Marie Luise von Hammerstein


Marie Luise Baroness of Münchhausen was a German lawyer. Despite being born into an aristocratic army family she became an activist member of the Communist Party. She worked for the party's intelligence service during the 1930s. She was treated with on-going suspicion and subjected to a number of interrogations by the security services between 1933 and 1945, although her party intelligence involvement is confirmed only in a document dated 1973.

Life

Provenance and early years

Marie-Luise Cäcilie "Butzi" von Hammerstein-Equord was born in Berlin, the eldest child of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord by his marriage to Maria, Baroness of Lüttwitz. The family was well connected. The father of Marie Luise served as head of the German army between 1930 and 1933. He was deeply opposed to the National Socialists but nevertheless, when he died in 1943, it was from illness. Other family members ended the war years in hiding, or, like :de:Franz Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord|Franz, the youngest brother of Marie Luise, as concentration camp inmates,

Student years

She studied Jurisprudence at the Frederick-William University of Berlin. She was, by this time, already politically engaged. To her mother's horror, she "quit the church" when she was 16. In 1923 she joined the Wandervogel movement. The Wandervogels were a nationwide youth network that combined hiking and other outdoor activities with a romanticist rejection of industrialisation and modernism in favour of old Teutonic values which on occasion overlapped with less palatable forms of German nationalism. Through the Wandervogels she met up with :de:Nathan Steinberger|Nathan Steinberger and Gertrud Classen. Through Steinberger and Classen she came into contact with the Communist Party, becoming a member during the first part of 1928, though still aged only 19. Over the next few years she and her younger sister Helga passed on secret information about their father's work to the "A-M Apparat", which was the intentionally misleading name of the party's extensive intelligence organisation in Germany. Given Leo Roth's personal involvement with her sister Helga, it is unsurprising that Marie Luise was also in contact with Roth during the middle 1930s, but the earliest confirmation that she worked for "Soviet intelligence", and that her handler was :de:Leo Roth |Leo Roth, comes in the form of a curriculum vitae which she herself composed for "internal use" as recently as 1973. Plans for a war of aggression against the Soviet Union existed in Berlin and were known about in Moscow in 1933, though Stalin chose to ignore them. Since Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord was still head of the army through most of 1933, it is reasonable to infer that Moscow's awareness of these plans resulted wholly or in part from information gathered from his papers by his daughters Marie Luise and Helga. According to one source it was for this reason that many years later the government of East Germany awarded Marie-Luise their Medal for Fighters Against Fascism.
There is persuasive speculation that as a Berlin law student von Hammerstein-Equord had a love affair with Werner Scholem, a member of the German Reichstag between 1924 and 1928, and a leading member of the Communist Party. Details of the romance may nevertheless have become embellished in the telling.

Change of direction

It may have been on account of her involvement with Werner Scholem that, starting in around 1930, she took language lessons in order to master Russian and, in parallel with her degree course, undertook a separate course to qualify as a "Referendarin", which would open the way for slower route, based on extensive "on-the job training" to a legal qualification. Having passed the necessary "Referendarin" exam she left university, apparently without completing her degree course, and took a job as a :de:Vorbereitungsdienst|"Referendarin", initially in Altlandsberg and later back in Berlin. In 1933 she married her employer, the lawyer :de:Mogens von Harbou |Mogens von Harbou. He had recently become a member of the National Socialist Party. Although Marie von Hammerstein-Equord had, as far as anyone in the family and their social circle knew, abandoned her earlier political activism, she self-evidently remained out of sympathy with her husband's politics. She became pregnant almost immediately, but the marriage nevertheless lasted less than three years. Following the divorce, the couple's child was taken to live with :de:Bodo von Harbou|his father's family. Meanwhile, until at least 1936, Marie-Luise was in touch with the party intelligence agent :de:Leo Roth |Leo Roth, directly and / or through her old friend from her Wandervogel days, :de:Nathan Steinberger|Nathan Steinberger.

Hitler years

Marie-Luise was under Gestapo surveillance even before the launch of the National Socialist dictatorship. During her brief marriage to :de:Mogens von Harbou |Mogens von Harbou, she underwent numerous interrogations, some of which lasted for several days, and was on the receiving end of house searches. One, at least, of the reasons she found herself targeted was the beliefs on the part of the security services concerning the closeness of her earlier political and personal association with Werner Scholem.
There was no immediate reduction of the Gestapo surveillance after her divorce, though it is striking that she seems to have avoided any period of detention longer than an interrogation session lasting a few days. Quite soon she moved to the countryside, relocating in 1937 to :de:Herrengosserstedt|Herrengroßstedt, and in 1942 to Prien. The choice of Herrengroßstedt was presumably connected to the fact that the country estate at the edge of which the village of Herrengroßstedt sits had been inherited in 1936 by :de:Ernst-Friedemann von Münchhausen der Jüngere |Baron Ernst-Friedemann von Münchhausen who became her second husband at some point around 1937. This second marriage would result in the births of more children and lasted, at least formally, till 1951. The Herrengroßstedt estate was confiscated in the :de:Bodenreform in Deutschland|1945 land reforms, and von Münchhausen, who had been a :de:Intendantur |reserve staff officer in the army supplies department during the war, was one of a large number of aristocratic land owners to be incarcerated as "Soviet prisoners of war" between 1945 and 1949.

Post-war years

in May 1945. The Hitler government collapsed meaning that Communist Party membership was no longer illegal and Marie-Luise lost very little time in rejoining the party. With the western two thirds of Germany now carved up into four military occupation zones, the southern part of the country found itself in the American zone. She worked during the next couple of years at the Rosenheim :de:Arbeitsamt|labour exchange. In June 1947 she moved from Upper Bavaria to the western half of Berlin. Following the 1948 currency reforms and the ensuing Berlin blockade, the physical divisions between the "western sectors" and the eastern half of Berlin, administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone, became progressively more intrusive, and then, during the 1950s, obstructive. In October 1949 the Soviet occupation zone became the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic. A few weeks before this, in September 1949, Marie Luise von Hammerstein relocated from West Berlin to East Berlin. She quickly followed the lead of millions of East German comrades who since 1946 had signed their Communist Party membership over to the recently created Socialist Unity Party which was emerging as the ruling party in a new kind of German one-party dictatorship.
In East Germany she returned to the academic study of Jurisprudence which she had broken off two decades earlier, while supporting herself by working as a legal assistant. After qualifying she worked as a lawyer in a co-operative legal practice in Berlin-Pankow. She now shunned political activism. However, at a National front party rally in July 1964 she caused a stir by commenting in public on her father's role as an opponent of Hitler during the 1930s/40s.
According to Ministry for State Security files which became accessible to researchers after 1990, Marie Luise von Hammerstein was "active for the Soviet security services between 1950 and 1960". It was unsurprising that the East German security services kept files on her. They kept many files. Files on Marie Luise von Hammerstein also included the judgment by an unnamed Stasi official that despite working for the Soviets she was "not without prejudices and a petty bourgeois mindset". The Stasi were always on the look out for any contacts to known dissidents and any hint of people wanting to escape to the west. The Stasi file on von Hammerstein noted her connections with the social circles around the high-profile dissident Robert Havemann and the troublesome singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann. One of her sons had committed the sin of escaping the country. In terms of her professional and personal life, she tended to attract a disproportionately large number of Jewish clients. She had for many years been estranged from her siblings "on political grounds".
Marie Louise von Münchhausen died in Berlin on 6 November 1999.