Hans von Lehndorff

Hans Graf von Lehndorff (13 April 1910 – 4 September 1987) was a German surgeon and writer.

Biography

Hans von Lehndorff was born in Graditz, the son of Landstallmeister Siegfried Graf Lehndorff, head of the Prussian main studs of Graditz and Trakehnen, had married the daughter Maria von Elard von Oldenburg-Januschau from Gut Januschau not far from Deutsch Eylau in the district of Rosenberg in Westpreußen. The mother Maria von Oldenburg was a frequent visitor to the estate with her numerous children. Two of her sons fell during the World War II. In 1944, Lehndorff's mother was arrested by the National Socialists for her steadfast stand with a pastor friend. In 1945, she and her eldest son were shot by Red Army soldiers while fleeing west on foot. A cousin of Lehndorff, Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, was hanged for his role in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 against Adolf Hitler.

Lehndorff, who had studied medicine and become a surgeon, came into contact as an assistant physician at the district hospital in Insterburg at the end of 1941 with a group of Protestant laymen who had come together at a time of growing political distress. From this group, paths led him into the Protestant Confessing Church and into internal resistance against National Socialism.

Lehndorff was not drafted into the Wehrmacht because he was indispensable to the hospital. He was in charge of a military hospital in Königsberg at the beginning of 1945 and experienced the battle and the capture of the city by the Red Army. Under months of shelling by artillery and low-flying planes of the largely encircled and destroyed city, he cared for the wounded, sick, and childbearing in hospitals, bunkers, and basements, and held devotions and Bible readings. He did not take an opportunity to flee the city, also motivated by his Christian faith. Lehndorff continued to work as a doctor even when the situation in Königsberg, after conquest by the Red Army, escalated to apocalypse with looting, murder and mass rape in the city turned into a sea of flames by arson. "I am so obliterated that I cannot even pray anymore," "This is man without God, the grimace of man," "Is it even possible to write of these things, the most terrible that exist among men?"

Lehndorff also participated in the temporary expulsion of the remaining population of Königsberg to the Samland region in April 1945, was sent to the NKVD internment camp Rothenstein, and then continued his medical work under extreme conditions in the city, which was ravaged by hunger, epidemics, and mass deaths, until October 1945. Lehndorff then made his way to western East Prussia and neighboring West Prussia, a region he knew well from childhood and youth through visits to his grandparents. He lived illegally under miserable conditions among remaining Germans, Poles, and Soviet occupation soldiers. Often on the run, he provided medical aid and received payment in kind. At the Januschau estate cemetery, he provisionally restored the troubled graves of his relatives. In addition to his maternal ancestors, two of his brothers rested there. Lehndorff also tracked down the site in the village of Kontken near Stuhm where his mother, a brother, and sixteen other members of the trek from Januschau had been shot by Red Army soldiers. They had been buried in a mass grave on site only weeks after their deaths. From Rosenberg, where Lehndorff had last worked in the hospital, he was then allowed to leave for Germany in May 1947.

Lehndorff recorded his experiences from 1945 to 1947 after the conquest of his homeland by Soviet troops in his East Prussian Diary, which is still being republished today (the 35th edition was published in 2020) and has also been made into a film. The Kaliningrad newspaper Novye Kolyossa published an excerpt in Russian translation.

In 1951, Count Lehndorf received his doctorate from the Georg August University in Göttingen. He later ran a clinic in Bad Godesberg for many years. He was involved in hospital chaplaincy and diaconia. He was married to Margarethe Countess Finck von Finckenstein.

Lehndorff belonged to the Order of St. John as an honorary knight from 1949 and as a legal knight from 1952. From 1954 to 1962, he led the Prussian Cooperative of the Order of Saint John as Commendator. His song "Komm in unsre stolze Welt" (Come into our proud world), composed in 1968, is included as No. 428 in the current Evangelical Hymnal (EG), as No. 833 in the Hymnal of the Evangelical Reformed Churches of German-speaking Switzerland (RG) and as No. 592 in the Catholic Hymnal of German-speaking Switzerland (KG).

Count Lehndorff died in Bad Godesberg a few months after the death of his wife.

Works

• Ein Bericht aus Ost- und Westpreußen 1945–1947. Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (1960)
• Ostpreußisches Tagebuch. Aufzeichnungen eines Arztes aus den Jahren 1945–1947 (1961; 2006; 2020)
• Die Briefe des Peter Pfaff 1943–1944 (1964; editor)
• Die Insterburger Jahre. Mein Weg zur Bekennenden Kirche (1969)
• Humanität im Krankenhaus: christliche Vorschläge für den Umgang mit Kranken (1975)
• Menschen, Pferde, weites Land. Kindheits- und Jugenderinnerungen (2001)
• Lebensdank (1983)

References

• Ehrenkrook, Hans Friedrich von (1952). Jürgen von Flotow: Genealogisches Handbuch der Gräflichen Häuser, 1. lücksburg/Ostsee: C. A. Starke, p. 246.
• Herbst, Wolfgang (1999). Komponisten und Liederdichter des evangelischen Gesangbuchs. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, p. 193.
• Klimpel, Volker (2010). "Von Insterburg nach Bonn. Der Chirurg und Schriftsteller Hans Graf von Lehndorff (1910-1987)," Chirurgische Allgemeine 11 (5), pp. 313–17.

External llinks

• Works by Hans von Lehndorff at German National Library