Marion Hedda Ilse Gräfin von Dönhoff (December 2, 1909 – March 11, 2002) was a German journalist who participated in the resistance against Hitler's National Socialists with Helmuth James Graf von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. After the war, she became one of the leading German journalists and intellectuals. She worked over 55 years for the Hamburg-based, weekly newspaper Die Zeit, as an editor and later publisher.
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Dönhoff was born to an old aristocratic family ("Gräfin" means "Countess") in Schloss Friedrichstein, East Prussia in 1909. Dönhoff's father was Count August Karl von Dönhoff, a diplomat and member of the Prussian House of Lords and the German Parliament. As a diplomat, he was located in Washington for some time, and became a close friend of Senator Carl Schurz. Dönhoff wrote, in her memoirs, how her father was involved in one of the last episodes of the Indian wars, the White River War.[1] Her mother was Maria Gräfin von Dönhoff, born Von Lepel (1869–1940).
As a young woman, she studied economics at Frankfurt, where National Socialist sympathizers were said to have called her the "red countess" for her defiance once they gained power in 1933. She left Germany soon after, moving to Basel, Switzerland, where she earned her doctorate. But she returned to her family home at Quittainen (Kwitajny), East Prussia, in 1938, and joined the resistance movement, which led to questioning by the Gestapo after a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. Though many of her fellow resistance activists were executed, she was released. While she had secretly helped to develop the organization of the government that was to take over in East Prussia once the resistance succeeded in removing Hitler, her name was not found in any of the documents seized by the Nazis. Out of modesty, she had not presumed to have herself included, which modesty ended up saving her.
In January 1945, as Soviet troops rolled into the region, Dönhoff fled East Prussia, travelling seven weeks on horseback before reaching Hamburg. She recounted her journey in a 1962 book of essays, recollecting her beloved homeland in what today is Russia (Kaliningrad oblast) and Poland (Warmia and Masuria). [2] Despite her deep emotional attachment to the region where she grew up, she was one of the first public figures to endorse the finality of the border between Germany and Poland, which had been established after the Second World War.
In 1946, Dönhoff joined the fledgling, Hamburg-based, intellectual weekly Die Zeit as political editor. She was promoted later to deputy editor-in-chief in 1955, then editor-in-chief in 1968, and publisher in 1972. At the time of her death, Monday March 11, 2002 at the age of 92, Dönhoff was still co-publisher of the influential newspaper and was widely regarded as a voice of wisdom, tolerance and morality. She was the author of more than twenty books, including political and historical analyses of Germany as well as commentary on U.S. foreign policy. Among many international distinctions, Dönhoff was awarded honorary doctorates by Columbia University and Georgetown University.
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The book Jews In Germany From Roman Times To The Weimar Republic by Nachum T. Gidal, Bertelsmann 1988, Könemann 1998, contains a Preface by Marion Gräfin Dönhoff.