Joseph van der Elst

Joseph Van der Elst and Allison Campbell-Roebling on October 26, 1926 in New York, Bettmann Archive.

Joseph Julien Marie Ignace van der Elst (born September 9, 1896 in Brussels , † February 20, 1971 in Oisquercq ) was a Belgian diplomat .

Life

He was the son of Marie Van der Elst Vessio and Léon-Georges-Joseph-Marie-Philomène van der Elst (born January 6, 1856 in Brussels, † May 23, 1933 in Ixelles ). He collected Flemish primitives , wrote in English and became a member of the Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique on January 9, 1965 .

In 1914 he volunteered in the Belgian army , was wounded in Bioul, near Namur , and taken prisoner. His fourth attempt to escape captivity was successful, whereupon he was used in the battle of the Yser and promoted to artillery officer. From 1918 he studied law at the Catholic University of Leuven , where he received his doctorate in law in 1920 . He practiced the profession of barrister in Brussels.

In 1922 he entered the foreign service and from 1923 to 1925 was Belgian High Commissioner for the Allied occupation of the Rhineland in Koblenz, carried out by Belgian and French troops . From 1925 to 1927 he was second class embassy secretary in Washington, DC and married Allison Campbell Roebling with whom he had five children. In 1927 he was embassy secretary in Athens , but in the same year he moved to Vienna , where he was also chargé d'affaires as embassy secretary from 1928 to 1936. From 1936 to 1938 he was chargé d'affaires in Prague .

From the Anschluss of Austria in 1938 to 1940 he was Consul General in Vienna. After the case of Gelb , he traveled via the Soviet Union to the United States, where he became Consul General in New York City in 1941 and Counselor for Economics in Washington DC in 1942. From April 25, 1945 to June 26, 1945 he took part in the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco .

Publications

• The Last Flowering of the Middle Ages, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1944

Individual evidence

1. ^ Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique
2. ^ Who's who: delegates to the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco , 1945

predecessor	Office	successor
Louis de Jonghe d'Ardoye	Belgian chargé d'affaires in Vienna 1928 to 1936	Richard Huybrecht
	Belgian Chargé d'affaires in Prague 1936 to 1938	Jean Cuvelier
André Motte	Belgian envoy in Lisbon from 1947 to 1951	Jacques Delvaux de Fenffe
Geoffroy d'Aspremont Lynden	Belgian envoy in Rome 1953 to 1961	Geoffroy d'Aspremont Lynden