later also gaining experience at the Kurt Hahn school. Having been offered the opportunity to lease an unoccupied country house, Schloss Wieblingen near Heidelberg, in 1926, Thadden quickly found a use for it. At Easter 1927, after receiving government approval to do so, as well as obtaining the requisite funds, Schloss Wieblingen became the home of Thadden's Evangelisches Landerziehungsheim für Mädchen, a private boarding school for girls incorporating the Christian ethics that Thadden had been brought up with and held dear, as well as Kurt Hahn's educational ideas. The initial enrolment was thirteen girls, whom Thadden hoped to train "strictly and fairly to (be) independently thinking, emancipated women." The 1920s were also the time when the National Socialists were rising to prominence. By the time Thadden founded her school, Adolf Hitler had already been released from prison after the Beerhall Putsch, and the Nazis were gaining popularity. Thadden herself even found a certain appeal in Nazi ideas in the beginning, but she soon decided otherwise, and came to regard the Nazis' vision for Germany as one quite at odds with her own humanitarian views. Third Reich After the Nazis came to power in 1933, tension between the authorities and Thadden's school began to grow. Thadden disregarded official edicts and continued to enroll Jewish girls at her school. She also kept seeing her Jewish friends. Thadden was also not shy about stating her views out loud, and for this reason she was ever more under the Gestapo's gaze. In October 1940, after the school had been evacuated to Tutzing in Bavaria because it was too near the French border, a pupil denounced the school to the Gestapo and the SD. Thadden decided to take the school back to Wieblingen, where she hoped that its widely acknowledged good name would keep such harassment away. It did not, however. In May 1941, the Education Ministry of Baden saw in Thadden's school "no satisfactory guarantee for a National-Socialist-aligned education", whereupon the school was nationalized. Thadden went back to Berlin and joined the Red Cross as a nursing assistant. Here, according to her sister Ehrengard, she learnt, among other things, that letters reaching Germany from German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union had to be destroyed because Hitler believed that they would weaken morale at the front. Arrest and execution Thadden developed contacts with opponents of the Nazi régime, including Helmut Gollwitzer, Martin Niemöller,