Marion Gräfin Dönhoff

Marion Hedda Ilse Gräfin von Dönhoff (2 December 1909 – 11 March 2002) was a German journalist who participated in the resistance against Nazism, along 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.

Dönhoff was born to the old aristocratic Dönhoff family in Schloss Friedrichstein, East Prussia (now in Guryevsky District, Kaliningrad Oblast) in 1909. Her 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.

Her mother was born Maria von Lepel (1869–1940). Dönhoff wrote, in her memoirs, how her father was involved in one of the last episodes of the Indian wars, the White River War.

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 Kwitajny in 1938, and joined the resistance movement, which led to questioning by the Gestapo after a failed assassination attempt on Hitler in 1944. Although many of her fellow resistance activists were executed, she was released reportedly because her name was not found in any of the documents seized by the Nazis.

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