Benita von Falkenhayn

Benita von Falkenhayn, maiden name von Zolikofer-Altenklingen (born c. 1900, died February 18, 1935) was a Swiss-born German baroness who was a spy for Poland.

Ms Ursula von Falkenhayn, born on 14 August 1900 in Berlin, was married to Baron von Berg and her name was actually Ursula Baroness Benita von Berg. She was first married to Lieutenant A.D. Mueller-Eckhardt (1920–1922) and secondly to former lieutenant Richard von Falkenhayn (1923–1930). The marriage between Benita von Falkenhayn and Richard von Falkenhayn ended on 18 December 1930 and on 18 October 1932 she married aircraft engineer Josef von Berg. This marriage was annulled on 19 October 1934 by a court, after which she re-adopted the name of her second husband.

In her early thirties, she met the Polish intelligence agent Major Jerzy Sosnowski and became his lover. In February 1935, she was arrested with her friend Renate von Natzmer, Sosnowski's other lover, Both women were both found guilty of espionage and treason and sentenced to death.

Two days later, after appeals for clemency had been turned down, they became two of the last people in Germany to be beheaded by axe, at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. In 1938, Adolf Hitler decreed that all future executions should be by hanging or the guillotine, although at least one other woman, the Romanian-Jewish communist Olga Bancic, did later die by the axe in Stuttgart in 1944.

External links

• "Baroness Beheaded". Time Magazine. 1935-02-25. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754540,00.html. Retrieved 2008-08-09. 
• Love, Espionage, and the Ax
• pl:Benita von Falkenhayn