Hermynia Zur Mühlen

Her maternal grandfather was the diplomat Ferdinand, Count von Wydenbruck, who had married a politically liberal woman from the Anglo-Irish gentry.

[1] Zur Mühlen wrote six detective novels under the name Lawrence H. Desberry, and collections of fairy tales interpreted from a radical perspective.

Zur Mühlen refused to agree to S. Fischer Verlag's appeal that she follow Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, René Schickele and Stefan Klein in undertaking not to write in émigré magazines:[1] To this 'best of company; I prefer solidarity with those who, in the Third Reich, are persecuted because of their convictions, shut up in concentration camps, or 'shot while attempting to escape.'

One cannot serve Germany and the German people better than by joining in the struggle against the horror tale become reality that is the Third Reich.Unsere Töchter die Nazinen was a directly anti-Nazi satire: serialized in the Territory of the Saar Basin in a leftwing newspaper in 1934,[4] it was banned after eventually finding a publisher in 1936.

After the German occupation of Bohemia in March 1939, they had to escape again; via Budapest, Yugoslavia, Italy, Switzerland and France, they reached London on 19 June 1939.