Marion Yorck von Wartenburg

Marion Gräfin Yorck von Wartenburg (June 14, 1904 – April 13, 2007) was a German jurist and judge. She was a resistance fighter against the Nazis and member of the Kreisau Circle.

Yorck was born Marion Winter in Berlin, Province of Brandenburg. She went to school with the later theologist Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin (now the Walther-Rathenau-Oberschule). She studied jurisprudence and earned her Juris Doctor in 1929. In 1930, she married Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, brother-in-law of Claus von Stauffenberg. Together with her husband, Marion Yorck von Wartenburg became active with the Kreisau Circle, an opposition group against the National Socialist regime, in 1933. Her husband was executed after the bungled assassination of Hitler, and Marion spent three months in prison. She was jailed again in Poland for another three months and beaten by communist guards who refused to accept that she was not a Nazi.

After World War II, Yorck worked in East Berlin as a jurist. In 1946 she was nominated as a judge at Amtsgericht Lichterfelde in West Berlin by the Allies. In 1952 she became the first female head of a juried court, and in 1969 she led the 9th Große Strafkammer of the regional superior court in Berlin. Her career as judge was marked by harsh sentences for homosexuals. She died in Berlin.

She was a lifelong living partner of Ulrich Biel, a CDU politician who died in 1996. They lived together for some 50 years.

Notes

Regarding personal names: Gräfin is a title, translated as Countess, not a first or middle name. The masculine form is Graf.

External links

• Obituary in the Guardian