Günther Bock (diplomat)

Günther Bock (born June 28, 1899 in Krefeld , † May 4, 1968 in Bonn ) was a German diplomat during the National Socialist era and ambassador of the Federal Republic.

Life

After graduating from high school, the son of Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm Bock did military service from 1917 to December 1918 during the First World War . He completed his studies in economics , law, history and art history at the Universities of Münster and Freiburg in March 1922 with a doctorate . Since 1919 he was a member of the Catholic student union AV Zollern Münster . After training at the Consular Academy in Vienna , he joined the Foreign Service of the Weimar Republic in 1923 .

In addition to the headquarters in Berlin, Bock was deployed in various consulates in Leningrad , Thorn, Addis Ababa and Reval . On March 1, 1937, he joined the NSDAP . After the Second World War began , he was transferred to Barcelona at the end of 1939 . From the beginning of 1941 he was at the embassy in Rome under Ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen and, after the Italian surrender, became Counselor in the German representation to the Italian Social Republic under Ambassador Rudolf Rahn . When Rahn was prevented by a car accident, Bock was sent to Benito Mussolini in his place on October 2, 1943 , to negotiate that the unpopular Labor Service Act would not be ordered by the Wehrmacht , but promulgated by the Mussolini government.

After the war he was interned until October 1946 . Nothing is known about its denazification . From 1950 he was secretary of the German-Argentine Chamber of Commerce in Buenos Aires . In September 1952 he was reassigned to the foreign service and from the end of 1954 was envoy and then ambassador to Ciudad Trujillo , the capital of the Dominican Republic . At the end of 1957 he returned to Bonn and still headed the German delegation in the German-Belgian border commission. The deputy head of the cultural department of the Foreign Office was denied him by the HR manager at the time, Josef Löns , because he had not married his wife Nora von Dehn in a Catholic church twenty years earlier, and she had been divorced for the first time. At the end of 1962, Bock was put into temporary retirement.

literature

• Maria Keipert (Red.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service 1871–1945. Published by the Foreign Office, Historical Service. Volume 1: Johannes Hürter : A – F. Schöningh, Paderborn et al. 2000, ISBN 3-506-71840-1

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rahn to Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath , October 10, 1943; In: files on German foreign policy. Ser. E, 1941-1945: Vol. 7, p. 62.
2. ↑ The steadfast goat. In: DER SPIEGEL. 13/1958.