Maria Terwiel

Terwiel was sentenced to death on 26 January 1943, and on 5 August 1943 was guillotined in Berlin-Plötzensee.

In a campaign initiated by Graudenz, on 17 May 1942, Terwiel, Schulze-Boysen, and nineteen others travelled across five Berlin neighbourhoods to paste the stickers on posters for the Nazi propaganda exhibition The Soviet Paradise (Das Sowjet-Paradies). The sticker read, "Permanent Exhibition. The Nazi Paradise. War, Hunger, Lies, Gestapo. How much longer?"

Following her arrest on 17 September 1942 and brutal interrogation, Terwiel was sentenced to death for treason on 26 January 1943 by the Reichskriegsgericht ("Reich Military Tribunal"). Maria Terwiel was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin on 5 August 1943. She was 33 years old. Himpel had preceded her, executed in May. In her immediate resistance circle, only Helmut Roloff was to survive.

With Himpel, who secretly and without charge continued to treat Jewish patients, Terwiel began helping Jews in hiding. They helped furnish them with identification and ration cards. A patient of Himpel's, the Communist writer John Graudenz, in 1939/40 brought them into contact with a broader resistance group in the city centred around the couples Adam and Greta Kuckhoff, Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen and Arvid and Mildred Harnack. For the Abwehr and Gestapo this, in turn, placed the couple in the frame of a wider European espionage network which, focusing upon Soviet contacts and Communist participants, they were identified under the cryptonym Rote Kapelle (the Red Orchestra).

Classed under the 1935 Nuremberg Laws as "Half-Jewess" ("Halbjüdin"), Terwiel realised that she could no longer finish her studies, as she would never be able to get a position as a trainee lawyer. Her legal dissertion, titled Die Allgemeinen Geschäftsbedingungen der Banken. insbesondere die Pfandklausel (The General Terms and Conditions of Banks, in Particular the Deposit Clause), was ready to be submitted to the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg in 1935. Terwiel also painfully realised, that she was forbidden to marry Himpel. They nonetheless lived together in Berlin; Hempel running a successful dentistry practice, and Terwiel finding work as a secretary in a French-Swiss textile company.

Maria "Mimi" Terwiel (7 June 1910 – 5 August 1943) was a German resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. She was active in a group in Berlin that wrote and distributed anti-Nazi and anti-war appeals. As part of what they conceived as a broader action against a collection of anti-fascist resistance groups in Germany and occupied Europe that the Abwehr called the Red Orchestra, in September 1942 the Gestapo arrested Terwiel along with her fiancée Helmut Himpel. Among the leaflets and pamphlets they had copied and distributed for the group were the July and August 1941 sermons of Clemens August Graf von Galen which denounced the regime's Aktion T4 programme of involuntary euthanasia.

Maria Terwiel was born on 7 June 1910 in Boppard am Rhein. She completed her Abitur at a Gymnasium in Stettin in 1931, where her father, Johannes Terwiel, a devoutly Catholic Prussian civil servant, worked as a provincial deputy commissioner, while her mother was Jewish, which would limit Mimi's professional aspirations after 1933. She studied law at Freiburg, where she met her future fiancé, Helmut Himpel, and at Munich. As a Social Democrat, her father was dismissed from office after Hitler came to power in 1933. The family had moved to Berlin, where she found a job as a secretary In a German-Swiss textile company.