Diego von Bergen

Dr. Carl-Ludwig Diego von Bergen (1872 – October 7, 1944) was the ambassador to the Holy See from the Kingdom of Prussia (1915–1918), the Weimar Republic (1920–1933), and Nazi Germany (1933–1943), most notably during the negotiation of the Reichskonkordat and during the Second World War.

From 1930 to 1943, by virtue of seniority, Bergen was also the doyen of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See. This office entitled him to speak at the funeral of Pope Pius XI in 1939, when he infamously urged the cardinals to elect a new pope who would work with the fascist governments of Europe to build "a new world upon the ruins of a past that in many things has no longer any reason to exist". Bergen was recalled in 1943, aged more than seventy, which was a good deal more than the mandatory retirement age for German diplomats, and was replaced by Ernst von Weizsäcker.

Diego von Bergen was born in Siam in 1872, the son of a German diplomat, , and a Spanish mother, Isabel Maria de las Mercedes Alcala. The young Bergen attended a Roman Catholic school in Roßleben and then the University of Berlin. He first entered the German diplomatic corps in 1895 as legation secretary at Peking, remaining in China during the Boxer Rebellion. He also held diplomatic posts in Brussels and Madrid before going to Rome. According to a New York Times obituary, "a man of considerable culture, a fluent linguist, he was said to have never been in sympathy with the Weimar Republic and to have been an early adherent to the National Socialist Regime."

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