Early years and marriage Martha was the fourth child of the German Jewish couple Ottilie and Heinrich Benjamin Marckwald, who ran a wool store in Berlin. She grew up with four siblings in a wealthy Jewish merchant family in that city. After the death of her father in 1870, Louis Liebermann,
Max Liebermann's father, became guardian of the Marckwald children. The union of the Marckwald and Liebermann families resulted in two marriages. First, Martha's older sister Elsbeth married the entrepreneur Georg Liebermann, Max's older brother. On 14 September 1884, Martha and Max Liebermann got married. Their marriage would last until his death in 1935. The couple's only child, Käthe Liebermann, was born in August 1885. In 1892 the family moved into the second floor of the at
Pariser Platz 7. In 1904, Martha Liebermann suffered from
breast cancer. She overcome the illness after being operated by
James Israel, the chief physician at the . In 1910, the family moved into their newly built summer house at the
Wannsee, the
Liebermann Villa, which was built by Paul Baumgarten.
Final years Martha Liebermann became a widow when her husband died on 8 February 1935, after 50 years of marriage, in the house on Pariser Platz. In the same year, Martha moved into an apartment at Graf-Spee-Straße 23 (today: Hiroshimastraße) in the neighboring Tiergartenviertel (then: Berlin W35). As a result of the persecution of Jews in
Nazi Germany, she lost her two houses on Pariser Platz and Wannsee, and almost her entire fortune. In 1940, Martha was forced by the Nazis to sell her villa to the
Reichspost below market value, but even that way she wasn't paid the sales proceeds. After the
Kristallnacht, in November 1938, Martha's daughter, Käthe, left Germany with her daughter and her husband
Kurt Riezler, moving to the
United States. Beginning in 1941, Martha tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to
Switzerland or
Sweden, both neutral countries. The emigration failed due to the high financial demands of the Nazi government, who tried to extort foreign currency from her helpers, the art dealer
Walter Feilchenfeldt and the collector
Oskar Reinhart, at the expense of the widow of a world-famous painter. In March 1942,
Prince Eugen, Duke of Närke tried to obtain an exit permit to the United States for Martha Liebermann;
Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, passed this concern to
Reinhard Heydrich, without taking further action. On 5 March 1943, she was to be deported to
Theresienstadt Ghetto, even aged 85 years old. She was found by a police officer in a coma, having taken an overdose of
Veronal to avoid deportation. She survived five more days, before dying on 10 March 1943, in the Jewish Hospital in Berlin. ==Burial==