Margret Boveri (1900–1975)

Margret Boveri was born in Germany, the daughter of German biologist Theodor Boveri and American biologist Marcella O'Grady Boveri. She studied history and political science at the universities of Munich and Bonn, and originally intended to become a teacher. However, after earning a doctoral degree in history, she embarked on a career as a journalist, working in the foreign affairs section of the Berliner Tageblatt. After publishing a few travel reports in the Frankfurter Zeitung, in 1939 she became the paper's Stockholm and then New York City correspondent. In her writing, she defended Nazi foreign policy and attacked the American capitalism system. She never joined the Nazi Party but was awarded the regime's War Merit Medal in 1941. After the USA entered World War II, she was interned for a time as a German national before being allowed to return to Europe. In 1942 she arrived in Lisbon, where she continued her work as foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. The Nazis banned the paper and shut it down in 1943, and she joined the staff of the Nazi weekly Das Reich. She witnessed the end of the war in Berlin, and wrote about her experiences of the Soviet occupation of the city in a letter to a friend that later formed the basis of her later book Tage des Überlebens (1968). She attacked American attempts at de-nazification and re-education in Germany in a 1946 book, Amerika-Fibel für erwachsene Deutsche. In 1948, she published Der Diplomat vor Gericht, her account of the trial against the leading Nazi diplomat Ernst von Weizsäcker, in which she rejected the legitimacy of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. She opposed the political division of Germany by the Allies and was an advocate for re-unification.