Background
Herbert von Dirksen was born on 2 April 1882 in Berlin.
Herbert von Dirksen was born on 2 April 1882 in Berlin.
The young von Dirksen, a pupil of the Konig Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin, had originally studied law, passing his examination as a junior barrister in 1905.
After a round-the-world tour he served as an assistant judge in 1910. During World War I he was on active service at the front, and entered the diplomatic service. Attached to various missions in Eastern Europe - he was at Kiev (1918-19), charge d’affaires in Warsaw- (1920-1) and Consul-General at Danzig (1923-5) - von Dirksen was made head of the East European division of the Foreign Office from 1925 to 1928. In the same year he succeeded Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau as Ambassador to Moscow and continued the policy of Russo-German co-operation, designed to obliterate the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty.
During von Dirksen's five years in Moscow', there was open economic and secret military co-operation. German technicians and experts helped in modernizing Soviet industry, but the hoped-for economic and political understanding fell through. With the rise of the Nazis to power, von Dirksen was transferred to Tokyo in 1933, where he remained until 6 February 1938, assuring Hitler that Japan was ‘a reliable partner for the anti-Comintern’,
On 7 April 1938 von Dirksen succeeded von Ribbentrop as Ambassador to London, a post he held until the outbreak of World War II, when he retired from active service in the Foreign Office. During the war he lived mainly at his country estate in Grdditzberg, Silesia.
Von Dirksen, who was a foreign policy adviser to Silesian Germans expelled from their former homeland, also demanded a more activist diplomacy to recover Silesia from the Poles. His published memoirs were translated into English under the title, Moscow, Tokyo, London (1951).
In June 1947 he was cleared by a de-Nazification court which regarded his membership of the Nazi Party as a mere formality and declined to see him as a supporter of the regime. In 1954, shortly before his death, von Dirksen publicly criticized Konrad Adenauer’s foreign policy as too pro-western, advocating more contacts and dealings with the East German regime to bring about an eventual reunification.
Dirksen although the Foreign Office had favoured an alliance with China. On his way to Japan he wrote his Zwischenbilanz (Intermediate Balance-sheet), private memoirs which reveal him as an egocentric, ambitious and bitter man, full of resentment at the insufficient appreciation of his services shown by Hitler and von Ribbentrop, whom he despised. These memoirs were also outspokenly anti-semitic, a trait which disappeared in the published version, where he claimed to have felt nothing but shame at the anti-Jewish pogrom of November 1938.
On his father's side he was descended from generations of Prussian civil servants, while his mother came from a family of Cologne bankers. A typical product of the Wilhelminian era, von Dirksen boasted in his memoirs (printed for private circulation in 1935) that he was 'proud of my purely Germanic blood' just as his father had been proud of his ennoblement in 1887 ‘before a whole batch of more or less Jew-tainted families was ennobled by the liberalistic Emperor Frederick III'.