Bismarck was born in
Schönhausen,
Brandenburg. He was the eldest of the three sons of
Herbert von Bismarck, as well as the grandson of the German chancellor
Otto von Bismarck and elder brother of
German Resistance figure
Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schönhausen. Bismarck was six when his father died and he inherited his family estate in
Schönhausen. A lawyer, he joined the
diplomatic service in 1927, serving in
Stockholm (1927–28),
London (1928–1937), with the
Foreign Ministry in Berlin (1937–1940), as
Envoy to
Rome (Kingdom of Italy) (1940–1943), and finally as head of the Italian section of the Foreign Ministry (1943–44). Bismarck was a member of the
DNVP (a
national-conservative party) in the
Weimar Republic, and served as a Member of
Parliament from 1924 to 1928. He joined the
Nazi Party in 1933. In 1935, he became a member of the
Anglo-German Fellowship which aimed to build up friendship between the United Kingdom and Germany.
World War II Whilst stationed in
Rome during the Second World War, Bismarck would pass on German intelligence to the Italian Foreign Office and privately speak ill of the Nazi regime, in particular
Ribbentrop,
Goering, and
Hitler. "The Prince used to tell Italian Foreign Office officials much of what he knew, but, as Ciano discovered, 'he was hellishly afraid of being found out, and implored me in Heaven's name not to pass his confidential information to anyone.' He was convinced of the inevitability of Germany's defeat but did not, unfortunately, mount the big political guns which had so often enabled his grandfather to avert disaster." Of Bismarck and the Nazi alliance with Italy,
King Umberto II said, "The military element is strong in Germany, and even Bismarck who was truly exceptionally intelligent, had to submit to it." In 1942, Bismarck played a role in the disclosure of
Nazi intelligence that allowed
Balkan Jews to be saved. Jews, mostly from
Croatia, had fled to the parts of
Yugoslavia which the Italian army occupied during 1941 and had since that time lived in peace under the protection of the Royal Italian Army. They had run from the unsystematic butchery of the Croatian fascists, the
Ustaši, but by the middle of 1942 they were threatened with the systematic extermination planned for them under the Nazi "new order" in Europe. In August 1942, the German government formally asked the Italian government to hand them over.
Mussolini agreed; a handful of Italian diplomats and generals said no. By refusing the German request and disobeying an explicit order of the Duce, the conspirators set a perilous course which in the end crossed not merely the murderous ambition of Mussolini but that of
Hitler,
Himmler and the
SS. At the start, they had no conclusive evidence of what is now known as "the
final solution", but the
Italian Foreign Ministry had received a broad hint. On 18 August 1942, Prince Bismarck, called on the Marchese
Lanza d'Ajeta at the Italian Foreign Ministry. Bismarck had orders to demand that the Italian government instruct its military authorities "to actuate those measures devised by the Germans and the Croatians for a transfer in mass of the Jews of Croatia to territories in the East". Prince Bismarck let slip the fact that the measures would lead to the "dispersion and elimination" of such Jews. Indeed, in the original text d'Ajeta had recorded the word 'liquidation'. Italy now faced the holocaust squarely. Bismarck himself had whispered the truth to the cabinet chief of
Count Ciano: the Jews were not being transferred to the east to work but to die. Mussolini was perfectly prepared to grant his Nazi ally the bodies of a few thousand
Croatian Jews. In his large hand, he wrote (no objection) across the memorandum. Mussolini apparently did not care what happened to the Jews of Croatia or refused to believe Bismarck's hint. It was that 'order' of Mussolini's that the conspirators decided to disobey. In spite of its clearly visible Red Cross markings on the roof, the Friedrichsruh manor house was destroyed during a
RAF raid in the last days of
World War II, due to the (false) rumor that
Heinrich Himmler was hiding there. After the war, the premises were rebuilt at the behest of Bismarck.
Post-war career In the 1950s, Bismarck considered becoming a member of the
FDP (the
liberal party), which offered him a nomination for Parliament, but eventually joined the
Christian-conservative CDU instead. He served as a Member of
Parliament for the constituency of (Duchy of Lauenburg; his grandfather held the title Duke of Lauenburg) from 1953 to 1965, and as a member of the foreign affairs committee. He was also a member of the
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and served as its vice president from 1959 to 1960 and from 1961 to 1966. He was also chairman of the
Deutsche Parlamentarische Gesellschaft from 1957 to 1961. He received the
Great Cross of Merit in 1965. He died in West Germany. == Personal life ==