Wendelgard von Staden

Wendelgard von Staden (née von Neurath; 7 June 1925 – 21 May 2026) was a German diplomat and author. In 1979, she published a memoir Darkness Over the Valley: Growing Up in Nazi Germany where she shares memories from her youth during the Nazi era about a concentration camp on her family’s estate and how her mother tried to help the people imprisoned there.

Life and career Von Staden was born on 7 June 1925 to Baroness Irmgard and Baron Ernst von Neurath. She grew up in , and attended school in Vaihingen an der Enz, the grammar school in Ludwigsburg. She received her high school diploma in Berlin in 1943 and completed an agricultural apprenticeship on a farm near Heilbronn. In 1948, she studied in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques as part of the first German-French student exchange after World War II. In 1950, she was an exchange student at UCLA, studying political science.

Von Staden pursued a diplomatic career, working in the German foreign service for ten years. She met her husband in Washington at an embassy dinner party. In 1963, he was posted to Washington, and they moved to Bonn in 1968,

Darkness Over the Valley: Growing Up in Nazi Germany is the autobiographical account of Wendelgard von Staden's youth originally published in German in 1979.

Von Staden died on 21 May 2026, at the age of 100.