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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. In September 1942, the Gestapo arrested Terwiel along with her fiancée Helmut Himpel, as part of what it conceived as a broader action against a collection of anti-fascist resistance groups in Germany and occupied Europe, identified by the Abwehr as the Red Orchestra. Among the leaflets and pamphlets Terwiel and Himpel 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.
Terwiel was sentenced to death on 26 January 1943, and on 5 August 1943 was guillotined in Berlin-Plötzensee.
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-Switzerland textile company.
On her typewriter, Terwiel copied anti-Nazi material supplied by the group that she, together with Himpel, John Graudenz, the pianist Helmut Roloff, and others posted to people in important positions, passed to foreign correspondents, and distributed across Berlin. This included Bishop von Galen's sermon condemning the Aktion T4 euthanasia program "The Murder of Unproductive Persons" Clemens von Galen and a polemic entitled "Fear for Germany's future grips the people" ( Die Sorge um Deutschlands Zukunft geht durch das Volk).
Signed AGIS, the leaflet was written by Harro Schulze-Boysen with assistance from John Sieg. It declared that "the most disgraceful tortures and cruelties are being perpetrated on civilians and prisoners in the name of the Reich" and that each day of war increased "the bill" that Germans in the end would have to pay. "Who", it asked, "cannot see now that the entire much praised social improvement in the Third Reich, the job creation, the Volkswagen, and many another things were nothing but preparation for war and armament?!" The only means Hitler had known for relieving unemployment was "the extermination of millions through a new war". A genuine "socialist revolution" lay in the future: the immediate task of "true patriots" and "all those who have maintained a sense of true values" was to do, wherever possible, the exact opposite of what the Nazi regime demanded of them.
In a campaign initiated by John 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?" Brysac, Shareen Blair (2000). Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-513269-4, p. 300
Three days after sentencing she wrote to her two younger siblings, Gerd and Ursula: "I have absolutely no fear of death and certainly not of divine judgement: that at least we don't have to fear. Stay true to your principles and forever and always stick together". In a farewell letter to a Polish cellmate, Krystyna Wituska, she gave legal advice and formulated appeals for clemency for her fellow prisoners (her own was rejected personally by Hitler). Terwiel also wrote a song, “O head full of blood and wounds” in which she called on Jesus to "appear to me as a shield to comfort me in my death".
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