Born in
Moscow, the son of a German businessman, Hilger spent most of his life in
Russia until 1941. After
World War I and the
Russian Civil War, Hilger advocated German
rapprochement with the Soviet Union and helped negotiate closer
economic ties and the
Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In 1941, he warned
Adolf Hitler and German
Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop against invading the Soviet Union but to no effect. After
Operation Barbarossa, Hilger was expelled from Russia and returned to
Berlin, where he served as a deputy to Ribbentrop in the
German Foreign Office. In 1945, Hilger surrendered himself to
allied occupation officials in
Salzburg. In 1953, he published
The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German–Soviet Relations, 1918–1941 with support from the
Russian Research Center of
Harvard University. Having acted as an unofficial envoy of
Konrad Adenauer in Washington, Hilger returned in 1953 to West Germany, where he was a Counselor at the Foreign Office in
Bonn until he retired in 1956. He then received a full pension for continuous civil service from 1923 to 1956. Hilger was awarded the
Federal Cross of Merit in 1957, and he continued to provide informal advice to West German and American officials until his death in 1965. Although Hilger was never prosecuted for
war crimes or atrocities committed under the Third Reich, controversy has surrounded his complicity in the activities of the Foreign Office during the Nazi period and his postwar employment by the US and the West German governments. == References ==