Alam mo ba?

DID YOU KNOW? — Former President Rodrigo Duterte is not the first Filipino to face trial in an international criminal court.

History reveals that Carmen Maria Mory, whose mother was from Iloilo, was the first person of Filipino descent tried for crimes before an international tribunal.

Mory was a kapo (prisoner functionary) at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in northern Germany during World War II. 

The camp held at least 132,000 Jewish women, with over 90,000 perishing due to starvation, forced labor, medical experiments, and mass executions in gas chambers. 

Established in November 1938 under the orders of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army in April 1945.

On February 3, 1947, Mory was sentenced to death along with 15 others for war crimes and crimes against humanity, particularly for her role in the deaths of Jewish prisoners. Before her execution could be carried out, she committed suicide on April 9, 1947.

Mory’s story began far from Nazi Germany. Her mother, Leona Castro, was a Filipina from Iloilo, originally married to Frederick von Kauffmann, a British subject residing in Iloilo City. They had three children: Elena, Federico, and Ernesto.

Leona was taken to Switzerland in April 1899 for medical treatment, where she met Dr. Ernest Emil Mory, a physician in charge of a sanatorium in Thun. The two fell in love, and after obtaining a divorce from Kauffmann in Paris in 1905, Leona married Dr. Mory.

They had three daughters: Leonita Elizabeth (born 1900), Carmen Maria (born 1906), and Esther Renate (born 1909). Tragically, Leona died in Bern, Switzerland, in 1910.

Carmen Maria Mory moved to Munich in 1928 to study voice and music but abandoned her studies after a tonsillectomy in 1932. 

She later relocated to Berlin, became a journalist, and was drawn to the power and glamour of the Nazi regime. By 1934, she had become a Gestapo agent.

Sent to Paris to spy on German emigrants, she was arrested for espionage in 1938 and sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment. 

When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, she escaped and resumed working for the regime. However, her Nazi colleagues suspected her of being a double agent, leading to her imprisonment at Ravensbrück in 1941.

At Ravensbrück, Mory became a kapo, akin to a “mayor de mayores” in modern prisons. She was assigned as a prisoner nurse overseeing tuberculosis patients and mentally ill women. 

Gaining notoriety as “the most feared woman in Ravensbrück” and “The Black Angel of Ravensbrück,” she was later accused by former inmates of participating in the selection and murder of 60 women prisoners.

After the war, she was convicted and sentenced to death, but before her execution, she took her own life using a razor blade.

Despite her mother’s Iloilo roots, Mory and her sisters were denied inheritance from their maternal grandfather, Samuel Bischoff, a Swiss businessman in Iloilo.

Mory’s mother Leona was born in Bacolod on April 11, 1875, but raised in Iloilo by her father, Bischoff, and stepmother, Doña Ana Ramirez. Her biological mother was Felisa Castro, a Filipina.

In an 1893 map of Iloilo, Bischoff was listed as owning properties along Plaza Alfonso XII, Calle Real, and Calle Ortiz. He died in Iloilo on June 29, 1913.

In 1918, the Supreme Court of the Philippines ruled in G.R. No. L-11796 (In the Matter of the Estate of Samuel Bischoff Werthmuller) that Leona’s divorce from Kauffmann was not legally recognized in the Philippines. 

Consequently, her children from her marriage to Dr. Mory were deemed illegitimate under Philippine law and excluded from inheritance.

The ruling stated: “The right to inherit is limited to legitimate, legitimated, and acknowledged natural children. The children of adulterous relations are wholly excluded.”

Mory’s trial at the Hamburg Ravensbrück Tribunal was among the early precedents for international war crimes prosecutions, long before the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2002.

While Duterte is the first Filipino leader to face ICC prosecution, Mory was arguably the first person of Filipino descent tried for war crimes before an international tribunal.

Her life was chronicled in the book “Ich, Carmen Mory”, written by Caterina Abbati, a Swiss author and historical researcher. 

Published in 1999, the book provides a detailed account of her espionage activities, role at Ravensbrück, trial for war crimes, and eventual suicide – serving as a controversial but valuable resource in understanding her complex and notorious past.