Maltzan von Maria

Maltzan, Gräfin (Countess) Maria von The youngest of seven siblings, Maria Isabel Helene (nicknamed Maruska) was born on March 25,1909 in Schloss Militsch, into an aristocratic Prussian family. The estate of 18,000 acres was situated in Militsch in Silesia (today Milicz in Poland). A life-long rebel and fiercely independent of mind, Maria von Maltzan did not get along well with her conservative and old-fashioned mother. Soon after the death of her father, the 12-year-old was sent off by her mother to Berlin, where she entered a boarding school for girls. The fashionable educational institution was much in demand by both old established Junkers from Brandenburg-Prussia and well-to-do Jews from Berlin, with whose daughters von Maltzan soon cultivated excellent relationships. In 1932, shortly before the Nazi takeover, while working in Munich for a doctoral degree in the Natural Sciences she became involved with an anti-Nazi group that had been organized by the Jesuit, Father Friedrich Muckermann. Her activity did not escape the notice of the Gestapo, and they interrogated her several times in 1933. The same anti-fascist convictions also made her fall foul of her brother, Carlos, an ardent Nazi sympathizer, who banished her from entering the family estate in Silesia. They became reconciled only a short time before Carlos’s death in action in France in 1940. After that, von Maltzan would have no qualms at all in brandishing the name of her fallen brother, or that of her famous brother-in-law, Nazi Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, in order to fend off inquisitive Nazi officials. In 1933, however, she was still tempted to avoid the persecution of the regime by seeking her luck in Africa. She returned to Germany only after the death of her mother in 1935. She had a short-lived and tumultuous marriage with a cabaret performer, Walter Hillbring; and then she decided to begin studying veterinary medicine in Berlin. In 1938, the veterinary student moved to a modestground-floor apartment in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, and assumed an additional, clandestine career as an underground activist and rescuer of racially persecuted Jews. In 1939, her boarding-school principal, Marga von Kuhlwein, introduced her to Hans Hirschel, the son of a Jewish judge from Silesia and a wealthy Jewish mother. A highly cultivated man of letters and editor of a respectable literary journal, Hirschel had been out of work ever since the Nazi rise to power. The two fell in love – despite the fact that their love affair was considered under Nazi law as a “racial defamation,” an offense punishable by the severest possible measures. In 1942, as Hirschel and his mother faced imminent deportation, he moved incognito into his lover’s apartment. To cover his tracks, the countess had him write a feigned suicide letter to his mother. A few weeks later, the old woman was deported to Theresienstadt, from which she did not return. Von Maltzan gave birth, in September 1942, to a premature baby, who died in the hospital incubator one day later due to a power shortage during an air raid. As the father she named her Swedish friend, Eric Svensson, who was both a married man and a homosexual. Sometime toward the end of 1943, the Gestapo, probably tipped off by a denunciation, had her house thoroughly searched by two officers. Hirschel had just enough time to jump into the chest of a huge couch in the living room, which was his hiding place. When the Gestapo officer, pistol drawn, wanted to pry open the chest, Von Maltzan challenged him to go ahead and shoot through the piece. She demanded, however, that he first sign a promissory note that he would repay all damages incurred as a result. At this the Nazi henchman backed off, but, from that time until the end of the war, her house was closely watched by the Gestapo. Quite independent of her romantic relationship with Hirschel, Von Maltzan played an important role in the rescue efforts of the Swedish Church at Landhausstrasse.She participated in underground rescue work by providing temporary shelter and Aryan documents to Jews in hiding. In October 1944, she participated in a bold rescue operation during which twenty Jews were to be smuggled from Berlin to Sweden stowed away in railway crates. The Swedes had the right to ship their furniture to Sweden in sealed crates. However, by a secret arrangement with the German railway personnel, the freight train was also to stop at an agreed place on the outskirts of Berlin. There the illegal Jews would be loaded onto the train, in place of the furniture that was in the crates destined for Sweden. Von Maltzan’s assignment was to conduct the hiding Jews to the meeting point. She carried out her mission successfully, according to plan, but, on the return journey, she found herself trapped in the woods with SS men with searchlights and dogs tracking her. To throw the dogs off her scent, she smeared herself in horse manure, waded knee deep in streams, and spent one day and two nights hidden in a tree. She arrived back in Berlin on the verge of physical collapse. All together, it may be estimated that von Maltzan was instrumental, in one way or another, in the rescue of some sixty victims of Nazi racial and political persecution, in addition to her own life-partner and future husband, Hans Hirschel. On February 19, 1987, Yad Vashem recognized Countess Maria von Maltzan as Righteous Among the Nations.