Early years Foundation The was established in 1870 to form the
foreign policy of the
North German Confederation, and from 1871 of the
German Empire. The Foreign Office was originally led by a
state secretary (therefore not called a ministry), while the
Chancellor, who usually also held the office of
Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, remained in charge of foreign affairs.
Bismarck In the first years of the German nation-state under
Otto von Bismarck, the Foreign Office on
Wilhelmstrasse No. 76 next to the
Reich Chancellery had two departments: one for political affairs and the other for economic, legal and consular matters. Bismarck in order to maintain his control of the appointed his son
Herbert von Bismarck as State Secretary. That Bismarck appointed his son as State Secretary reflected his determination to be his own foreign minister, and his need for an utterly loyal man to run the when he was not around. Bismarck would not accept opinions contrary to his own, and only those diplomats who were devoted to him rose to high rank. Bismarck greatly valued accurate information, and as such diplomats tended to report what they believed to be the truth back to Berlin.
An exclusive club Right from the start, the was very socially exclusive. To join, one needed a university degree, preferably in
jurisprudence and needed to prove that one had a considerable private income. In 1880, a candidate had to prove that he had a private income of at least 6,000
marks/annum in order to join; by 1900, the requirement was 10,000 marks/annum and by 1912, a candidate needed at least 15,000 marks/annum to join. This requirement explains why so many German diplomats married richer women because without the wealth of their wives they would never had been able to join the ''''. The income requirement to enter the AA was only dropped in 1918. Aristocrats were very much overrepresented in the ''
. During the Imperial period, 69% of the 548 men who served in the were noblemen, and every single ambassador during the German Reich was an aristocrat. The most important department by far was the Political Department which between 1871 and 1918 was 61% aristocratic; middle-class men tended to serve in the less important Legal, Trade and Colonial Departments. In the 19th century, it was believed that only aristocrats had the proper social standing and graces to correctly represent the Reich'' abroad as ambassadors, which explains why no commoner was ever appointed ambassador during the Imperial era. Additionally, during the entire duration of the "old" from 1871 to 1945, Catholics were underrepresented in the '''', comprising between 15 and 20% of the AA's personnel. The was largely a
Protestant institution with Protestant candidates favored over Catholic candidates when it came to recruitment. Even more underrepresented were the Jews. During the Imperial period from 1871 to 1918, the had only three Jewish members, plus four Jews who had converted to Lutheranism in order to improve their career prospects. If Jews were not formally excluded, Jewish candidates were rarely accepted because of a climate of snobbish
anti-Semitism, where Jews were considered to be too pushy, vulgar and lacking in social graces to be diplomats. There were also meritocratic elements within the AA. Besides for the income requirement, to enter the AA during the Imperial period, only candidates with the best grades at university and who knew two foreign languages were considered, and to join one had to pass what was widely considered to be one of the toughest diplomatic entrance exams in the world.
Wilhelm II The reign of Emperor Wilhelm II was from 1888 to 1918. After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890, another department for colonial policy was established, spun off as the separate
Reichskolonialamt in 1907. In the years preceding
World War I, the was responsible for the country's foreign policy under Emperor
Wilhelm II, and played a key role in the
Reich's pursuit of
Weltpolitik (World Politics), under which Germany sought to become the world's dominant power. The was split into three factions competing against one another, namely one faction of men loyal to Bismarck, another faction loyal to
Friedrich von Holstein, and yet another faction led by
Prince Philipp von Eulenburg and Prince
Bernhard von Bülow, who would later become chancellor. This constant plotting and scheming between these factions weakened the execution of German foreign policy. As a whole, the Wilhelmstrasse was never entirely in charge of foreign policy in the
German Empire, but was instead just one out of several agencies, albeit a very important one that made and executed foreign policy. In the years 1904–1907, the
Reich attempted to form an alliance with the United States on the basis of the supposedly shared fear of the "
Yellow Peril" with Wilhelm writing to the American President
Theodore Roosevelt a series of letters telling him that Germany and the United States must join forces to stop the "yellow peril", especially Japan from conquering the world. It took the diplomats a long time to tell Wilhelm that Roosevelt was a
Japanophile who was not impressed with Wilhelm's call for an alliance based on anti-Asian racism.
Ottomans and the Armenians A nation with whom the was much concerned during the Imperial period was the
Ottoman Empire, especially during the
Armenian genocide. In 1915, the German ambassador to the
Sublime Porte, Baron
Hans von Wangenheim told the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte,
Henry Morgenthau Sr.: "I do not blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians... They are entirely justified". On September 28, 1915 Count
Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the ambassador in Washington, D.C., stated to American journalists that reports of a systematic campaign of extermination against the Armenian minority in the Ottoman Empire were all "pure inventions", that these reports were all the work of British propaganda and no such campaign of extermination was taking place.
Post-imperial period In 1919, the Foreign Office was reorganised as the and a modern structure was established. It was now under the authority of a
foreign minister, though still called
Amt for traditional reasons. In 1922, the Foreign Minister
Walther Rathenau was assassinated by members of the
Organisation Consul, which reviled him both as a Jew and a supposed contributor to "creeping communism" for having negotiated the
Treaty of Rapallo with
Soviet Russia. The most notable head of the Foreign Office during the
Weimar Republic was
Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, who strived for a reconciliation with the
French Third Republic, which earned him—together with
Aristide Briand—the 1926
Nobel Peace Prize. In an important sign of changed emphasis within the '
, in July 1930 , the State Secretary (the number #2 man in the ') and Stresemann's right-hand man was fired and replaced with the "crudely nationalist" Prince (who is not to be confused with his uncle, Chancellor
Bernhard von Bülow). The replacement of Schubert with Bülow marked the ascendency of the more nationalistic fraction within the who favored a more confrontational foreign policy with regards to France. In March 1933, Baron
Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron, the Ambassador to the United States, resigned on the grounds that he could not in good conscience serve the Nazi government; he was the only member of the entire who resigned in protest at the Nazi regime. Officially, the men of the were supposed to be non-political, but in practice the diplomats formed a "quite exclusive group" with extremely conservative views and values. For these men, unconditional loyalty to the state was the highest possible value, and though the majority of the diplomats were not ideological National Socialists, they served the Nazi regime loyally until the very end. The dominance of the traditional "insiders" at the can be seen that every State Secretary during the Nazi era was a professional diplomat. The State Secretaries of Nazi Germany were Prince Bernhard von Bülow (State Secretary 1930–36), Count Hans Georg von Mackensen (State Secretary 1936–1938 and ambassador to Italy 1938–1942), Baron
Ernst von Weizsäcker (State Secretary 1938–1943 and ambassador to the Holy See 1943–1945) and Baron
Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland (State Secretary 1943–1945). The overlap in goals between the professional diplomats and the Nazis were well illustrated by the memo on what should be the foreign policy of the Hitler government written by Bülow in March 1933 calling for Germany to recover the borders of 1914 and all of the lost colonies, annexation of Austria, and German domination of Eastern Europe. During the Neurath years (1932–1938), there were very few "outsiders" allowed into the '
. Aside from Ribbentrop, who served as variously as Commissioner of Disarmament (1934–35), Extraordinary Ambassador-at-Large (1935–36), and Ambassador to Great Britain (1936–1938), the most notable of the "outsiders" were Franz von Papen (Ambassador to Austria 1934–1938 and to Turkey 1939–1944), Hans Luther (Ambassador to the United States 1933–1937), Colonel Hermann Kriebel (Consul in Shanghai 1934–1939), and General Wilhelm Faupel (Ambassador to Spain 1936–37). Most diplomats were not believers in National Socialism, but during Nazi rule, many diplomats such as Neurath himself joined the NSDAP and/or the SS as an opportunistic way of improving their career prospects; such self-interested careerism was rampant amongst the German civil service in the Nazi period. Those diplomats involved in the attempts to overthrow Hitler such as Count Ulrich von Hassell, Adam von Trott zu Solz, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, Richard Kuenzer, Hans Bernd von Haeften, and Edmund Brücklmeir comprised a small minority of the '. The German historian wrote that for those diplomats who chose to become involved in
Widerstand, given that they were steeped in Prussian traditions where loyalty to the state was the highest virtue, it required "extraordinary strength of character" for them to go against everything that they had been taught to believe in.
Post-WWII Founding of the Federal Republic After Germany's defeat in May 1945, the country was occupied and the German state was abolished by the Allies. The country was administered as four zones controlled respectively by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. In August 1949, a German government was reestablished in the western zones, the Federal Republic of Germany, which in its first years had very limited powers. In October 1949, the German Democratic Republic was founded in what had been the Soviet zone. Whereas
Georg Dertinger had already been appointed the first minister of foreign affairs of
East Germany in 1949, due to the Allied
occupation statute the of
West Germany was not reestablished until 15 March 1951.
Adenauer Chancellor
Konrad Adenauer took office as the first Foreign Minister in
Bonn until he was succeeded by
Heinrich von Brentano in 1955. By and large, the men who had served in the new were the same men who had served in the old ''
. In a Bundestag'' debate on 23 October 1952, Adenauer admitted that 66% of the diplomats of the had belonged to the NSDAP, but justified their employment as: "I could not build up a Foreign Office without relying upon such skilled men". Upon
Willy Brandt's taking office as Foreign Minister in the
Grand coalition under
Kurt Georg Kiesinger starting in 1966, the office was usually connected with the position of the
Vice-Chancellor. From 1974 until 1992—with a short pause in 1982—
Hans-Dietrich Genscher served as Foreign Minister and continued to champion Brandt's
Ostpolitik while also playing a crucial role in the preparation of
German reunification.
Berlin In 2000 the Foreign Office returned to Berlin where it took up quarters in the
former Reichsbank building, which from 1959 to 1990 had served as the seat of the Central Committee of the
Socialist Unity Party of Germany and was enlarged by a newly built annex. The former ministry in Bonn was retained as a secondary seat. The Foreign Office has always stressed its continuity and traditions going back to 1870. ==Further historiography and analysis==