Blumenthal family

Origin

Martial and political history

Prominent members

• Ruthger von Ammendorf, Bishop of Brandenburg 1241–51
• Otto Magistrate in 1420, a bulwark of Frederick Count of Zollern against the Wendish nobility of the Brandenburg Mark.
• Otto son of the above, Captain of the Prignitz 1415–22; Castellan of Lenzen 1420–22
• Hans , son of Otto, Vogt of Arneburg 1440–50
• Georg , the last Catholic sovereign ruler in northern Germany, and the only Bishop in Brandenburg during the Protestant Reformation to die a Catholic.
• Joachim Friedrich , diplomat and politician of Brandenburg-Prussia
• Heinrich , the most recent common ancestor of all living members of the family, fought at the Battle of Fleurus in Derfflinger's Foot and was addressed by the Elector Frederick III as "Obristwachtmeister usw. Baron von Blumenthal"
• Christoph Caspar, Brandenburg's Ambassador to France, was the son of Joachim Friedrich. He negotiated the Peace of Oliva. He narrowly lost to Count Schwarzenberg the election to the Grand Mastership of the Order of Saint John. His son
• Ludwig became a Count of the Holy Roman Empire in 1701, was a chamberlain to Frederick I King of Prussia and was Colonel of the Prussian Life Dragoons, at whose head he was killed in a charge up the slope to Oberglau at the Battle of Blenheim; the regiment lost 300 men. He married Sophie Wilhelmina von Schöning, daughter of the Field Marshal and War Minister Hans Adam von Schöning.
• Ludwig was President of Frederick the Great's principal ministry, the War and Domains Directory. He was succeeded by his nephew.
• Ludwig 's sons Friedrich and Hans both commanded Frederick the Great's famous Gardes du Corps, which Friedrich had founded. Hans won the Pour le Mérite at Hohenfriedberg. He had to leave the army after being wounded leading his regiment in a successful cavalry charge at the Battle of Lobositz. In 1786 he was made a Count, together with his cousin Joachim and supervised the education of Frederick William III's brother, Prince Henry.
• Their brother Henrich , a major in Prinz Heinrich's Regiment, was killed in action at Ostritz in 1756. His gallant defence was reported in the local press and his friend the poet von Kleist wrote his epitaph.
• Georg won the Pour le Mérite at the Battle of Prague. In March 1760 his defensive action against a surprise attack at Neustadt caught the attention of the British press. He was charged with raising forces to oppose the invasion of Pomerania in the 1760s by the Russians, who put a price on his head. He became a major general. His nephew
• Werner and his son Werner both commanded the dragoon regiment known as the Porzellaner
• Ludwig , brother of Werner, fought at Jena and Eylau and was mortally wounded leading the 2nd Squadron of the Brandenburg Dragoons in Thümen's Brigade at Dennewitz.
• Joachim Christian Prussian Minister of War and Finance, was made a count together with his cousin Hans, by an unusual double-patent.
• Ludwig 's daughter Countess Charlotte, Count Heinrich 's widow Marie Thérèse, née d'Harscamp and Friedrich 's widow Leopoldine, the biographer of Zieten, were all chief ladies-in-waiting to Princess Henry, sister-in-law of Frederick the Great. A sculpture of Marie Thérèse by Jean-Pierre-Antoine Tassaert was destroyed by allied bombing.
• Count Heinrich , the last Blumenthal to occupy the family seat at Horst bei Blumenthal, was Mayor of Magdeburg and Head Chamberlain to Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, as well as governor of Jerôme's palace at Wilhelmshöhe.
• Count Albert commanded the Prussian First Foot Guards from 1851 to 1856 and retired as a lieutenant-general
• Robert was Regierungspresident of Danzig from 1841 to 1863 and of Sigmaringen from 1864 to 1873. He was a leading opponent of Roman Catholicism in Prussia.
• Leonhard , field marshal and leading general of the German wars of unification
• Albrecht , son of Leonhard, who published his father's memoirs, became a lieutenant general.
• Louis , brother of Leonhard, led the Prussian 52nd Infantry as Colonel into its decisive charge on the Austrian Hoch- und Deutschmeister Regiment at the Battle of Nachod in 1866. He became a major-general.
• Maximilian , was a major in the 1st East Prussian Grenadiers No. 1 during the Austro-Prussian War, in which he won the Order of the Red Eagle. In 1870 he commanded a battalion of the 73rd Fusiliers and won the Iron Cross at Gravelotte, having led his battalion through the murderous crossfire of the Mance Ravine and stood firm while being bombarded by the artillery of both sides. After the war he commanded the 1st Silesian Grenadier Regiment No. 10. He retired as a major general.
• Count Werner von Blumenthal-Suckow, was a Member of Parliament of the North German Confederation and also of the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus
• Count Werner von Blumenthal-Suckow, a veteran of the Austro- and Franco-Prussian wars, and a friend of Prince Frederick von Hohenzollern of Prussia, became Chamberlain to the King of Saxony. He was a leading moderate in the Conservative Party, and at the Tivoli Congress of 1892, at which Klasing persuaded the party to adopt anti-semitism as part of its programme, he spoke out courageously. He was shouted down, and those who supported him did not dare do so publicly. His daughter Maria, a nun, was murdered in her 70s by the SS.
• Gustav commanded one of three columns in the campaign which ended the Maji-Maji wars in German East Africa.
• Hans , youngest son of Ludwig, lost his two elder brothers in the Franco-Prussian War. Most of his adult life was uneventful. He was colonel of the 13th Hussars in 1900; Commander of the 24th cavalry Brigade stationed in Metz in 1906, and promoted to major general, but after quarrelling with his commanding officer, General Maximilian von Prittwitz, he left the army in 1910 as a lieutenant general. However, on the outbreak of the First World War he rejoined the army and first commanded the 60th Landwehr Brigade, then the 49th in Bois de Lord, south of the Champagne, until 1917, when health forced him to retire again. He was made a Count of the Grand Duchy of Baden, and married Lillian Steinway-Oakes, daughter of the celebrated co-founder of Steinway & Sons, Henry Steinway, and sister-in-law of Baden's minister of the interior, Baron Heinrich von Bodman. His end was tragic. His son Curt joined the SA and rose to be Reiterstandartenführer in command of the 27th SA Reiterstandarte at Kyritz. On the night of May 1, 1945, Curt shot his wife, children and himself in front of his father and sister Clarissa. Shortly after that, the Russians arrived and attempted to rape the 65-year-old Clarissa. Hans, himself over ninety, drove them off. But the experience was a shock and he died of a heart attack a few days later on 7 May.
• Clarissa mentioned above, made a career for herself during the 1930s as an impressionist painter in Florence and Rome. She was a Roman Catholic convert. A portion of those years are mentioned in the Memoir, "Artemis Smith's ODD GIRL Revisited" by Annselm Artemis Smith Morpurgo, daughter of Scandinavian Expressionist Painter and Sculptor Vilna Jorgen Morpurgo. Vilna resided and studied with Clarissa in Rome at Clarissa's studio on via Marghutta. As late as 1962, a gallery on via Marghutta is known to have still exhibited Clarissa's work. Both Clarissa and Vilna participated in a noted 1938 Group Show of Foreign Women Artists, which also included Elaine De Kooning, at another neighboring gallery on via Flamminia. Clarissa notably also painted a portrait of Vilna in 1933, taken to the US in 1940 by a branch of the Italian-Jewish Morpurgo Baronial Family and only recently placed on charity auction by The Savant Garde Institute. Additional history related to that obscure impressionist masterpiece may be found at the Vilna Jorgen Morpurgo webpage. Clarissa's technique is unmistakable although she may often have left her work unsigned. There are probably many other of her paintings that will eventually surface. She was also an accomplished Vatican restorer and probably, according to colleague Vilna Jorgen Morpurgo, also secretly a fine arts forger for the Vatican. Both Vilna and Clarissa were included in the elite artistic social circle surrounding Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s, but it is also very likely, from Vilna's account, that Clarissa is one of the unsung heroines of the German aristocracy who secretly opposed and worked against Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and helped Vilna and her Italian-Jewish Family escape to the US in 1940.
• Albrecht was a respected philologist, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and as a poet was a leading member of the circle of Stefan George, to whom he introduced the Stauffenberg brothers. The dissident Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer conducted an illegal seminary in 1938 from Albrecht's estate at Groß Schlönwitz. In 1940, he joined the NSDAP. In 1945, faced with the advancing American troops and the defeat of Nazi Germany, he and his wife committed suicide in Marburg.
• Wolf-Werner von Blumenthal, brother of Albrecht, was chairman of the family firm of Bachmann-von Blumenthal, which manufactured fighter aircraft during the Second World War. His diary of the last days of the war survives.
• Count Hans-Jürgen, officer who took part in Oster's 1938 conspiracy and was executed after the July 20 Plot against Adolf Hitler in 1944.
• Wulf von Blumenthal served on the Eastern Front and pursued a military career in the post-war Bundeswehr, rising to the rank of Colonel commanding the 32nd Panzer Grenadier Battalion.
• Werner Richard and Wolfgang Charles, Albrecht's sons, were both educated at Oxford. They ceased using their first Christian name and adopted their stepfather's surname, becoming, respectively, Richard and Charles Arnold-Baker, joined the British army and both served as officers in MI6. Richard was in the team of officers who interrogated Rudolf Hess, and Charles commanded Winston Churchill's bodyguard for part of the war, and in Norway arrested the Deputy Commandant of Auschwitz, Karl Fritzsch. Charles was one of the earliest officers of MI6 to voice suspicions about the traitor Kim Philby. He was the Senior Barrister of the Inner Temple and author of The Companion to British History.
• James Arnold-Baker, son of Werner Richard, read Geology at Oxford. He was CEO of BBC Enterprises from 1986 to 1994 and then became Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press.
• Henry only son of Wolfgang Charles, read Theology at Oxford and is Deputy Dean of the EIB Institute. He is the editor and publisher of his father's magnum opus, The Companion to British History, and himself the author of a book of short stories.
• Ulrich formerly head of the United Nations Legal Department
• Julia, Professor of Political Science at the Humboldt University, Berlin; from 2018, President of the Viadrina.
• Raphael Actor, Comedian and playwright http://www.raphaelvonb.com/about/

Principal historical estates

Heraldry