Marion Countess Yorck von Wartenburg

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Marion Countess Yorck von Wartenburg , b. Ellen-Marion Winter (born June 14, 1904 in Berlin ; † April 13, 2007 there ) was a German lawyer and judge . She was a resistance fighter against National Socialism and a member of the Kreisau Circle .

Life

Marion was the daughter of the Royal Privy Councilor and Administrative Director Franz Winter and his wife Else Bertha Rosalie nee. Springorum. The house where she was born was at what was then Hitzigstrasse 4 (today Stülerstrasse 13/15), near the zoo . During her school days at the Grunewald-Gymnasium (today Walther-Rathenau-Gymnasium) in Berlin, Marion Winter, who later became Countess Yorck von Wartenburg, was a classmate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer . She then began to study law in Berlin , which she completed in 1927 with the 1st state examination. 1929 doctorate them in Hans Helfritz to Dr. jur. She learned shortly before thatPeter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg , whom she married in 1930. Together with her husband, after 1933 she came into opposition to the Nazi regime and became active in the Kreisau Circle in the resistance against the National Socialist regime. After the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler on 20 July 1944, her husband was executed , she herself came for three months in guilt by association .

Even after the war she made it her duty to commemorate the resistance. She campaigned for victims of Nazi persecution and their survivors in the main office for the victims of fascism in the entire Berlin magistrate , went public and gave speeches in memory of them. She stayed in contact with survivors of the resistance all her life and considered retaining her married name, despite a new civil partnership, as an obligation to act on behalf of her husband. After the end of the war, Marion Yorck von Wartenburg worked as a trainee lawyer in the Berlin magistrate in East Berlin . In 1946 she was appointed by the Allies to be a judge at the Lichterfelde District Court in West Berlin . In 1952 she was the first woman in Germany to chair a jury court . She directed until 1969 as a district court director the ninth Big Youth Criminal Chamber of the Landgericht Berlin . In doing so, she acquired a reputation as an “extremely strict” judge, although she was said to have been this with “impeccable manners and without arrogance” , also due to the treatment of her husband by Roland Freisler . B. addressed the accused by name, which was unusual at the time.

It was later made public that in her time as a judge she also applied § 175 StGB , which at the time made homosexuality a criminal offense, with "exemplary deterrent" judgments and was involved in internal reviews during her work at the Berlin magistrate, which led to homosexual victims of Nazi persecution were denied recognition as Nazi victims. According to the cultural scientist Andreas Pretzel , she combined “her work as a lawyer with a rigid anti-liberal stance, which she apparently wanted to see as the ideological legacy of the Kreisau district ” and which at the time was shared by large sections of the population and by the Federal Constitutional Court with regard to sexual norms .

Grave site , Königin-Luise-Straße 55, in Berlin-Dahlem

After 1952 she lived (unmarried) with the Berlin CDU politician Ulrich Biel . The couple have a common grave in the St.-Annen-Kirchhof in Berlin-Dahlem with two gravestones for their respective names - connected on the back with a sentence from Paul : "Love is ..." on Biel's tombstone is on the gravestone of Yorck von Wartenburg ends with "... the fulfillment of the law".

Works

  • with Claudia Schmölders (editor): The strength of silence. Memories of a Life in Resistance (= Edition C / C , Volume 509), Brendow, Moers 1998 (first edition: Diederichs, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-424-00787-0 ), ISBN 3-87067-717-1 .
    • The Power of Solitude. My Life in the German Resistance , translated and edited by Julie M. Winter, foreword by Peter Hoffmann, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE / London 2000, ISBN 0-8032-9915-X / ISBN 0-8032-4915-2 .

literature

  • Dorothee von Meding, With the courage of the heart, The women of July 20 , Siedler Verlag, Berlin 1992, pp. 191–206.
  • Andreas Pretzel (ed.), Nazi victims with reservation. Homosexual men in Berlin after 1945 , LIT, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-6390-5 .
  • Margarete Fabricius-Brand, Kristine Sudhölter, Sabine Berghahn (eds.): Lawyers - reports, facts, interviews. Berlin-West (Elefanten-Press) 1982. The book contains on pp. 131-138 a biographical interview by Fabricius-Brand and Berghahn with Marion Yorck about her participation in the Kreisau Circle and her experience as a judge in post-war Berlin.

Web links

Commons : Marion Yorck von Wartenburg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

  1. ↑ a b Birth register StA Berlin III No. 596/1904.
  2. ↑ Marion Yorck von Wartenburg: The strength of silence . 2nd Edition. Dtv, Munich, S. 23 .
  3. ↑ a b c “You can't be too soft” Article by Andreas Pretzel in taz magazine , July 17, 2004, p. III.
  4. ^ Annemarie Cordes: Marion Yorck von Wartenburg (1904-2007). Kreisau Initiative, accessed on February 10, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Marion Yorck von Wartenburg: The strength of the stillness, introduction by Claudia Schmölders . 2nd Edition. Dtv, Munich, S. 1 .
  6. ^ Annemarie Cordes: Marion Yorck von Wartenburg (1904-2007). Kreisau Initiative, accessed on February 10, 2019 .
  7. ^ Anne Buhrfeind: Love is the fulfillment of the law. Heinrich Bedford-Strohm, Annette Kurschus, Dr. Irmgard Schwaetzer, January 30, 2019, accessed on February 9, 2019 (German).
  8. ↑ Andreas Pretzel, Dipl. Rer. cult. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft eV, accessed on February 10, 2019 .
  9. ↑ s. o., Andreas Pretzel in the article You shouldn't be too soft - http://www.taz.de/!726167/ - accessed on February 4, 2019. See also: Andreas Pretzel, NS victim with reservation , s . o. literature.
  10. ↑ In a decision of May 10, 1957, the Federal Constitutional Court rejected a constitutional complaint against Section 175 of the Criminal Code with reference to “the moral views of the people”, which were largely based on the teachings of the “two great Christian denominations”. The Federal Constitutional Court and the legislature have completely given up the notion of a "moral law" above human or fundamental rights: In 1994, § 175 was finally deleted from the Criminal Code, since then it has been considered to violate human rights from the start.
  11. ↑ Anne Buhrfeind, ibid. Epistle of Paul to the Romans, 13.10.
personal data
SURNAME Yorck von Wartenburg, Marion Countess
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Winter, Ellen-Marion (maiden name); Winter, Marion
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German judge and resistance fighter
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 2007
Place of death Berlin