Viola Herms Drath (February 8, 1920 – August 11, 2011) was a Washington, D.C., author, socialite and a German-American member of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy for over thirty years.
In 1946, in Germany, she was a playwright, with one of her early productions, Farewell Isabell,[2] staged in Straubing's Municipal Theater[3] and in Munich.
During the post-World War II period, Drath worked as a German interpreter in Munich, in the office of her soon-to-be husband, who was the deputy military governor of Bavaria.
They bought a house at 3206 Q Street, Northwest, in the Georgetown district in northwest Washington, D.C.[1] Sonia Adler hired Drath to write for the Washington Dossier,[1] where she wrote about "political gossip, lifestyle advice, and culture, explored a diverse cross-section of the city's fine-art world.
In the early 1980s, Viola met Albrecht Gero Muth, 44 years her junior, then an unpaid intern from Germany.
[1] In April 2011, Muth somehow arranged a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery to honor fallen American soldiers in Iraq, supposedly on behalf of the Iraqi regime.
Early in the marriage, Muth started a pattern of domestic violence against Drath, inducing repeated police visits to the Q Street home.