Herbert von Dirksen

Eduard Willy Kurt Herbert von Dirksen (2 April 1882 – 19 December 1955) was a German diplomat who is best remembered as the last German Ambassador to Britain before World War II.

Dirksen was born to a recently ennobled family. The Dirksen family had been Prussian civil servants for generations, and his father, Willibald, was ennobled by the Emperor Wilhelm I in 1887 and was granted a large estate together with Gröditzberg castle (modern Grodziec castle) in Silesia as a reward for his services to the House of Hohenzollern. Willibald von Dirksen was a conservative nationalist who after retiring held a seat in the Reichstag for the anti-Semitic Reichspartei, and was described as a "fanatical admirer" of Wilhelm II, who visited regularly when he was in his Dutch exile while his mother Viktoria came from a wealthy banking family. His mother was once helpful to Adolf Hitler, which benefited Dirksen's career in Nazi Germany. In his memoirs, Dirksen boosted that he was "proud of my purely Germanic blood" as the Dirksen family had been ennobled in 1887 "before a whole batch of more or less Jew-tainted families were ennobled by the liberalistic Emperor Frederick III" in 1888.

As the Dirksens were parvenu nobility unlike the ancient Junker families, they felt very insecure, and from the age of 5 onward, Herbert was forced to undergo a strict training regime to produce an "exemplary bearing" to allow him to be accepted by the Junkers. Dirsken had wanted to enter the exclusive Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), but his father forced him to enter the Prussian civil service in order to prepare him to manage the family's estate in Silesia. As an university student at Heidelberg, the snobbish Dirksen joined the most exclusive fraternity whose membership were mostly aristocrats, a fact which was a source of considerable pride to him. In 1905, he graduated with a Referendar (junior barrister) legal degree and, in 1907, he went on a tour around the world. After his graduation from university, Dirksen become a reserve officer with the Third Guard Ulan regiment based in Potsdam, which he always noted only accepted men from the aristocracy as officers. After working as assistant judge, in 1910, Dirksen went on a four-month trip to Rhodesia, South Africa and German East Africa, where he was thinking about settling. During World War I, Dirksen served in the German Army as a lieutenant and won the Iron Cross, Second Class. The American historian Carl Schorske described Dirksen as a "correct and proper aristocrat with the right connections", but also a man who was slavishly loyal to those who held power. Entering the Auswärtiges Amt in 1917, Dirksen served in the Hague (1917), Kiev (1918-1919) and in Warsaw (1920-1921).

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