Christabel Bielenberg, who has died aged 94, was the author of a best-selling memoir, The Past is Myself, based on her experiences in Nazi Germany. The worst of these arose from the failed attempt on Hitler's life on July 20th, 1944.
For two weeks she did not know whether her husband, Peter (a friend of some of the plotters), was dead or alive. She finally learnt that he was being held at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Then came the news that their close friend, Adam von Trott zu Solz, had been arrested, tortured and hanged for his part in the plot.
She was placed under house arrest in the village of Rohrbach in the Black Forest, where she had taken her children to be safe from air raids. In the hope of securing her husband's release, she volunteered to be questioned by the Gestapo. She caught her interrogators unawares by insisting that the lights which were shining directly in her face were turned off. "That made the whole thing much easier."
Throughout the interrogation, she repeatedly emphasised her Irish origins and made much of her influential contacts in Britain, promising her interrogator that her relatives would help him after the war. The outcome was that her husband was released from Gestapo custody and assigned to an army punishment squad sent to clear minefields on the Eastern Front. He managed to escape and joined his family, remaining in the Black Forest until the war ended.
She was born in London on June 18th, 1909, one of the four children of Lieut Col P.C. Burton and his wife, Christabel (née Harmsworth). A niece of newspaper magnates, Lord Northcliffe, Viscount Rothermere and Lord Harmsworth, she was presented at court. "We all wore white dresses and three feathers in our hair. We had to curtsy to Queen Mary and the king, and two of us fell over," she recalled.
She attended boarding school and won a scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, but with John McCormack's encouragement opted to study singing in Hamburg.
There in 1932 she met Peter Bielenberg, a law student. He swept her off her feet. "With him I realised what dancing was all about." They had their first glimpse of Hitler at a rally in the autumn of that year. Peter assured her that, however politically idiotic the Germans might seem, they "won't be so stupid as to fall for that clown".
When Hitler was elected chancellor in 1933 the couple, like many of their friends, regarded Nazism as an ugly phenomenon that would surely pass. On realising that the Nazis were not going to go away, the Bielenbergs in 1938 decided to leave Germany for Ireland. They were prevailed upon to stay by von Trott, who persuaded Peter to abandon his legal career to work in the civil service and join the internal resistance to Hitler.
During the war her preoccupations were the same as her neighbours', coping with food rationing and bombings, just as their opposite numbers in Britain were doing. They had to fend for themselves. "Our husbands were in Russia or fighting. We had all the problems single mothers face now, what with bringing up sons on our own. I saw Peter maybe once or twice a year, for six years."
She also saw people acquiesce in dictatorship. People like Herr Neisse, the gardener who discussed dahlias lovingly with her, were the bewildered pawns. "It was easy to picture him, shooting out his right arm and bawling with the rest, his eyes growing moist as the strong male voices broke into the national anthem, Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles".
With three children, she sometimes had to make difficult choices. In Berlin she sheltered a Jewish couple for two nights and found it painful to have to ask them to leave. "The boys kept asking questions. It was just too difficult."
When the war ended, David Astor, the editor of the Observer, appointed her special German correspondent, despite her lack of experience and inability to type. She had no inhibitions about criticising misconduct by occupying troops and was angered by the Allies' tendency to blame the German people for all that had happened.
Through her connections she was able to ensure that her husband obtained a visa for Britain. The couple settled in Ireland in 1948, purchasing a rundown farm in Tullow, Co Carlow. Peter taught himself farming and made an outstanding success of the venture.
Christabel's father was from Corofin, Co Galway, and she considered herself Irish "by nature". At pains to point out that her ancestors, who came to Ireland in the 17th century, were not part of the Cromwellian conquest, she set out to write their history. But finding them too dull, she decided to tell her own story. The Past is Myself, published in 1968, was one of the best personal memoirs to emerge from the second World War.
Reprinted many times and translated into seven languages, a television adaptation of it by Dennis Potter was broadcast in 1988 with Elizabeth Hurley in the starring role. A sequel, The Road Ahead (1992), was based on the immediate postwar years.
A supporter of the Northern Ireland Peace People in the 1970s, she acted as interpreter for Betty Williams on a visit to Germany. But no translation was necessary when, at a lecture in Heidelberg University, Williams grabbed a heckler by the shoulders and told him, "I'm going to speak and you're going to listen, d'y hear me, y'wee f . . . er!"
The Bielenbergs helped many of the children of Hitler's German opponents, making them welcome at their home in Tullow. The German government made Christabel a commander of the Federal Order of Merit and she was awarded a gold medal of merit by the European Parliament.
She was predeceased by her husband in 2001; her sons, Nicholas, John and Christopher, grandchildren and great-grandchildren survive her.
Christabel Bielenberg: born, June 18th, 1909; died, November 2nd, 2003