George Ogilvie-Forbes

George Arthur Drostan Ogilvie-Forbes ( December 6, 1891 - July 10, 1954 ) was a British diplomat .

Life and activity

Early life

Ogilvie-Forbes was the son of the Scottish officer JCM Ogilvie-Forbes and his wife Christine, nee Vaughan. After attending Beaumont School, he studied at the University of Bonn and at the New College of the University of Oxford . At the latest when the First World War broke out, Ogilvie-Forbes joined the British Army, where he reached the rank of captain with the Scottish Horse Yeomen.

During the First World War, Ogilvie-Forbes was used in Gallipoli , Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, he temporarily served as the adjutant of the British Commander-in-Chief in this theater of war, General FS Maude. In 1918 he was finally assigned to the General Staff of the War Ministry.

Diplomatic career

In 1919 Ogilvie-Forbes joined the British diplomatic service. From 1919 to 1920 it was first used at the British embassies in Stockholm and Copenhagen . From 1920 to 1923 he was second secretary at the British Mission in Helsinki . From 1923 to 1925 he then worked in the Foreign Office .

In 1925 Ogilvie-Forbes was appointed 1st Secretary at the British Mission in Belgrade . In 1927 he took over the same position at the British legation in Mexico City . In 1932 he was transferred to the British Mission in Baghdad as Councilor of Legation . From 1930 to 1932, Ogilvie-Forbes served as the representative of the British government in the Vatican with the rank of Chargé d'Affaires (de facto envoy). From 1932 to 1935 he was used as a Legation Councilor at the British Mission in Baghdad.

From 1935 to 1937 Ogilvie-Forbes was employed at the British representations in Madrid and Valencia . Since 1937 he has held the rank of "Sir".

After a job at the British Embassy in Madrid, he moved to the British Embassy in Berlin as first secretary in early 1937 as the successor to Envoy Newton . As 1st secretary he was the permanent deputy of the ambassador and thus the second man in the British diplomatic mission in the German capital. After Sir Eric Phipps was recalled as British Ambassador to Berlin in the spring of 1937, Ogilvie-Forbes served as British Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin from March 19 to April 24, 1937 - that is, he assumed the duties of ambassador on an interim basis - before the new ambassador Neville Henderson took up his post in April. After Henderson was diagnosed with cancer in 1938 and was in London for treatment from October 1938 to February 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes was again the ambassador for a longer period of time.

During his activity in Berlin, Ogilvie-Forbes prepared, among other things, the report of his embassy on the anti-Jewish riots in Germany of November 1938 ( Reichskristallnacht ), where he warned - without receiving any response from his government - that the situation of the Jews in the German domination is not only a German, but a world problem, which, if one does not address it, has the potential to end in a terrible catastrophe ("contains the seeds of a terrible vengeance").

In the British Foreign Service, Ogilvie-Forbes was considered the protégé of Lord Vansittart, the Secretary of State at the Foreign Office. His views on the German state and the Nazi system were in sharp contrast to those of his superior in Berlin, Henderson, with whom he was in a tense relationship: in the reports he wrote to the British Foreign Minister Halifax in his capacity as deputy ambassador sent in London, Ogilvie-Forbes warned urgently of the danger posed by the German regime. Although he was of the opinion that Germany had been inflicted injustice with the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and that his claims to the areas of Czechoslovakia populated by German minorities were in principle justified, he considered it a mistake to make any political concessions to the German Reich. because he was convinced that the German government would ultimately use giving in to such "legitimate" claims to create a basis for the more effective enforcement of non-legitimate further claims: In this sense, he referred in a report that he wrote on 6 December 1938 to Halifax sent on the 14th chapter of Hitler's programmatic political confession Mein Kampf , in which Hitler sets out in detail the foreign policy program that he intended to carry out once he came to power: First of all: 1.) massively upgrade, then 2.) through the Versailles he treaty to rejoin territories separated from his territorial body as well as Austria and the Sudeten territories to the Reich territory and then 3.) on this basis to annex extensive territories in Eastern Europe that were not traditionally settled by Germans and to incorporate them into the territorial association of the German Reich. Since he had completed the first two points, according to Ogilvie-Forbes, he had no doubt that Hitler would soon move on to the third point: How exactly this would take place is unclear. But it is a certainty that the goals of the National Socialists would be on a level that would take on "enormous dimensions" ( grandiose scale ) and that their "final goals" were unlimited ("there is no limit to their ultimate ambitions". On the basis of the information he gathered in the political circles of the capital, he held an attempt by the German rulers to establish a Ukraine under German hegemony, independent of Russia, or that Germany would initially turn against the West in order to "liquidate" France and England as opponents before they could draw level with Germany in terms of armaments in order to then implement its ambitious goals in the east.

After the British declaration of war on Germany on September 3, 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes left the country. He was used briefly in the Foreign Office in London and then transferred to the British legation in Oslo .

In Germany, Ogilvie-Forbes was meanwhile classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state and in the spring of 1940 was placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Security Main Office , a directory of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the German Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1940 Ogilvie-Forbes was sent to Cuba as the British Government's envoy . He stayed in this post until 1944. In that year he moved to Venezuela as British ambassador . In 1948 he retired.

In 1950 Ogilvie-Forbes became a member of the Scottish National Representation (Commissioner of the 4th National Assembly of Scotland for the Covenant).

family

Ogilvie-Forbes had been married to Clare Hunter since 1921, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

literature

• Bruce Strang: Two Unequal Tempers. Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, Sir Neville Henderson and British Foreign Policy, 1938-1939 . In: Diplomacy & Statecraft , Vol. 94, pp. 107-137.
• Rudi Strauch: Sir Neville Henderson , 1959.
• Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes. A Varied Diplomatic Career . In: The Times, July 12, 1954 (obituary)
• The Catholic Who's Who , Vol. 35, 1952, p. 157.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Abraham Ascher: Was Hitler a Riddle? Western Democracies and National Socialism , 2012, p. 75.
2. ^ Entry on Ogilvie-Forbes on the special wanted list GB (reproduction of the list on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London)

predecessor	Office	successor
Donald St. Clair Gainer	British Ambassador to Venezuela 1944–1948	John Hall Magowan