The Last Surviving Member of the Kreisau Circle

Marion Yorck, 102, Aided Hitler Assassination Conspiracy

By The Daily Telegraph | May 17, 2007

Marion Countess Yorck Von Wartenburg, who died April 13 in Berlin at 102, was among the last survivors of the Kreisau Circle, the group of intellectuals opposed to Adolf Hitler from which sprang the attempt to kill him with a bomb in July 1944.

The circle derived its name from having met several times at the country estate of Helmuth Count Moltke. Yet though Moltke was the Kreisauers’ driving force, they owed their harmony to the more measured temperament of Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg, Marion Yorck’s husband, and it was at their Berlin apartment that the group usually gathered in the later years of the war.

Its members constituted a wide array of anti-Nazis, not merely aristocrats and soldiers, but also trade unionists and teachers. Many had firm Christian convictions, most were influenced by the maltreatment of the Jews, and not a few had rather utopian ideals. Indeed, the circle’s original purpose was to plan for the renewal of Germany after the fall of Hitler, and only gradually did it move to plotting to bring about that end itself.

The assassination was entrusted to Peter Yorck’s cousin, Claus Count Stauffenberg. Yorck kept very little from his wife, who attended the circle’s meetings, often cooked for them, and delivered messages.

On July 18, 1944, the couple traveled to Weimar together for a wedding and the following day parted for the last time when Peter Yorck left for Berlin, in preparation for the coup that was to follow Stauffenberg’s attempt on the Führer’s life two days later at his headquarters, deep in present-day Poland.

Marion Yorck afterward wrote that her husband felt that the plot was likely to fail, but that it was worth the sacrifice to show the world that not all Germans were under Hitler’s sway. The latter’s survival of the blast triggered by Stauffenberg led to a fatal delay by those officers who had promised to back the coup, and Peter Yorck and many of the other conspirators were quickly arrested and tried. He was executed on August 7.

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