Maria von Maltzan.
German Resistance Memorial Center
IT BEGAN WITH strange phone calls. Hans Hirschel, the Jewish boyfriend of Maria von Maltzan, was hiding from the Nazis in Maria’s Berlin apartment. He noticed that during some evenings, the phone would ring twice, then stop. Even if she was right next to the phone, Maria wouldn’t pick it up. Instead, she would look at her watch. One minute would pass. Then the phone would again ring twice and stop. Another minute would pass. Then, when the phone rang again, Maria would finally pick it up. The conversations were always extremely short, and Hans couldn’t hear what was being said.
These phone calls were always followed by Maria abruptly going out into the night. Maria ignored Hans’s questions and continued to respond to the short, strange phone calls by heading out, night after night.
One night, Maria came home from one of these outings and calmly began to apply some antiseptic to a wound on her neck. Hans was shocked. “For God’s sake, Marushka,” he said to Maria, “that’s a bullet wound! What’s going on?”
“Hans,” Maria said calmly, “never ask me about where I’ve been and what I’ve done. It’s better that you don’t know.”
What Hans did know was that Maria Helene Francois Izabel von Maltzan, the girlfriend whom he affectionately referred to as Marushka, the daughter of a German count who had been raised on a beautiful 18,000-acre estate, had not been surprised by the roundup of Jews in Berlin. In fact, she wasn’t surprised by any of Hitler’s actions against the German Jews. After all, she had carefully read Hitler’s autobiography, Mein kampf, while a university student in Munich. Most Germans were so thrilled with Hitler’s promises to transform economically depressed and politically divided Germany into a glorious Third Reich that they ignored his ravings against the Jews. Maria, however, clearly understood and detested those ravings. She knew that Hitler would try to destroy the Jews of Europe if he ever got the chance.
When the Nazis first took control of Germany’s government in 1933—the same year Maria finished her doctoral studies in the natural sciences—she said to a friend, “I love this country so much, and I’m just beside myself with what’s happening.” She joined various Resistance groups and did what she could to fight the Nazis. Because she was a count’s daughter and closely related to several Nazi officers she was at first considered above reproach and was able to obtain useful information from elite Nazi social gatherings. But eventually she came under suspicion of assisting the enemies of the Third Reich. When called in for questioning, however, her cool demeanor, her Nazi connections, and her excellent acting skills always led to her release.
In 1942, despite several massive Jewish roundups the previous year, thousands of Jews were still living in the German capital of Berlin, where Maria lived and had studied veterinary medicine. German Wehrmacht (regular armed forces) officials wanted the roundups stopped since many of Berlin’s Jews kept the city’s bustling munitions factories running. But Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister and the gauleiter (high-ranking Nazi official) in charge of Berlin, was particularly embarrassed that so many Jews remained in the capital city.
His wishes soon trumped those of the Wehrmacht officials, and in February of 1943, massive Jewish roundups resumed in Berlin. When Goebbels announced several months later that Berlin was Judenfrei, there were still thousands of Jews living in Berlin. But they were in hiding, and many of them had been so for months.
Maria’s apartment, a converted store near the railroad, had always been open to anyone who was on the run from the Nazis. Many of them stayed only temporarily, often during their last nights in Berlin before they escaped by train. But Hans Hirschel, Maria’s boyfriend, a scholar and a writer, remained in Maria’s apartment. Maria obtained writing assignments for him, changed the wording a bit to disguise the real author, and then sold them, using the money to supplement the income she obtained by working various odd jobs.
When Hans had moved in with her, Maria noticed that his large couch with space inside might be a good hiding place during an emergency search. She drilled some air holes into the bottom of it, then covered the bottom with a thin material that would mask the holes but still let in air. Then she fixed the couch so that once someone was hidden inside, it could not be opened from the outside.
The Nazis knew that they had not found all of Berlin’s Jews, so they stepped up their searches. Maria had long come under suspicion for hiding Jews. One day a Nazi official searching for Jews came into Maria’s apartment, looked at the couch where Hans was hiding, and said, “How do we know nobody is hiding in there?”
Maria calmly answered, “If you’re sure someone is in there, go ahead and shoot. But before you do that, I want a written, signed paper from you that you will pay for new material and the work to have the couch recovered after you put holes in it.”
The official did not shoot and soon left the apartment.
Maria was also involved with a Jewish rescue operation that was working out of the Church of Sweden in Berlin. Maria worked with a young man named Eric Wesslen who was “buying” people back from one particular Nazi official. Eric would give this official certain items in exchange for prisoners, both Jewish and political. Once these people were delivered to him, he would rely on Maria, who had developed a network of safe houses, to find them a temporary shelter. Maria also provided these refugees with false ID papers so that they could more easily get around without fear of being rearrested.
Maria and Wesslen also smuggled people out of Germany and into Sweden in a system that was called schwedenmöbel (Sweden furniture). Sometimes she would use a vegetable cart to transport refugees out of Berlin and into the woods. Other times, she would meet the people in the woods after they had been brought there by someone else. She used her real identity card during the day and a false one—identifying her as a woman named Maria Mueller—at night.
One morning, following an evening when Maria had received one of the many phone calls that Hans had found so mysterious, Maria told Hans that she would be home late because of some business. By now, Hans knew better than to ask her what the business was. That afternoon, Maria took a train out of Berlin, got off, walked into the woods, and found a group of 20 people waiting for her. Maria led the group for about a mile. They came to a clearing where they could see a small shack next to some railroad tracks.
“You’re to hide in the woods on the other side, 50 meters from that shack,” Maria told them. “When the train comes, stay hidden until someone fetches you. You’ll be told what to do. Now move out, one at a time, and God be with you.”
Maria wanted very much to stay and ensure that the people she had led there would be safe, but her work was only half finished. She had to retrace her steps to make certain that no one had followed them. She knew that the train was scheduled to arrive at any moment. When it did, a group of men, hidden in a different part of the woods, would rush to the train and open one of the boxcars. (The conductor and train workers had been previously bribed with food and money.) Inside the boxcar would be crates of furniture. The men would remove the furniture and replace it with the refugees, seal the box back up, and eventually destroy the furniture. The crates of people would then be loaded onto a freighter and later unloaded in Sweden, where it would finally be safe for the refugees to come out of hiding.
Although Maria sensed that the refugees were on their way to safety, as she retraced her steps she had a bad feeling that something was about to go wrong. If she were stopped by a German patrol, she would have a very hard time explaining what she was doing in the woods in the middle of the night.
When Maria was nearly out of the woods, she heard dogs barking. Just 100 yards ahead of her, she saw a beam of light. Then another beam of light appeared behind her. She was trapped! The dogs were barking because they had picked up her scent. What could she do?
There was a brook nearby. If she could get there before the dogs found her, they would lose her scent. It was her only chance of escape. She jumped in the brook and swam with the current until she had reached a pond surrounded by low-hanging trees. She swam across the pond and waited until the dogs’ barking became more and more distant.
She waited there for hours, exhausted and freezing. She knew that the patrollers with the dogs were probably still looking for her, waiting just outside of the woods. Her only hope was an Allied bombing, a frequent occurrence in Germany at this time. During the confusion following a bombing, there was a good chance that her pursuers would stop looking for her.
When she finally thought it might be safe to come out of hiding, she heard the sweetest of sounds: the sirens sounding an air raid warning! Just as she got to the edge of the woods, an Allied bomb hit a factory right in front of her. Maria helped extinguish the fire caused by the bomb, then asked an official for a note stating that she had helped so that she would have paperwork to present to officials at checkpoints explaining why she was so far from home and in such a bedraggled state.
When Maria finally arrived at the Swedish church in Berlin, Wesslen asked her if she was going to faint. She said no and asked him if the refugees had made it to safety. He told her they had. She was handed a glass of champagne, took one sip, and promptly fainted.
Maria von Maltzan personally rescued more than 60 Jews and political enemies of the Nazis and assisted in the rescue of many others. After the war, she and Hans were married. Maria practiced veterinary medicine and often treated animals for free.
A film based on the relationship between Maria and Hans, called Versteckt (Hidden), was filmed in Berlin in 1984. In 1986, Maria published her autobiography, Schlage die trommel und fürchte dich nicht (Beat the Drums and Be Without Fright). She died in Berlin in 1997.
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