Nazis stole hero’s land and Germans won't give it back

Now, 65 years later, his grandson Prinz Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth has told of his outrage after a German court refused to overrule the Nazi decree that “stole” lands belonging to his forefathers for more than four centuries.

“We are astonished and very angry,” the prince said last night.

“Outwardly, to the rest of the world, the German government refuses to recognise any decision taken by the Nazis when they were in power. But inwardly, we can now see that when commercial deals and profit are at stake, this inconvenient history no longer matters.”

It was the latest round in a legal wrangle which dates back to July 20, 1944, and Operation Valkyrie, the unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler and mount a coup in Germany.

The plot included some of Hitler’s most trustworthy officers and centred on placing a bomb under a conference table next to the Fuhrer.

It was led by aristocratic, one-eyed and one-armed Colonel Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg, port­ray­ed last year by Tom Cruise in Hollywood blockbuster Valkyrie.

If it had succeeded, the plan would have rid Germany of its Nazi leader, wrestled power from the SS and placed it back with the army.

Without the deranged and increasingly paranoid Hitler issuing orders to fight to the death, the war would have ended sooner and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been spared.

Since most soldiers swore an oath of allegiance directly to the Fuhrer, his death was vital for the coup to succeed.

It failed, however, after a series of last-minute hitches, including a change of venue from a brick to wooden bunker and the accidental placing of the bomb-filled briefcase against a solid wooden table leg, which deflected the bomb blast from Hitler’s direction.

Most plotters were immediately rounded up and executed, including von Stauffenberg, who faced a firing squad the day after the failed attempt.

Others were less fortunate, tortured in the dungeons of the Prinz Albrecht Strasse prison for information, before being strung up with piano wire.

Although not a military officer, Prinz Friedrich zu Solms-Baruth III was involved in the plot from the start, even offering two of his castles for clandestine meetings.

But the aristocrat escaped the garrote. Related by blood to royal families in Sweden and Denmark, his death would have left SS chief Heinrich Himmler unable to pursue his secret and ultimately flawed peace negotiations.

Instead, his punishment was pain, banishment to South Africa and the loss of nearly 17,300 acres of land.

“My grandfather was not in the military but he was nevertheless heavily involved in Valkyrie,” said Friedrich, 45, the 5th Prin­­ce of Solms-Baruth.

“He was seldom out of the Gestapo’s sights. He would not employ any Nazi party member on his lands, for instance.

“After the plot fail­­ed, he spent seven months in Prinz Alb­recht Strasse pris­on, where he was tortured on a daily basis.

“I would defy most people to resist even seven minutes under those conditions.

“In the end, after he had completed all his interrogations and torture, it seems that Himmler did not dare to kill him out of fear that further actions could harm his attempts in Sweden. Instead he was forced to sign away all our estates.”

The ancestral lands became part of East Germany. Under German law, no citizens were given reparations for lost lands in East Germany after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

Most of the disputed lands, said to be worth in the region of £5million, are owned by the state of Brandenburg, which is trying to negotiate private sales to corporations.

“I simply want what belongs to my family,” said the prince.

“I am virtually making this my life’s quest.

“We will take this case to higher courts in Germany and, if this doesn’t work, we will take it to the European Court of Human Rights.”