Name Konstanze Schulthess | Role Author | |
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Konstanze von Schulthess-Rechberg (born 27 January 1945) is a German author.
Konstanze von Schulthess-Rechberg, born Konstanze Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg on January 27, 1945, is the youngest child of Operation Valkyrie leader Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg (1907 – 1944), a member of the traditional German nobility, and "Nina" Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg (1913 – 2006). She was born in a Nazi maternity center in Frankfurt an der Oder, Brandenburg, where her mother had been transferred for childbirth from the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her mother, who was pregnant with her fifth child at the time of the failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and remove the Nazi Party from power on July 20 1944, for which her father was summarily executed, had been arrested and imprisoned in the aftermath of the assassination attempt.
After the war, Konstanze and her four older siblings – Berthold (1934), Heimeran (1936), Franz-Ludwig (1938), and Valerie (1940 – 1966), who had been placed in an orphanage under the surname of Meister in Bad Sachsa, Lower Saxony upon their mother’s arrest by the Gestapo – were reunited with their mother at the Stauffenberg family seat in Lautlingen in Baden-Württemberg. Together, they returned to their mother’s hometown of Bamberg, Bavaria.
Konstanze, who has lived in Switzerland since 1965, trained as a maternity nurse. She wrote a biography of her mother, Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg: ein Porträt, that was published in 2008 (in German).
Married since 1967, Konstanze and her husband Dietrich von Schulthess-Rechberg (1937) have four children. Their son, Philipp von Schulthess (born 1973), is an actor who played a supporting role in the 2008 film Valkyrie - The Stauffenberg Assassination, a depiction of the failed plot in which Philipp's grandfather was involved. The film starred actor Tom Cruise as von Stauffenberg, much to the chagrin of Philipp’s uncle Berthold, eldest of the von Stauffenbergs, who feared that the film might become "horrible kitsch".