Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graf_Yorck_von_Wartenburg

http://www.allemagne.diplo.de/Vertretung/frankreich/de/05-gk-lyon/0...

http://genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00096582&tree=LEO

BIOGRAPHY Son of Graf Heinrich Yorck von Wartenburg and Freiin Sophie von Berlichingen, Paul was born 26 January 1902 in Klein-Oels. In 1926 Paul graduated from the University of Breslau and started to manage the family farm until 1940 when he was drafted into the German army. A younger brother, Hans, was killed, 9 September 1939 in Slupia, during the invasion of Poland.

Paul married Else Eckersberg 5 May 1940 in Berlin. Else was born 5 January 1895 in Berlin, daughter of Paul Eckersberg and Antonie Tessel. An actress, she had performed in Max Reinhardt's Deutschem Theater. Else married her first husband, Dr. Walter Eitzen, in 1913 and divorced him in 1918. Her second husband, Freiherr Philipp Schey von Koromla, a descendant of the Rothschild family, she married in 1921 and they had one son, Alexander, but they divorced in 1935. Paul adopted her son Alexander.

The youngest von Wartenberg brother, Heinrich, was killed in battle, 10 March 1942, at Pokrowskoje, Russia. Paul received a medical discharge in 1943 after suffering bullet wounds in his right arm and right leg. While recoving from his wounds, Paul was arrested in 1944 by the Gestapo. He was tied to a plot to kill Hitler which involved his younger brother, Peter, and his cousin, Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, and was sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp north of Berlin. Nazi authorities confiscated and looted his 4,000 acre estate. His brother Peter was hanged, 8 August 1944 in Berlin, in what was described as 'the most sadistic and brutal way.' Stauffenberg was shot.

When Paul was liberated from Sachsenhausen by Soviet troops in April 1945 after 13 months of confinement, his weight had dropped from 210 to 157 pounds. He had been among the approximately 200,000 prisoners confined to Sachsenhausen's main camp, where between 30,000 and 100,000 were reportedly killed.

After World War Two Paul reclaimed the family's Klein Oels Estate, which occupies land that today falls within the boundaries of Wroclaw, Poland. Although he received restitution from the German government, the family was hoping to obtain additional compensation for stolen assets.

His nephew, David, in 1998 received a letter from Yaacov Lozowick of the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem acknowledging the family's legacy, maintaining: 'To anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the German resistance to the Nazis, your family's name is a badge of honour.'

His sister-in-law, Marion, widow of his brother Peter, in 2000 published _The Power of Solitude: My Life in the German Resistance,_ describing the family's role in opposing the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.

Paul, Graf Yorck von Wartenburg, died in Reichenau, 9 June 2002, survived by his adopted son, Alexander, a former German ambassador to Portugal.