Leopold von Hoesch

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leopold von Hoesch (left), 1932

Leopold von Hoesch (born June 10, 1881 in Dresden , † April 10, 1936 in London ) was a German diplomat and ambassador.

Life

Leopold von Hoesch came from the German industrial family Hoesch and was the son of the industrialist Hugo von Hoesch (1850-1916), who was raised to hereditary nobility in 1912, and Mathilde Friederike von Schoeller (1857-1913), daughter of the mining industrialist Gustav Adolph von Schoeller .

From 1894 onwards, Leopold Hoesch received his schooling primarily in private lessons. At Easter 1900 he passed the Abitur at the Vitzthumschen Gymnasium in Dresden. He then studied at the Universities of Geneva, Heidelberg, Munich and Leipzig law . In 1902 he became a member of the Corps Saxo-Borussia in Heidelberg . He completed his studies in February 1905 with the first legal exam and began in July as a trainee lawyer in the royal Saxon justice service in Pirna. During his studies he did his military service from October 1900 with the Saxon guard riders. This training period as an officer ended at the same time as he graduated, and he was promoted to lieutenant on April 22, 1905. At the beginning of 1907 he was seconded to the Dresdner Bank in Berlin by the Saxon judicial service. From here, in April, he was ordered to work in the bank's branch in London. On August 23, 1907, he began a diplomatic career in the Foreign Office. Initially he was employed as an attaché at the German embassy in Beijing until May 21, 1908. However, in order to concentrate on his doctorate, he was dismissed at his own request. In the following year he submitted his dissertation at the University of Leipzig with the title "The honorary payment according to the applicable law of the exchange regulations". On June 11, 1909, he was promoted to Dr. iur. PhD .

Thereupon Leopold Hoesch was called up again to the Foreign Office, he continued his diplomatic career and was appointed as attaché at the German embassy in Paris from July 14, 1909. After a year there was another change from March 1910 to the management of the second secretary at the German embassy in Madrid. At the end of the year he returned to Germany and from January 1911 was assigned to the IA (Politics) Department at the Foreign Office in Berlin. Here he also passed his diplomatic examination in February 1912. With this important professional qualification in his pocket, his next path took him from March 1912 as legation secretary to the German embassy in London. This assignment was short-lived because in September he was called back to the Foreign Office, Department IA, for temporary employment. After this assignment he returned to the German Embassy in London in October 1912 as 3rd Secretary. At the beginning of the First World War he was called up for military service and fought at the front from August 1914 to early 1915, most recently with the rank of first lieutenant . In order to be able to work on a special mission as required, he was put into temporary retirement. This extraordinary mission led him from March 1915 to Sofia, where he was acting as head of the embassy from January to March 1916. From here he moved to Constantinople where his temporary employment lasted from June 1916 to September 1917. From August 1917 he was again employed in the Foreign Office in Department IA (Politics) and was a member of the delegation at the peace negotiations in Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest . In April of the following year he was given the status of a legation councilor and was then sent to the embassy in Kristianina, now Oslo , for a new temporary job from August 1918 . Up until November 1919, he was the acting head of the legation here several times.

During the first weeks of the Weimar Republic, Leopold von Hoesch was posted to Madrid in October 1919. After he was sworn in on the Weimar Constitution on November 7, 1919, he took over the German embassy in Madrid on December 6, 1919 as chargé d'affaires . From the middle of 1920 he was temporarily employed as a "flying" secretary of the legation and from January 31, 1921 as counselor in Paris . During the time of the occupation of the Ruhr , from November 1923, von Hoesch was temporarily appointed head of the German embassy in Paris. This was done not least at the instigation of the French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré that Hoesch was able to hand over the credentials to the German government as ambassador on February 17, 1924 . In particular in the preliminary negotiations (preliminary contract negotiations) on the Locarno treaty , he distinguished himself as a mediator between Reich Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann and the French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand . After Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath (1873-1956) was appointed Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs on June 2, 1932, Leopold von Hoesch succeeded him as Ambassador in London on November 2, 1932 . From the beginning of 1933 Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg (1886–1974) became a military attaché at the embassy in London and a close confidante of the ambassador. Among the German heads of mission in the interwar period, von Hoesch was considered the most capable diplomat . After 1933, Joachim von Ribbentrop (1893–1946) quickly became one of his personal opponents . The main reason for this conflict lay in the completely different political attitudes and character behavior of both people. The fact then, when von Ribbentrop in the post of "extraordinary ambassador on a special mission" interfered significantly in the political processes in London and in June 1935, under the abusive exclusion of Hoesch, had negotiated the German-British naval agreement, intensified the contraverse several times.

Leopold von Hoesch had good relations with the British royal family and with Alfred Cooper, Minister of War . This was just one of the reasons why he gradually gained the trust of Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring . King Edward VIII characterized him as a " good diplomatic representative of the German Reich and a bad representative of the Third Reich ". Hoesch's warnings against a German invasion of the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland , through which the Locarno Treaty of 1925, which was regarded as the diplomat's life's work , went unheeded by Hitler. The impression he conveyed to Berlin on March 21, 1936 , that “Europe only just got past a fire”, also turned out to be exaggerated in view of the reactions of the Western powers .

Giro the dog - his grave is outside the former German embassy in London .

Leopold von Hoesch died of a heart attack on April 10, 1936 . As a show of honor, his remains were transported to Germany on a British warship. Shortly after his death, speculation circulated in the British tabloids about an alleged suicide of the ambassador or about his murder by the Gestapo . In August 1936, Joachim von Ribbentrop took over his post as ambassador in London.

Works

  • The honorary payment according to the applicable law of the bill of exchange regulations, Wigand Verlag, Leipzig 1909

literature

  • Amy Buller : Darkness over Germany . Foreword by AD Lindsay . Longmans, Green, London 1943, p. 102f (Chapter XIV: Tribute to an Ambassador )
  • E violin miller; Ambassador von Hoesch and the German-Austrian Customs Union Plan of 1931; in: Historische Zeitschrift, 195, year 1962, issue 3
  • E. Geigenmüller, Ambassador von Hoesch and the eviction question; in: Historische Zeitschrift, 200, year 1965, issue 3
  • Leo Freiherr Geyer von Schweppenburg, Leopold von Hoesch. Ambassador for Peace, private print Bischofsheim in der Rhön, 1974
  • Keiper, Gerhard (edit.): Biographical manual of the German foreign service. Volume 2: G - K : Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005 ISBN 3-506-71841-X , pp. 331f.
  • Ekkhart Verschau:  Leopold von Hoesch. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 367 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Commemoration of the Federal Foreign Office on the 30th anniversary of the death of Ambassador Leopold von Hoesch, Bonn 1966

Web links

Commons : Leopold von Hoesch  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1960, 66 , 1107
  2. ↑ Keiper, Gerhard (edit.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service. Volume 2: G - K : Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005 ISBN 3-506-71841-X , pp. 331f.
  3. ↑ Ekkhart Verschau:  Leopold von Hoesch. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 367 f. ( Digitized version ).
  4. ↑ Keiper, Gerhard (edit.): Biographical Handbook of the German Foreign Service. Volume 2: G - K : Gerhard Keiper, Martin Kröger. Schöningh, Paderborn 2005 ISBN 3-506-71841-X , pp. 331f.
  5. ^ Leo Freiherr Geyer von Schweppenburg, Leopold von Hoesch. Ambassador for Peace, private print Bischofsheim in der Rhön, 1974
  6. ↑ Ekkhart Verschau:  Leopold von Hoesch. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 9, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1972, ISBN 3-428-00190-7 , p. 367 f. ( Digitized version ).
personal data
SURNAME Hoesch, Leopold von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Dresden
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1936
Place of death London