Count Schwerin von Schwanenfeld remains steadfast against Roland Freisler
Schwerin was born the son of the diplomat Ulrich von Schwerin. He lived until the age of twelve with his parents and sisters almost exclusively abroad. Only then his father received as Prussian envoy a German domestic use in Dresden. The family was politically very interested. The environment was conservative, the education christian and strict.
Schwerin gained practical political experience in the confrontation of the German minority with the Polish state. The vast majority of Germans of the former Prussian provinces of West Prussia and Posen, who had come through Versailles to Poland, "opted" for Germany. Those who remained in the corridor were especially Germans, who were bound by possession. The minority organized itself to defend its securitized by the League of rights. Here, the Foreign Office in Berlin and the League of Nations in Geneva were the main point of contact. Schwerin was for many years the voice of the minority leadership in Poland, which itself could not travel freely in the ministries in Berlin. Within the German minority it came to clashes between the established leadership and the NS-friendly Jungdeutschen Party. Schwerin made his first negative experiences with the Nazis as a student in 1923 as an eyewitness to the march on the Feldherrenhalle. He followed the rise of the NSDAP from 1930 increasingly critical. Hitler's behavior after the murder of Potempa in August 1932 ment a crossroads for him. Schwerin commented on the murders of 30 June 1934 with the words "who does not even get it now ..." during the so-called Röhm-Putsch.
On the 20th July 1944 Schwerin was in the center of the coup, in the premises of the commander of the Reserve Army in the War Office (now the German Resistance Memorial Center in the Stauffenbergstraße) in Berlin. He was arrested after the failure of the coup along with Yorck, Schulenburg and others shortly before midnight.
Schwerin's detention stations were the house prison of the Gestapo at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, the cell block of the Ravensbrück concentration camp and again the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He was sentenced to death and confiscation of property in the fourth trial of the members of the coup on 21 August 1944 by the People's Court under the chairmanship of its President Roland Freisler. During the interrogation Schwerin called as a motive for his resistance activities "the many murders that happened at home as abroad," before he was shouted down by Freisler and was described as "shabby lump".
On 8 September 1944 the judgment in the prison in Berlin Plotzensee was carried out. His wife, sons and mother came also into custody in Güstrow and Dresden, the two elder sons (second son was Christoph Andreas Graf von Schwerin von Schwanenfeld) have been put in the Kinderinternierungslager Bad Sachsa later.
His body, together with those of the other five executed have been cremated in the crematorium Wilmersdorf on the 8th September 1944. His ashes were passed the next day in a reservoir to the Reich Ministry of Justice. In 1978 his widow erected on the Forest Cemetery in Berlin-Dahlem in the Dept. 10A-11 a cenotaph with epitaph, which is maintained as a memorial grave of the State of Berlin.