Paasche, Maria (1909–2000)

Anti-Nazi activist in the 1930s. Name variations: Maria Therese von Hammerstein. Born Maria Therese von Hammerstein in 1909 in Magdeburg, Germany; died on January 21, 2000, in San Francisco, California; daughter of General Kurt von Hammerstein (commander-in-chief of the German army, 1930–34, and anti-Hitler conspirator); granddaughter of General Walther von Lüttwitz; sister of anti-Hitler conspirators Ludwig von Hammerstein and Kunrat von Hammerstein; studied agriculture at public schools in Berlin; attended University of Berlin; married John H. Paasche, in 1935 (died 1994); children: Gottfried Paasche; Joan Briegleb; Michaela Grudin; Virginia Dakin.

Transported Jews to Prague (1930s); smuggled information to anti-Nazi community; exiled in Japan during World War II; emigrated to United States (1948); worked as literary researcher; subject of documentary Silent Courage: Maria Therese von Hammerstein and Her Battle Against Nazism (1999).

One of seven children born to General Kurt von Hammerstein, commander-in-chief of the German army from 1930 to 1934, Maria Paasche began life as Maria Therese von Hammerstein in Magdeburg, near Berlin, in 1909. Growing up in an important army family—her grandfather General Walther von Lüttwitz was involved in the 1920 putsch against the Weimar Republic—Paasche and her siblings enjoyed a childhood less constrained and conservative than their environment would suggest.

Encouraged to explore intellectually and politically outside their immediate circle and inspired by her many Jewish friends, Paasche began to nurture plans to move to Palestine. She left the convent she was attending and took up agricultural studies at a public school, preparing for life in the Middle East; she went on to study at the University of Berlin.

Committed to political activism, like most of her siblings, Paasche soon realized the implications of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. In the early 1930s, she began helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany, transporting them to Prague—still a free city—on her motorcycle. She also took newspapers to the anti-Nazi community there, warning the Jewish community in Prague about Hitler's plans, based on intelligence information received from her father.

As Hitler's fortunes rose, Paasche's family lived in military accommodations under close surveillance. Her father did not attend her wedding in 1935 to John H. Paasche, although he gave his blessing. John's background made him a target in Nazi Germany. Not only was he part Jewish, but his father Hans Paasche was a former navy captain, discharged after becoming a pacifist and known to the authorities for serving as a pallbearer at the funeral of assassinated socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg .

Maria and John Paasche moved to Palestine to join their Zionist friends, but a typhoid epidemic drove them back to Germany. As a Jew, John was prohibited from studying law there, so he took up oriental languages instead. Persistently interrogated by the Gestapo about the activities of friends and relatives, the couple decided to emigrate to Japan.

In 1939, Maria's father plotted to lure Hitler to his headquarters on the Western front and kill him. Chancellor Heinrich Brening called von Hammerstein "the only man who could remove Hitler—a man without nerves." The attempt was unsuccessful, however, and the general died of cancer in 1943. A year later, two of her brothers, Ludwig and Kunrat, joined another conspiracy to kill Hitler. They both escaped with their lives and became fugitives. Maria Paasche's mother and two youngest siblings were sent to concentration camps because of their refusal to reveal the conspirators' whereabouts. They remained imprisoned until freed by the Allies at the end of the war.

In Japan, as Maria and John Paasche raised their family, they were spied on by the Japanese police. They lived in fear that their political background would be revealed to the German exile community, which was comprised predominantly of Nazi sympathizers. John Paasche worked after the war as a translator for the American occupiers and, in 1948, the family emigrated to San Francisco. While her husband worked in a tomato-canning factory, Maria cleaned houses. She eventually became a literary researcher, fluent in German, Russian, English and French. Her husband, who earned a master's degree from Berkeley and worked in the Chinese section of the Library of Congress, died in 1994.

The heroism of Maria Paasche remained largely unknown until, as an old woman, she went to live in the Jewish Home for the Aged in San Francisco. Her son Gottfried began researching her political activities despite his mother's long silence on the subject. "She never lost her fear of naming names," he said. The information he gathered on her wartime work became a 1999 documentary, Silent Courage: Maria Therese von Hammerstein and Her Battle Against Nazism, a film sponsored by B'nai B'rith and the German government. Maria Paasche died in San Francisco in January 2000, at age 90.