Marie Luise von Hammerstein

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Marie Luise v. Hammerstein (1928)

Marie Luise Freifrau von Münchhausen, b. Freiin von Hammerstein-Equord (born September 27, 1908 in Berlin ; † November 6, 1999 there ) was a German lawyer. She was a supporter of the Communist Party of Germany and worked for their intelligence service .

Life

Marie Luise von Hammerstein-Equord was a daughter of Colonel General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord and his wife Maria Luise Freiin von Lüttwitz. Her father, since 1930 head of the army command , was located at the time of appointment of Hitler for Chancellor in 1933 at a crucial switching point; Although Hitler and National Socialism had a skeptical attitude, he feared a civil war between the Reichswehr , which was limited to 100,000 men (among whose younger officers Hitler also had sympathizers) and the more than 400,000 members of the SA . For this reason, he did not prevent Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor and even afterwards did not seize the opportunity to putsch against him , although he had repeatedly considered . Nonetheless, he sympathized (and conspired) with Hitler's opponents from the circles of resistance fighters until his death in 1943 , as did his sons - Marie Luise's brothers - Kunrat and Ludwig , who went into hiding in 1944, while the youngest brother, Franz , a later theologian, as well the mother and a sister were deported to concentration camps in 1944.

Marie Luise left the church at the age of 16. At the age of 19 she became a member of the KPD. During her law degree, she is said to have had a love affair with the communist member of the Reichstag, Werner Scholem .

In 1933 she married the lawyer Mogens von Harbou , who had recently joined the NSDAP and later participated in the persecution of the Jews during the German occupation of Poland . The marriage lasted only three years. During this time, the couple's apartment was searched by the Gestapo and Marie Luise was interrogated for several days. The reason was her previous connection to Werner Scholem and the allegation that she had given Scholem the official secrets of her father Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord . Marie Luise said nothing about it; only in an internal résumé from 1973 did she admit that she had worked for the KPD intelligence service; the contact man was Leo Roth . As plans for a war of aggression against the Soviet Union were known in Moscow as early as 1933 through her activities (but were ignored by Stalin ), she received the award “Fighter against Fascism” from the GDR .

From 1937 to 1951 she was married to Ernst-Friedemann Freiherr von Münchhausen (1906–2002), who owned the Herrengosserstedt estate in the Eckartsberga district . After the war , the couple separated, Marie Luise moved from West Berlin to East Berlin in 1949 , joined the SED , completed her law studies , which she began in the Weimar Republic , and worked as a lawyer in a joint law firm in Pankow.

According to state security records , she was “unofficially active for the Soviet security organs” from 1950 to 1960. But she was "not free from prejudices and petty-bourgeois ways of thinking", she also had "connections to groups of people around Havemann and Biermann ", and one of her sons was "a refugee from the republic ". At the time, Marie Luise was particularly committed to Jewish clients, both professionally and personally. For a long time she distanced herself from her siblings, including from her brothers Ludwig von Hammerstein-Equord and Kunrat von Hammerstein-Equord , for political reasons .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hammerstein, Marie Louise von. Federal foundation for coming to terms with the SED dictatorship , accessed on November 1, 2019 .
  2. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge, Werner Scholem - a Political Biography, Konstanz 2014, pp. 383–408.
  3. ↑ See Ralf Hoffrogge, Werner Scholem - a Political Biography, Konstanz 2014, p. 406, p. 458.
personal data
SURNAME Hammerstein, Marie Luise von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Münchhausen, Marie Luise von (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer, supporter of the KPD and employee of its intelligence service
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 1999
Place of death Berlin