Blood and Iron: From Bismarck to Hitler the Von Moltke Family's Impact on German History

Opposing the Nazis from the outset, patriotic lawyer Count Helmuth James von Moltke worked as an analyst in the Third Reich's military intelligence headquarters, where he clandestinely supported the anti-Hitler resistance and devised a blueprint for a democratic Germany. Arrested by the Gestapo, he was executed in 1945, months after Hitler narrowly escaped a detonated bomb in an assassination attempt by his generals. Von Moltke abhorred Nazism as a terrible perversion of Prussian traditions that had been ratified in part by his great-great-uncle, Bismarck's field marshal, Helmuth Carl Bernhard von Moltke, who captured Paris in 1871 in the Franco-Prussian War. Yet Field Marshal von Moltke scorned ``that ill weed Democracy,'' and his nephew and namesake, General Helmuth von Moltke, German chief of staff in WWI, worked out the strategic plan for a two-front war against France and Russia that led him and his country to ruin. Peopling a vivid canvas with cameos of Wagner, Nietzsche, Brecht, Thomas Mann and others, prolific U.S. historian Friedrich recreates modern German history through the prism of the von Moltke family in a gripping political and military chronicle. Photos. (Nov.)