Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel Biography, Age, Height, Wife, Net Worth and Family

Von Einsiedel died in Munich on 18 July 2007, aged 85.

Von Einsiedel was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany from 1957 until 1992 and was elected as a member of the German Bundestag as a candidate of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) from 1994 until 1998.

Von Einsiedel wrote for the liberal Hamburg weekly, Die Zeit. He also wrote The Shadow of Stalingrad: Being the Diary of Temptation in 1953, which attempted to tell his complex story. Eventually von Einsiedel joined the film industry, as a scriptwriter and a film soundtrack dubber. He also played the role of a pilot in the drama The Last Bridge (1953) with his first wife, Barbara Rütting.

He thus moved to West Germany in late 1948, where he worked as a translator, script-writer and journalist. The governing Socialist Unity Party of East Germany acknowledged von Einsiedel as a bonafide anti-fascist but a petit bourgeois who, “as soon as the class war became acute”, had wavered and switched political camps for his own self interests.

In World War II Einsiedel served as a German fighter pilot, initially with Jagdgeschwader 2 over the Western Front, flying the Messerschmitt Bf 109. He took part in escort operations over the cruisers Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen as they made their ‘Channel dash’ from Brest to Germany in February 1942. Von Einsiedel claimed two of the six Fairey Swordfish of No. 825 Squadron Fleet Air Arm, who made an unsuccessful low-level torpedo attack.

In June 1942 von Einsiedel was transferred to Jagdgeschwader 3 on the Russian Front for the forthcoming offensive against Stalingrad. He was awarded the German Cross in Gold.

On 30 August 1942, during combat with Russian ‘Ratas’, he was forced to land and was captured by Russian ground forces, becoming a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union.

Heinrich Graf von Einsiedel (26 July 1921 – 18 July 2007) was a German journalist, politician, and World War II Luftwaffe ace.

Regarding personal names: Graf was a title before 1919, but now is regarded as part of the surname. It is translated as Count. Before the August 1919 abolition of nobility as a legal class, titles preceded the full name when given (Graf Helmuth James von Moltke). Since 1919, these titles, along with any nobiliary prefix (von, zu, etc.), can be used, but are regarded as a dependent part of the surname, and thus come after any given names (Helmuth James Graf von Moltke). Titles and all dependent parts of surnames are ignored in alphabetical sorting. The feminine form is Gräfin.

Einsiedel, a great-grandson of Otto von Bismarck, was born in Potsdam, Province of Brandenburg, as the youngest child to Herbert von Einsiedel (1885–1945) and Irene von Bismarck-Schönhausen (1888–1982). His parents were divorced in 1931.