Marie Luise von Hammerstein

Marie Luise Baroness of Münchhausen (27 September 1908 – 6 November 1999), born Baroness of Hammerstein-Equord, 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 Baroness Maria von Lüttwitz. The Hammerstein family was a well connected German noble family. 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 Franz, the youngest brother of Marie Luise, as concentration camp inmates.

Student years She studied Jurisprudence at the Frederick-William University (as it was then known) of Berlin.

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. He had recently become a member of the National Socialist Party (which had taken power at the start of that year). 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. (Leo Roth (1911-1937) later became the lover and possibly also, briefly, the husband of Helga (1913-2005), the younger sister of Marie Luise von Hammerstein.) Von Münchhausen, who had been a reserve staff officer in the army supplies department during the Second World War, was one of a large number of aristocratic land owners who were interned as prisoners of war by the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1949.

Post-war years After Germany was defeated in May 1945, von Hammerstein joined the Communist Party of Germany, which had been outlawed during Nazi rule. The SED was the ruling party of East Germany for almost the whole of the country's existence.