The incident shown opposite gave rise to our project “Trees for Peace”.

Shortly after Count Luckner’s death in April 1966, the then President of the Central Council of Jews, Prof. Dr. Herbert Lewin, planted five trees for him in the Thomas Mann Forest in Israel.

The background to this, in our view, extraordinary honor by the highest dignitary of the Jewish people in Germany is the behavior of Felix Count von Luckner towards them, especially during the “brown period” in Germany. While Luckner had previously had no reservations, reservations or other negative feelings towards Jews, this openness continued during the aforementioned period, when it became downright dangerous to maintain such contacts. The National Socialists naturally noticed this and meticulously documented this misconduct. Their later so-called “honor trial” was based, among other things, on the accusations that Luckner had cultivated too easy and thoughtless contact with Jews.

Another reason for the honor, which fortunately for the count remained undiscovered until the end of the war, was the rescue of the Swiss Jew Rosalie Janson from deportation and the associated certain death. You can find more information on this >>> HERE <<<

We are now planning to plant trees ourselves, which may grow and flourish for the goals of our society – peace, international understanding, tolerance and reconciliation – in the future, ideally worldwide, but we started with a first step in Halle (Saale), the headquarters of our society.

Halle Peace Grove

In realizing a first step in the idea described above of a worldwide distribution of peace trees, the “Trees For Peace”, we started a project, the “Halle Peace Grove”.

After we found out through research that the Thomas Mann Forest mentioned above was actually a grove in which the 5 trees for Luckner had been planted in 1966, we also decided on the number 5 for the peace grove we were planning.

The city of Halle (Saale) was very supportive of the project from the start, so we quickly received written permission to complete our project on municipal land. The city’s parks department was more than willing to cooperate and was extremely helpful, among other things, in selecting the right trees for our latitude and the special challenges of the location we had chosen.

On November 25, 2024, the time had come. In the presence of Ms. Katharina Brederlow, Deputy Mayor for Education and Social Affairs of the City of Halle (Saale), Dirk Schlesier (Head of the Planetarium) and Dr. Markus Folgner (Chairman of the Planetarium’s Friends’ Association) – all three of whom were happy to pick up a spade and diligently helped with the planting – the three trees were planted. This, of course, was under the expert guidance of the city’s parks department and the Saale tree nursery, from which the trees for the “Halle Peace Grove” come. Numerous members of our society were also present, so that the action could be completed within a relatively manageable time frame. Nevertheless, it was new to some of us how many details have to be taken into account when planting a tree – at least if you want to do it professionally.

The tree species are the following, which we name from the left (when looking from the planetarium):

- Broad-leaved whitebeam

- Hop hornbeam carpinifolia

- Gleditsia triacanthos inermis (Gleditsia)

- Sweet chestnut

- Castanea sativa

- Zelkova serrata Green Vase (Japanese zelkova)

The trees were all financed by donations from members of the Luckner Society and without the use of public subsidies. We thank everyone involved for their support!

Below we have attached a few impressions of the tree planting.

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