Maria Reese

Maria Reese (born Maria Meyer: 5 January 1889 – 9 October 1958) was a German teacher who became a writer and journalist. She was also politically active, and sat as a member of the national parliament (Reichstag) between 1928 and 1933.

For most of her time in the Reichstag she was a Communist member. However, in 1933, after spending time in Moscow she became appalled by the careerist functionaries surrounding Stalin. (The dictator's potential rivals for power and influence had, in most cases, disappeared from the scene by this time.) She managed to escape from the Soviet Union and pursued a complicated political trajectory which included a period working for the Nazi government in the Anti-Comintern department of the Propaganda Ministry.

Her son was shot for suspected desertion in 1944, but a few months later she received a letter from the military high court stating that this had resulted from an error. After 1945 she re-converted Roman Catholicism.

Life Provenance and early years Maria Meyer was born at Michelbach, a village in the hills north of Trier, on the western edge of the Prussian Rhine province. Her father, Anton Meyer, was a primary/middle school teacher. Extension of the French military occupation separated their home district from the rest of Germany. Maria Reese was briefly arrested. In October 1923 she followed her husband, who had already been expelled, She later said that she thought, rightly or wrongly, that she might be able to influence the Nazis: "I did not speak for National Socialism: I spoke for Germany". appeared, complete with the requisite antisemitic undertones, in 1938. It was a bestseller. A few months later his mother was informed by the military high court that this had been a mistake. Maria Reese was also one of several thousand detained by the Gestapo after the failed attempt to assassinate the leader, in a mass round up of people whose names were on Nazi files because they had been politically prominent as opponents of the Nazi Party before 1933. She survived.

War ended in May 1945 and Maria Reese was detained again, this time by the French who had returned as an occupying power. Because of her past as an opportunist "employee of Dr. Goebbels", between 1946 and 1948 she was interned by the French Military government in a prison camp.

After 1948 she returned to her work as a school teacher. She remained in or near her home "Eifel" region in the hills to the north of Trier, although she never settled in any one place for very long. In her personal life, she recovered a deep attachment to Roman Catholicism. After a succession of house moves, in 1958 she moved to Zell on the Moselle, a short distance downstream from the border with Luxembourg. On 9 October 1958, two days after moving into her new home, Maria Reese died suddenly.