Hans-Adolf von Moltke

Hans-Adolf von Moltke 1935
German ambassador, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, Polish leader Józef Piłsudski, German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Józef Beck, Polish Foreign minister meeting in Warsaw on June 15, 1934, five months after signing the Polish-German Non-Aggression Pact.

Hans-Adolf Helmuth Ludwig Erdmann Waldemar von Moltke (November 29, 1884 in Oppeln - March 22, 1943 in Madrid) was land owner in Silesia and German Ambassador in Poland during the Weimar Republic and under Hitler up to the fall of Poland.[1]

Life

Moltke studied law and joined the Foreign Service in 1913. During the years of 1920 to 1922, Moltke represented the German Foreign Office at the Allied Commission of the Upper Silesia plebiscite in Oppeln and from 1922 to 1924 at the Joint Commission for Upper Silesia. From 1924 to 1928, he served as Counselor at the Embassy of Constantinople. From 1931 to the German occupation of Poland in 1939 he was ambassador in Warsaw. He then returned to the Foreign Office in Berlin where he head the Archive Commission for the evaluation of captured files. On January 11, 1943, he was nominated ambassador in Madrid where he died two months later.

He was also a land owner of the estates of Wernersdorf and of Klein-Bresa in Silesia.

Since 1904 he had been a member of Corps Saxo-Borussia Heidelberg.

On 1 October 1937 he joined the NSDAP.

The White Book

In 1939, Molkte was made the editor of The White Book, a collection of German diplomatic documents intended to prove the "war guilt" of Poland, where Molkte selectively edited the documents such as exercising his warning to Berlin in a cable he sent in March 1939 warning that Poland would go to war if the Reich sought to alter the status of the Free City of Danzig.[2] For his work in German foreign policy after the outbreak of war, the German Historical Institute has republished a press photo from 1939:

"Alleged War Guilt: The former German Ambassador to Poland, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, demonstrated foreign press representatives archive material from Warsaw as proof "for the debt of Poland at the outbreak of war (Fall 1939). The photo shows the former German Ambassador to Poland, Hans-Adolf von Moltke, at the screening of archive material from Warsaw before foreign press representatives, to "prove" the war guilt of Poland."'

Genealogy

Descended from the old Mecklenburg noble family of Moltke, he was the grandson of the Prussian district administrator Adolph von Moltke (1804-1871), who was a brother of Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke and the son of Royal Prussian Minister of State and Oberpräsident Friedrich von Moltke (1852-1927).

Moltke married Davida Yorck von Wartenberg (September 24, 1900 - September 26, 1989) on June 8, 1926.

The couple had eight children :

  • Monika von Moltke (1927-1948)
  • Maria von Moltke (born 1929)
  • Friedrich von Moltke (born 1931), Bank Manager
  • Heinrich von Moltke (born 1933), Director General for Enterprise Policy at the European Commission
  • Wulf von Moltke (born 1935), Senior Executive Vice President
  • Gebhardt von Moltke (born 1938), among others, German Ambassador in London
  • Angelika Baroness von Hahn (born 1940), professor of Neurology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario
  • Renate von Dobschütz (born 1942), art historian, married to Leonard of Dobschütz.

References

  1. ↑ "Hans-Adolf von Moltke". info4u. Archived from the original on 18 May 2014. Retrieved 18 May 2014.
  2. ↑ Weinberg, Gehard The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany, New York: Enigma, 2010 pages 656-657.
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