Unit 1012
will honor and always remember Maria Von Maltzan, every year on November 12, as
she passed away at the age of 88 on that date in 1997. We will remember and
honor her for saving the lives of many Jews during World War II and he
rightfully deserves to be recognized by the State of Israel as Righteous among the Nations. Her story should be
an inspiration for us to support victims’ rights and defend the use of the
death penalty by speaking out against evil and saving lives.
We will
post information about her from Wikipedia and other links.
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Maria von Maltzan, German Resistance Memorial
Center
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Maria Helene Françoise Izabel Gräfin von
Maltzan, Freiin zu Wartenberg und Penzlin (March 25, 1909 – November 12, 1997)
was an aristocrat who, as part of the German Resistance against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party, saved the lives of many Jewish
people in Berlin.
Biography
Countess Maria von Maltzan was born
into an enormously wealthy family at Militsch Palace, Silesia, Germany (today
Milicz, Poland)
and was raised on the family's 18,000 acres (7,300 ha) estate, the
youngest of eight children. After completing grade school in Berlin in 1927, she
decided to undertake studies in zoology at the University of Breslau, quite unusual for a
girl during this time. Her family was strictly against the idea, but her
teachers supported her and she got permission. In 1928 she enrolled at the University of Munich where
she received her doctorate in natural
sciences five years later.
When the Nazis
seized power in 1933, Maria's sense of justice made her join different
resistance movements against the Nazis almost immediately. For years she worked
as an underground-fighter. As the brutality of the Nazi Régime accelerated with
murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total
extermination of the Jews dawned on Maria von Maltzan in all its horror - and
she immediately decided to act. Back in Berlin since 1935, she always responded
to calls for help and took the Jews into her own home, fed and protected them,
right under the noses of the Gestapo. Due to her well-known political attitude
she had to get by with numerous jobs before in 1940 she began studying veterinary
medicine, graduating in 1943. Throughout the war the Countess von Maltzan in
cooperation with the Swedish Church provided a safe haven for
more than 60 Jews, deserters and forced labourers, arranging for them to escape
to safety. She falsified official visas and other documents and helped many
Jews escape from Berlin in trucks that she often drove herself.
Before World War II she got to know
the Jewish author Hans Hirschel, the former
editor of Das Dreieck, an avant-garde German literary journal founded in
1925. From 1942 to the end of the war she sheltered Hirschel in a special
hiding place inside a couch in the living room of her appartement in Wilmersdorf,
thus saving his life at the peril of her own. Maria became pregnant with Hans's
child. She later recalled how the new-born baby was placed in an incubator and
the hospital was bombed. The electricity running the incubator stopped and the
baby died. Shortly afterwards she adopted two little girls of a children's
camp.
After the war Maria married Hans
Hirschel but the marriage failed. They separated after two years, then
remarried in 1972. During the post-war-years Maria had many difficulties, but
grateful Jews, who never forgot her heroism, helped her survive bitter years.
Because of the horrors of the war she became addicted to drugs and at times
lost her approbation as a veterinarian. She later recalled how she was even
brought to a psychiatric hospital and had to scrub floors day after day to
afford a living.
After Hans Hirschel died in 1975,
Countess Maria von Maltzan, aged 66, decided once again to build up a new
existence with her own veterinary practice in Berlin, from 1981 on located in
the Kreuzberg
district, where she became famous for the cost-free treatment of dogs owned by
local punks and her struggle for improvement of the
living conditions of immigrants. In 1986 she published her memoirs which made
her biography known to a wider public and she received the award of a Righteous among the Nations one year later.
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