Renate von Natzmer

Who was Renate von Natzmer?

Renate von Natzmer was a German noblewoman who worked for the army during the Weimar Republic and Third Reich. She also worked for Polish intelligence. In the early 1930s, she met Polish agent major Jerzy Sosnowski and she became, like her friend Benita von Falkenhayn, his lover. They were arrested for spying and treason. Von Falkenhayn and von Natzmer were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Two days later, after appeals for clemency had been turned down, they became two of the last people in Germany to be beheaded by axe, at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. In 1938, Adolf Hitler decreed that all future executions should be by hanging or the guillotine, although at least one other woman, the Romanian-Jewish communist Olga Bancic, did later die by the axe in Stuttgart in 1944.