Marion Countess Yorck Von Wartenburg, who died April 13 in Berlin at 102, was among the last survivors of the Kreisau Circle, the group of intellectuals opposed to Adolf Hitler from which sprang the attempt to kill him with a bomb in July 1944.

The circle derived its name from having met several times at the country estate of Helmuth Count Moltke. Yet though Moltke was the Kreisauers’ driving force, they owed their harmony to the more measured temperament of Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg, Marion Yorck’s husband, and it was at their Berlin apartment that the group usually gathered in the later years of the war.

Its members constituted a wide array of anti-Nazis, not merely aristocrats and soldiers, but also trade unionists and teachers. Many had firm Christian convictions, most were influenced by the maltreatment of the Jews, and not a few had rather utopian ideals. Indeed, the circle’s original purpose was to plan for the renewal of Germany after the fall of Hitler, and only gradually did it move to plotting to bring about that end itself.

The assassination was entrusted to Peter Yorck’s cousin, Claus Count Stauffenberg. Yorck kept very little from his wife, who attended the circle’s meetings, often cooked for them, and delivered messages.

On July 18, 1944, the couple traveled to Weimar together for a wedding and the following day parted for the last time when Peter Yorck left for Berlin, in preparation for the coup that was to follow Stauffenberg’s attempt on the Führer’s life two days later at his headquarters, deep in present-day Poland.

Marion Yorck afterward wrote that her husband felt that the plot was likely to fail, but that it was worth the sacrifice to show the world that not all Germans were under Hitler’s sway. The latter’s survival of the blast triggered by Stauffenberg led to a fatal delay by those officers who had promised to back the coup, and Peter Yorck and many of the other conspirators were quickly arrested and tried. He was executed on August 7.

Shortly before, he was told that he had been expelled from the German army. “They can take the uniform from us, but not the spirit in which we acted,” he wrote in one of his last letters to his wife.

A few days later Marion Yorck was arrested. She was held in solitary confinement for three months at the bleak Moabit prison in Berlin. On her release, she made her way to the Yorck family estates in Silesia (now western Poland), where in the chaotic months after the end of the conflict she did her best to aid tenants.

Yorck managed to avoid being raped by Russian soldiers by hiding in a cemetery at nighttime, but she and her sister-in-law were later held in prison in Poland for three months. Once, she was repeatedly slapped when she denied being a Nazi. The communists appeared to believe that the only reason Marion Yorck would have returned to the estate was to search for gold she must have buried during the war.

She was born Marion Winter in Berlin on June 14 1904, the third of six children of a civil servant who had charge of the administration of the national theaters. She was educated at the Grunewald Gymnasium, where in class she sat next to the future theologian Dietrich Bonhöffer. At university in Berlin, she initially intended to study medicine but soon changed to law. In 1929, unusually for a woman at that time, she completed a doctorate and began to train as an assistant judge.

The following year she married Peter Yorck, who was also a lawyer and a descendant of the Prussian field marshal whose defiance of Napoleon had freed his country from the French yoke.

After the war, the countess resumed her legal career and advanced rapidly as a judge, as she was one of the few in that profession untainted by Nazi associations. She specialized in criminal law and gained a reputation for handing down severe sentences. In 1952 she became the first woman judge to preside over a jury trial in Germany, and in 1969 she took charge of one of Berlin’s regional superior courts.

She and Peter Yorck had no children, nor did she ever remarry, being keen to preserve the memory and legacy of his name. For nearly a half-century, she lived with Ulrich Biel, a lawyer and Christian Democrat politician who had been forced to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. He died in 1996.

In 1984 she published a brief memoir, “Die Starke der Stille,” translated into English in 2000 as “The Power of Solitude.”