Moltke bought Kreisau with his 1866 war grant; his great-grandnephew was hanged in 1945 and the family lost the estate

After the 1866 war the Prussian state gave Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke a cash grant. He bought Gut Kreisau in Silesia, about 500 hectares, on 1 August 1867. When his wife died in 1868 he built a mausoleum on the estate, and he was buried there in 1891. He had no children, and the estate stayed with the Moltke family. From 1928 his great-grandnephew Helmuth James von Moltke and his wife Freya lived in the Berghaus, a smaller house, because the manor cost too much to run. They worked to keep the estate out of bankruptcy. The Kreisau Circle of anti-Nazi planners met there three times in 1942 and 1943. Roland Freisler's People's Court sentenced Helmuth James on 11 January 1945, and he was hanged at Plötzensee on 23 January 1945. The mausoleum was plundered in 1945, and the Field Marshal's remains are lost^†. Freya left in September 1945, and the remaining Germans were expelled in 1946. On 12 November 1989 Helmut Kohl and Tadeusz Mazowiecki attended a reconciliation Mass at Krzyżowa. The Krzyżowa Foundation bought the Berghaus in 1990. A renovation from 2023 to 2026 was funded in part by the Moltke family. The German and Polish foreign ministers visited on 30 March 2026.