Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen

Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen KCMG (born March 26, 1886 - March 21, 1971 ) was a British diplomat .

Life

Knatchbull-Hugessen was the second son of Reverend Reginald Bridges Knatchbull-Hugessen and his second wife Rachel Mary, née Montgomery. He studied at Eton College and Balliol College , Oxford , where he was friends with Anthony Eden . In 1907 he completed his training with a Bachelor of Arts . In 1908 he joined the Foreign Service.

In October 1909 he was appointed attaché in Constantinople . During the First World War he was employed by the Contraband Department . In January 1919, Knatchbull-Hugessen was promoted to first-class embassy secretary and sent to Versailles for the Paris Peace Conference . In 1920 he was accepted as a Companion in the Order of St. Michael and St. George . As a result, he was employed at the embassies in The Hague , followed by Paris . From 1926 to 1930 he worked in the British Embassy in Brussels .

From 1930 to 1934 Knatchbull-Hugessen served as the British Crown's Envoy Extraordinary to the Baltic States, based in Riga . From 1934 to 1936 he was British envoy to the court of the Shah of Persia in Tehran. From 1936 he was British ambassador to China. During this time he was promoted to Knight Commander of the aforementioned order. The following year, he was seriously injured when a Japanese fighter plane shot at his car.

After a long convalescence he was sent to Ankara as British ambassador from 1939 . At the suggestion of Miklós Horthy, Miklós Kállay sent Legation Secretary László Veress to Istanbul . After negotiations with Burton Y. Berry , László Veress and Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen agreed a separate armistice between Hungary and the Western Allies. From there, his Albanian valet Elyesa Bazna forwarded photographs of documents to the Reich Security Main Office from late October 1943 to early April 1944 . The news of the armistice with Hungary launched in this way triggered Operation Margaret I in March 1944 , whereby mainly SS units occupied Hungary and were spared the battles of Operation Overlord . From 1944 until his retirement in 1947, Knatchbull-Hugessen acted as British ambassador to Belgium.

Knatchbull-Hugessen was married to Mary Gilmour. The couple had two daughters and a son.

Publications

• Diplomat in Peace and War (1949)
• Kentish Family (1960)

Web links

• Newspaper article about Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen in the press kit of the 20th century of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ London Gazette . No. 31712, HMSO, London, December 30, 1919, p. 5 ( PDF , accessed October 23, 2010, English).
2. ↑ London Gazette . No. 33724, HMSO, London, June 9, 1931, p. 3758 ( PDF , accessed October 23, 2010, English).
3. ↑ London Gazette . No. 34331, HMSO, London, October 13, 1936, p. 6536 ( PDF , accessed October 23, 2010, English).
4. ^ Bradford A. Lee: Britain and the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1939 . Stanford University Press, Stanford 1973, ISBN 0-8047-0799-5 , pp. 40-41.
5. ↑ London Gazette . No. 34607, HMSO, London, March 14, 1939, p. 1763 ( PDF , accessed October 23, 2010, English).
6. ↑ No state action . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 1948 ( online ).
7. ↑ Wolfgang Schumann, Gerhart Hass: Germany in the Second World War Volume 5. Academy of Sciences of the GDR. Central Institute for History, Military History Institute of the German Democratic Republic, Institute for Marxism-Leninism at the Central Committee of the SED. Pahl-Rugenstein, 1974, p. 559
8. ↑ Jonathan Steinberg, Avraham Barkai: The Deutsche Bank and its gold transactions during the Second World War
9. ↑ London Gazette . No. 36811, HMSO, London, November 24, 1944, p. 5393 ( PDF , accessed October 23, 2010, English).

predecessor	Office	successor
Joseph Addison	British envoy to the Baltic States 1930–1934	Edmund Monson
Reginald Hoare	British ambassador to Tehran 1934–1936	Horace James Seymour
Alexander Cadogan	British envoy to China 1936–1937	Archibald Clark Kerr, 1st Baron Inverchapel
Percy Loraine, 12th Baronet	British envoy in Ankara 1939–1944	David Victor Kelly
	British envoy in Brussels 1944–1947	George William Rendel
	British envoy to Luxembourg 1944–1947	George William Rendel