With a name that conjures up every First World War cliché of the “beastly Boche”, Baron Hermann von Richthofen was bound to run into the old prejudices about his country when he arrived in London as German ambassador in 1989.
Indeed, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the sudden prospect of German reunification and Margaret Thatcher’s increasing hostility to Germany’s growing power in Europe, much of the British press had a field day invoking the spectre of Germany as a dangerous new superpower.
Von Richthofen, instructed by Helmut Kohl, the chancellor, to improve the frosty Anglo-German relations, did what he could to change the image and urged the British press to drop the old tropes. The breakthrough, he hoped, at last came in February 1991 when he was invited to meet the editors of The Sun.
Not for the first time, a German diplomat underestimated the power of popular memory in Britain: the headline the next morning proclaimed: “The Hun meets The Sun”. There was a large picture of Manfred von Richthofen, the famous “Red Baron” and First World War flying ace, with the caption underneath: “Iron Cross”. Beside him was a picture of his great-nephew, the ambassador, with the caption: “I am cross”.
A polished and suave diplomat, he took it in his stride. But behind his elegance he had a tough time getting his message through to the British government.
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, reunification suddenly became a possibility. The four allied powers that occupied Germany in 1945 and retained responsibility for its postwar policies responded by setting up the “Two Plus Four” negotiations. These involved the foreign ministers of Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union, plus the two from East and West Germany.
The initiative, largely the brainchild of Douglas Hurd, then foreign secretary, was remarkably successful. There was swift progress. Thatcher, however, became more and more agitated. Like all British prime ministers, she had paid lip service to reunification. The closer it came to reality, however, the more she disliked the notion, saying in private that it was a dangerous step.
Changing her mind proved a difficult job, and one in which von Richthofen and his opposite number in Bonn, Sir Christopher Mallaby, played a vital and co-ordinated role. Mallaby, who became a firm friend of von Richthofen, sent the memorandums and briefing notes to Thatcher from Germany, with the constant reassurance that Britain’s interests would not be harmed. Von Richthofen did the same from London. He, too, had a tough job to convince his boss how best to play his hand. He told Kohl that, for Britain, it was essential that Germany recognised the Oder-Neisse line as the final eastern boundary of a reunited Germany with Poland. Kohl wanted to separate the issues, and deal with a final acceptance of boundaries after reunification. Von Richthofen’s advice prevailed.
“I recall from conversations with Margaret Thatcher that her greatest fear was that of a kind of dominance of a united Germany in the process of European integration,” von Richthofen said in 2000. “She found that a united Germany would be hard to control. She would have liked to stop at the Single European Act and not go on with European integration in which a united Germany would have too high a political and economic weight.”
No one, he said, had foreseen that the Wall would come down or the immediate demands for freedom and reunification. “The only things that politicians can do in such a situation is to put the change in the right channels. That is what we did.” He said Germany was well prepared for the talks, and did its homework on the rights and responsibilities of the four allied powers with respect to Germany and Berlin.
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But, as he recalled at the seminar, relations between Kohl and Thatcher were “difficult”. And after reunification they became worse, rather than easier. Thatcher was afraid things were going too fast, and she felt Germany was pushing Britain into a corner over European integration.
For an ambassador, however, a tough assignment is an enjoyable challenge. Von Richthofen was temperamentally suited to London. He spoke perfect English. Unlike the swashbuckling image of his famous forebear, he was low-key, reserved and personally modest. “He was not interested in personal success or prominence,” one friend recalled. “He was good at his job because he was careful and correct.”
In London he was respected rather than popular. His grasp of British politics and attitudes was honed by spending a lot of time talking to MPs on all sides. It was the orthodox approach to diplomacy. Rather than throwing lavish receptions or cultivating a personal image, von Richthofen knew that his job was to keep the chancellor in Bonn briefed up to the minute on how the British political establishment was reacting to the momentous events in East Germany and in Berlin.
His own life echoed some of Germany’s turbulent history. One of three children, he was born in Breslau, in Silesia, now part of Poland, in 1933. At the age of 12 he moved west with his family, months before the end of the war when thousands of Germans fled the Russian advance. His mother exaggerated a mild case of his asthma to persuade the Nazi authorities to allow the family to move to Bavaria. As with many aristocratic families who had lost all their possessions, the postwar years meant grinding poverty for the von Richthofens. But in 1955 he was able to enrol as a law student in the prestigious universities of Munich, Heidelberg and Bonn, and then continued with postgraduate studies in Cologne until 1963.
He joined the German diplomatic service that same year. Von Richthofen began his diplomatic career in 1964 as an attaché in Boston. His meeting with Henry Kissinger and introduction to intellectuals in America shaped his thinking. Even more formative was the harrowing lesson he learnt from the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, which he recorded in Boston in preparation for the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt.
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His next posting was to Saigon from 1966, followed by Jakarta in 1968. Asia was an early love. He married Christa, Countess of Schwerin, at the start of his career and they called one of their daughters Sita, a name recalling their days in Asia. She is now a psychiatrist in Hamburg. Another daughter, Esther, works in international relations at the University of Göttingen, and a son Peter is a banker in Singapore.
After Asia and a spell in the foreign ministry’s legal department in Bonn, von Richthofen took up what for the German Federal Republic was one of the most sensitive of all diplomatic postings, at the West German “permanent representation”, or embassy, in East Berlin. Given the tense relations between the two countries and the constant attempt by the German Democratic Republic to undermine West Germany and spy on its affairs, Bonn’s diplomats in East Berlin had to tread a very careful line in reaching out to the GDR to further the policy of “Ostpolitik”.
After London, arguably the high point of his career, he was posted to Brussels as Germany’s permanent representative to Nato. During his five years there, from 1993 to 1998, the alliance was preoccupied with forging a new role for itself as a regional security alliance, rather than a defensive pact against the Soviet Union. It was not an altogether successful attempt, and Nato, once the linchpin of Germany’s strong ties to America, was less and less a popular cause. Germans, like most other Nato members, wanted to enjoy the fruits of peace and the end of communism in Europe.
Von Richthofen continued to take a close interest in Britain, however. He became chairman of the German-English Society, and also played a leading role in the Königswinter conferences, which brought together leading British and German politicians and academics once a year. In retirement he became increasingly upset by the growing hostility in Britain to the EU. He wanted, as he often said in speeches, Europe to have “a strong, united voice in the modern world”. Brexit, in his eyes, was a disaster — a rejection, he told friends, of everything he had worked for in Britain.
Apart from golf, which he played enthusiastically, von Richthofen did not have many outside interests. But he took great pride in his family and its long history as a respected part of German society. He could never shake off the Red Baron tag but was neither proud nor ashamed of his great-uncle’s fame and achievements in the air.
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His success in London was partly because of his hard work and determination to make reunification happen, but he knew that an ambassador’s reputation often rests on small details and incidents. He once received a request from Wales from William Rae, then 68 and a British former prisoner of war, who wanted a new fountain pen. Shot down over the North Sea near Heligoland, he had been taken into captivity and forced to hand over his writing utensils in exchange for a receipt. The receipt had never subsequently been redeemed. He sent the receipt to the ambassador to “test the German sense of humour”. Von Richthofen immediately responded with the gift of a new pen. He passed the test, Rae concluded.
Baron Hermann von Richthofen, former German ambassador to Britain, was born on November 20, 1933. He died after a short illness on July 17, 2021, aged 87