Herbert von Dirksen

Herbert von Dirksen

Eduard Willy Kurt Herbert Dirksen , from 1887 von Dirksen (born April 2, 1882 in Berlin ; † December 19, 1955 in Munich ) was landlord (until 1945) on Gröditzberg near Adelsdorf in the district of Goldberg , Lower Silesia , German ambassador and author .

family

He came from a West Prussian family with Claes Dirksen (1605 *) in Gdansk (1681), the regular series starts, and was the son of the landowner and Imperial German ambassador Willibald von Dirksen close (1852-1928), Lord of Gröditzberg (now Grodziec Zagrodno , formerly Adelsdorf ), and his first wife Ella Schnitzler (1860–1916). His father and his family had been raised to the Prussian hereditary nobility in 1887 .

Vietnitz manor

Dirksen married Hilda Freiin von Oelsen on June 25, 1910 in Berlin (born January 14, 1885 at Gut Vietnitz, Königsberg district , Neumark in Brandenburg ; † September 12, 1942 at Gröditzberg estate, Goldberg-Haynau district, Lower Silesia province ), their daughter of the landowner Alfred Freiherr von Oelsen, landlord of Vietnitz and others, and Margarethe von Saldern .

Life

Studies and Prussian administration

After initial home schooling, Dirksen graduated from high school in 1900 at the Königlichen Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Berlin; He then studied law in Heidelberg and Berlin from 1900 to 1903 and obtained his doctorate in law. iur. in Rostock . During his studies he became a member of the Corps Saxo-Borussia Heidelberg . After one year of military service with the 3rd Guard Uhlan Regiment in Potsdam, he did his legal clerkship in the Prussian civil service from 1904 to 1910, interrupted by a longer stay in London in 1905 and a one-year trip around the world in 1907/08. After the 2nd state examination in law, he married Hilda von Oelsen in 1910.

From 1910 to 1914 Dirksen was a government assessor at the district office in Bonn. During this time his lifelong foreign policy and economic interest arose. He expressed this in the form of several historical-political articles, the focus of which was German imperialism , which he advocated. With the outbreak of the First World War he was drafted and served in the supply and in various military staffs. In 1915 he was given a position in the civil administration in Belgium, where he was responsible, among other things, for the deportation of Belgian workers to the German Reich. Due to his war experiences, he no longer viewed war as an effective means of enforcing politics and criticized German foreign policy and diplomacy in several newspaper articles under the pseudonym Darius.

Beginnings in the Foreign Office

Despite his criticism, Dirksen took on a temporary job in 1917 as a consultant in the English aid agency at the German legation in The Hague and even promoted his acceptance into the German diplomatic service. In mid-1918 he was taken over by the Foreign Office and sent to the Imperial Embassy in Kiev as head of the Press and Propaganda Department . In Ukraine , which was occupied by German troops, he was supposed to help consolidate the country as an independent state as part of the German war policy. With the end of the war and the advance of Soviet troops into Kiev, the embassy was closed; In 1919 he returned to Berlin.

Dirksen actually wanted to withdraw from the diplomatic service with the end of the empire and the constitution of democracy, as he was not convinced of this form of government. Nevertheless, he did not ask for his resignation , because ultimately, as a loyal civil servant, he felt obliged to the state, regardless of the form of government. At the same time he was involved in the German National People's Party (DNVP), which he joined soon after it was founded. In 1919 he became head of the Baltic sub-division in the Foreign Office. The central task of his work was the orderly and rapid repatriation of German troops from the Baltic States .

With the resumption of diplomatic relations with Poland in 1920 Dirksen was sent to Warsaw to act as chargé d'affaires until an ambassador moved up. When he resigned after only four months in office and the Foreign Office did not want to send a successor because of the difficult German-Polish relations, Dirksen became charge of charge again. He was not involved in the international preparations for the division of Upper Silesia .

Ordered back to the Foreign Office in Berlin, Dirksen, as head of the Poland department, was confronted with the question of Upper Silesia from 1921 onwards. Like a large part of the German population, he felt the eastern cessions as a humiliation of the German nation and demanded a revision. Nevertheless, he had to prepare the German-Polish negotiations for it.

Appointed Consul General in Gdansk in 1923 , Dirksen was only able to influence political and economic decisions to a limited extent due to the status of the Free City, which is why he switched to cultural policy, with the help of which he wanted to maintain the spiritual unity of Empire and city.

In the course of restructuring in the Foreign Office, Dirksen was given the position of conductor in the so-called Eastern Department with the areas of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and East Asia in 1925. While he was only marginally involved in the negotiations on the Locarno Treaties as the secretary of the German delegation, he was of greater importance in the preparations for the economic and consular treaty and the Berlin treaty with the Soviet Union . Here he was partially entrusted with conducting negotiations in mid-1925.

In 1928 Dirksen became Erich Wallroth's successor as head of the Eastern Department in the Foreign Office. He felt that the work at the head office involved too much bureaucratic routine work. In 1928, the dispute between President Paul von Hindenburg and Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann over the occupation of the ambassador's post in Moscow turned out to be a happy coincidence . After long arguments they agreed on Herbert von Dirksen as a compromise candidate.

Ambassador to Moscow, Tokyo and London

Under difficult conditions, Dirksen tried in vain as ambassador in Moscow to bring about an improvement in German-Soviet relations by supporting political relations with economic and military ones. Due to several diplomatic mistakes, he gave the impression of incompetence in Germany right from the start of his time as ambassador. His fundamental misjudgments before and during the Soviet-Chinese border war of 1929 and the situation of the Reich Germans in the Soviet Union gave rise to this in 1929. In the years that followed, Dirksen did not succeed in sustainably improving German-Soviet relations. Political provocations on both sides, the Soviet forced collectivizations , Moscow's non-aggression pact policy and the Reichstag fire were reasons for this. In the fall of 1933, the Foreign Office was finally transferred to the German Embassy in Tokyo .

When Dirksen arrived in Tokyo at the end of 1933, he immediately announced a visit to Manchukuos, which was under Japanese control . Since this would have amounted to undesirable recognition by Germany, the Foreign Office forbade him. However, he did not feel bound by this directive, as he believed he was acting on behalf of Adolf Hitler , who had instructed him to improve German-Japanese relations . Despite Dirksen's intensive efforts to improve bilateral relations, he was not included in the negotiations on the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936 . This was not because of Dirksen's personal or professional inadequacies, but was an expression of Hitler's distrust of his diplomats . That is why the negotiations took place without the involvement of the Foreign Office. In the Sino-Japanese conflict in 1937, after a long period of hesitation, he spoke out in favor of German mediation, which, however, failed in early 1938. After five years in East Asia, he was recalled from Tokyo at his own request, solely for health reasons.

On the terrace of the motorway service station at Chiemsee (from left) v. Dirksen, Neville Chamberlain and Ribbentrop .

Dirksen remained a member of the DNVP until the party was dissolved in 1933. Dirksen did not join the NSDAP until the summer of 1936 (membership number 3.811.159), but his admission was delayed until March 1937. He never became a staunch National Socialist.

On his return trip to Germany Dirksen received an offer from Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to take on a new diplomatic mission. Although he still had the intention of ending his professional career at that time, he became ambassador to London in 1938 . His ongoing efforts to improve British-German relations failed, as did his efforts to preserve peace in Europe. The fact that he was unsuccessful is also due to Ribbentrop's habit of summoning his ambassadors to Berlin for long and frequent consultations. As a result, Dirksen's presence in London was limited to a total of a few months. In addition, Hitler conducted his foreign policy independently of the Foreign Office, so that Dirksen's assessment was of no importance to him and therefore no influence was possible.

Second World War, denazification and post-war period

With the beginning of the Second World War, Dirksen's active time as a diplomat ended. During his reign in Gröditzberg in Silesia , he returned to his journalistic activities. In the German and occupied European areas he also gave historical-political lectures to soldiers and party comrades, in which he justified the war and Hitler's policy in general.

From Silesia Dirksen was detained by a special command of the Wehrmacht on the express order of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop . Presumably, files from the estate and private archives were left behind and fell into the hands of the Soviet troops (see Soviet publication from 1949: Dirksens archive). The files were later moved to the central archive of the GDR in Potsdam.

Dirksen spent his last years in Bergen / Upper Bavaria , where he had to undergo denazification ; In 1947 the court in Traunstein classified him as exonerated. During this time he worked for the Gehlen Organization , the forerunner of the Federal Intelligence Service . Here he mainly had representative tasks. Until his death he wrote various critical essays on Konrad Adenauer's Ostpolitik and the Silesian problem. After a long and serious illness, Herbert von Dirksen died on December 19, 1955 at the age of 73 in Munich .

Fonts

• Friend country in the east. a book of Nippon in pictures. Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert Verlag, 1943
• Moscow, Tokyo, London. Memories and reflections on 20 years of German foreign policy 1919–1939. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1949.

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 , p. 102f.
• Gerald Mund: Herbert von Dirksen (1882–1955). A German diplomat in the German Empire, Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. A biography. Dissertation. Berlin 2003.
• Gerald Mund: East Asia in the mirror of German diplomacy. The private service correspondence of the diplomat Herbert von Dirksen from 1933 to 1938. Historical communications from the Ranke Society, Supplement 63. Steiner, Stuttgart 2006.
• Carolin Reimers: Dr. Herbert von Dirksen: A German ambassador as a collector of East Asian art. In: East Asian Journal. 1, 2001, pp. 22-32.
• Masako Hiyama: Herbert von Dirksen. In: Bridge Builders. Pioneers of the Japanese-German cultural exchange. iudicium, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89129-539-1 .
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR: The Dirksens Archives (1938–1939). Documents and materials from the prehistory of the Second World War, Volume 2. Moscow 1949.
• Herbert von Dirksen (1882–1955). In: Cologne collector…. 2003, pp. 169-179.

Web links

• Literature by and about Herbert von Dirksen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Newspaper article about Herbert von Dirksen in the 20th century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Literature list in the online catalog of the Berlin State Library
• The Herbert von Dirksen library in the University and City Library of Cologne

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Wolf: The emergence of the BND. Construction, financing, control . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-96289-022-3 , pp. 133-134 .