Paul von Hintze was a German naval officer, diplomat, and politician who served as Foreign Minister of Germany in the last stages of World War I, from July to October 1918.
Background
Paul Hintze was born in 1864 in the little town of Schwedt approximately eighty miles northeast of Berlin. The Hintze family was part of the hardworking German middle class of the Prussian country towns. Schwedt only had ten thousand inhabitants but because the city is located on the Oder River it benefited from trade. Paul's father owned a tobacco plant, making cigars of the raw tobacco he imported. He also had a seat in the City Council. The Hintze family was one of the best regarded and wealthiest in town.
Education
Paul attended the humanistic Gymnasium (high school) and graduated with a baccalaureate in 1882. Rather than serving the mandatory year in the military, he joined the navy as an eighteen-year-old. Paul struck his superiors as very smart and very tough. After basic training on the school ship Prinz Adalbert, Hintze sailed the seven seas for the next twelve years, in which he saw the coasts of Africa, the Middle East, North and South America. In 1894 the navy lieutenant (Kapitänleutnant) studied at the Naval Academy at Mürwik, a school for which very few officers had the honor of admission.
Career
He entered the navy in 1882 and attended the Navy Academy in 1894-1896; two years later he served as adjutant to Admiral Otto von Diederichs while the latter shadowed Commodore George Dewey's forces at Manila. Hintze was appointed naval attaché to St. Petersburg in 1903 and his clever, if not always accurate, reports quickly caught the eye of Wilhelm II, who asked the young officer to accompany him to his historic meeting with Tsar Nicholas II at Björkö in 1905. Hintze was promoted captain in 1907, ennobled one year later, and in 1911 retired from the navy in the grade of rear admiral. His career then continued in the foreign service as ambassador to Mexico (1911-1914), to China (1914-1917), and to Norway (1917/1918).
In June 1918, the vain and ambitious Hintze succeeded Richard von Kühlmann as state secretary of the Foreign Office. To the surprise of many, Hintze favored a policy of cooperation with the Bolsheviks, thereby antagonizing General Erich Ludendorff and former Deputy Chancellor Karl Helfferich. Although he favored the Draconian peace of Brest-Litovsk, he counseled against further military operations in Russia, and eventually succeeded in preventing Ludendorff from overturning the Brest-Litovsk peace and imposing even harsher terms on the Bolsheviks. On September 29, 1918, after Wilhelm's military paladins had declared the war to be lost, Hintze persuaded the kaiser to introduce a pseudoparliamentary government. Hintze resigned as state secretary on October 3, but remained at army headquarters as the Foreign Office's representative; in this capacity he, along with Generals Wilhelm Groener and Count von der Schulenburg, advised the monarch on November 1/2 to seek an honorable death at the front at the head of his troops. When Wilhelm rejected the suggestion, Hintze advised exile and helped to prepare the way for the kaiser's flight to the Netherlands.
After the war, Hintze headed the German People s party in Silesia; later he guided the "League of Overseas Germans" as well as the "German Overseas Institute" in Stuttgart. Hintze died in Merano on August 19,1941.
