He spent the weekend with his family at Kümmernitz in the West Prignitz, where he took the inexplicable fall of a mirror from the wall as a bad omen. The next day, 23 July 1944, he was arrested by three members of the Gestapo, who appeared in a car and took him away without his being able to say goodbye to his wife, who was thereafter unable to communicate with him. This all took place within half an hour. Between then and his trial before the German "People's Court" (Volksgerichtshof) and immediate execution by hanging at Plötzensee Prison on 13 October 1944, is almost unknown, apart from the slender details mentioned in his last letter to his wife. The sentence was as follows: 'In the name of the German people: Georg Schulze Buttger, Hans Jurgen Count Blumenthal, Roland von Hosslin and Friedrich Scholz Babisch, knew well beforehand of the planned betrayal of 20 July. They revealed nothing and thus allowed the plot to come to maturity. Thus they are forever without honour, jointly guilty of the heaviest betrayal known to history. They stand together as traitors with the assassin Count von Stauffenberg. With him they betrayed everything that we are, and for which we fight. They betrayed the sacrifices of our soldiers, betrayed the People, the Fuhrer and the Reich. They had a part in a betrayal which would have delivered us, defenceless, to our mortal enemies. For this they are sentenced to death.' However, Zeller goes on: ...von Blumenthal came from the Potsdam Tradition, his father had been a tutor to the Hohenzollerns, but in the opinion of F. W. Heinz, the former editor of the Stahlhelm, from the beginning he had viewed the German nation's pact with Hitler as a misfortune, an opinion which grew ever stronger and made him increasingly restless as the years passed. He was close to Dohnanyi and Oster, and a childhood friend of Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim. We know from eyewitnesses to his interrogation that he did not reveal the names of his accomplices. In Fabian von Schlabrendorff's book Offiziere gegen Hitler, he is mentioned only in the death-roll. In his last letter, Hans-Jürgen wrote: My Most Tender Love! When these lines reach your good, lovely hands, I will no longer be in this world. I have been sentenced to death and am smoking a final cigarette. Shortly I will pass into eternity,