Name Alexander Dornberg | ||
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Alexander Freiherr von Dornberg zu Hausen (17 March 1901 in Darmstadt – 7 August 1983 in Oberaula-Hausen, Hesse) was a German jurist, diplomat and SS officer. He was head of the Protocol Department of the Foreign Office from 1938 to 1945.
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Life and work
He came from the Dornberg family of Hessian nobility. In his youth, Dornberg attended the Reform-Realgymnasium in Kassel. After his Abitur in 1919, Dornberg joined the Freikorps and participated in the violent domestic disputes in Germany after the end of World War I. He then studied jurisprudence at several universities: Heidelberg, Bonn, Munich, Marburg, and Frankfurt. In 1920, he became a member of the Corps Saxo-Borussia Heidelberg, a student organization, and in 1921 the Corps Borussia Bonn. In 1925, he received his doctorate of law.
In 1926, Dornberg was for some months private secretary to German Ambassador Ago von Maltzan and to the Embassy of Germany, Washington, D.C., before he officially joined the diplomatic service in 1927. At the Foreign Office, he was first assigned as attache to Alfred Horstmann. In 1930, he took the diplomatic-consular examination. Subsequently, he was employed as attache at the Germany embassy in Bucharest from 1930 to 1933.
In 1933, Dornberg – who attracted attention by his height of about 6 feet 7 inches (2.01 m) – worked for several months in the Disarmament Department of the Foreign Office, before he worked at the Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia from autumn of 1933 to 1936. After a stopover in the Political Department of the Foreign Office from 1936–37, he became a secretary of legation to the Embassy of Germany in London. There was an intensive collaboration between Dornberg and the then German ambassador to Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, with whom he became friends for the first time.
On 1 January 1934, Dornberg became the regional leader of the NSDAP in Estonia. In 1938, he also joined the SS, in which he reached the honorary rank of SS-Oberfuhrer. In July 1938, Dornberg was appointed as the successor to Vicco von Bulow-Schwante as Chief of the Protocol Department of the Foreign Office. He remained in this post until the collapse of the Nazi regime in 1945. In the fall of 1938, Dornberg received British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain during the negotiations over the Munich Agreement. In August 1939, he accompanied Ribbentrop to Moscow to sign the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
As a diplomat, Dornberg held the title of Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary.
Post-war
After the German surrender, Dornberg was arrested by the Allies and interrogated during the Nuremberg trials as a witness, especially in the Ministries Trial.
Greater public attention was given Dornberg posthumously in 2005: The Protocol Department of the Foreign Office had Dornberg's portrait photograph inserted during all successive terms of department heads since 1920, hanging from the AA in the corridors of Protocol Department on the first floor of the west wing. This led to a dispute about the culture of remembrance of the Foreign Office and aroused the displeasure of the then Foreign Minister Joseph Martin Fischer.