Background
Yorck was born Marion Winter in Berlin, Province of Brandenburg.
Yorck was born Marion Winter in Berlin, Province of Brandenburg.
She studied jurisprudence and earned her Juris Doctor in 1929.
She went to school with the later theologist Dietrich Bonhoeffer at Grunewald-Gymnasium in Berlin (now the Walther-Rathenau-Oberschule). Her husband was executed after the bungled assassination of Hitler, and Marion spent three months in prison. She was jailed again in Poland for another three months and beaten by communist guards who refused to accept that she was not a Nazi.
After World World War II, Yorck worked in East Berlin as a jurist.
In 1952 she became the first female head of a juried court, and in 1969 she led the 9th Große Strafkammer of the regional superior court in Berlin. Her career as judge was marked by harsh sentences for homosexuals.
She died in Berlin. They lived together for some 50 years.
Together with her husband, Marion Yorck von Wartenburg became active with the Kreisau Circle, an opposition group against the National Socialist regime, in 1933.
She was a resistance fighter against the Nazis and member of the Kreisau Circle.