Benno Alexandrowitsch von Siebert

Benno Alexandrowitsch von Siebert (born May 22, 1876 in Saint Petersburg , † April 29, 1926 ) was a Russian diplomat of Baltic German origin. Before the outbreak of World War I, he worked at the Imperial Russian Embassy in London and regularly passed copies of important incoming and outgoing correspondence to the Berlin Foreign Office. This happened over a period of five years, between 1909 and 1914, without Sieberts being exposed.

Life

The von Siebert family originally came from Silesia, from where the great-grandfather moved to the Baltic States at the end of the 18th century. Since 1839 she belonged to the Livonian government aristocracy. The family ties to Germany remained intact over the generations. This resulted in Sieberts Germanophilia, which would later form the central motive for his betrayal of secrets. In 1886 Siebert attended high school in Heidelberg, where he passed the Abitur in 1893. Siebert then returned to Russia to join the Foreign Service there in 1898. After his initial assignment in the Russian Foreign Ministry, he worked abroad via Brussels and Washington to London. Siebert was there from May 1908 as the second secretary of the Russian ambassador Alexander Konstantinowitsch Benckendorff until the outbreak of the First World War.

Espionage activity for the German Reich

From March 1909 there was permanent contact between Siebert and the Foreign Office in Berlin. The flow of information went on for five years without the source being disclosed. By July 1914, around five to six thousand top-secret documents had reached Wilhelmstrasse in this way. The materials transmitted by Siebert included not only the correspondence between the Russian embassy in London and the St. Petersburg headquarters, but also contained reports from the Russian embassy worldwide and information about the meetings of the Russian Committee of Ministers. Sieberts' documents gave German decision-makers a deep insight into the political processes in Russia, and in some cases even the entire Triple Entente .

Later life (1920 to 1926)

With the outbreak of war in 1914 Siebert resigned from the diplomatic service, which ended his espionage activities. From 1917 he acted as a German representative and confidante who passed on information and observations, but also traveled to the Baltic Sea provinces to investigate the mood in the areas occupied by German troops on behalf of Wilhelmstrasse. From 1919 until his death, Siebert devoted himself to researching the question of war guilt on behalf of the Foreign Office .

Works

• Benno Alexandrowitsch von Siebert: Encirclement? From the files of Russian diplomacy , Leipzig 1922.
• Paléologue, Maurice: At the Tsar's court during the world war. Diaries and reflections. With an introduction by Benno von Siebert , Munich 1929.

literature

• Stephen Schröder: "Extended espionage" - Benno von Siebert's secret collaboration with the Foreign Office (1909–1926) , MGZ 64 (2005)
• Stephen Schröder: The Anglo-Russian Naval Convention, Vandenhöck and Ruprecht Verlag (2007)
• Rainer Blasius: The second secretary. A hundred years ago a top spy informed the Reich leadership of the Entente's intentions , FAZ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 2, 2014, p. 8

Individual evidence

1. ↑ cf. on everything: Stephen Schröder: “Extended espionage” - Benno von Siebert's secret collaboration with the Foreign Office (1909–1926), MGZ 64 (2005) pp. 426–427.
2. ↑ ibid: pp. 429-430.
3. ↑ ibid: pp. 431-440.