Bernstorff, Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht, Countvon b. November II, 1862; London, England d. October 6, 1939; Geneva, Switzerland
Imperial Germany’s ambassador to the United States during World War I.
After the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, Johann Heinrich von Bern- storff found himself at the center of a diplomatic firestorm in the ensuing months.
His profound knowledge of the political landscape in the United States and its economic potential, together with his conviction that President Woodrow Wilson was genuinely trying to keep his country out of the European war, led to Bern- storff’s desperate but unsuccessful campaign to avert a German American break. Although a skilled and eloquent diplomat and a popular person in Washington’s most influential circles, he fought from a position of weakness. His own government in Berlin regularly ignored his advice, believing him to be too liberal and too pro-Western. His urgent warnings not to underestimate U.S. determination were considered to be exaggerations by his superiors in the Foreign Office. When the naval and military high commands in Berlin decided to resume submarine warfare at the end of 1916, there was nothing left Bern- storff could do to prevent U.S. entry into the war against Germany in 1917.Bernstorff was born in London, where his father Albrecht was ambassador to the Court of St. James. Growing up in Britain, he became bilingual. When his father died in 1873, his mother returned to the family estate in northern Germany. When a family quarrel with the influential
Bismarcks kept him from pursuing a diplomatic career in his father’s footsteps, he spent eight years in the military as a lieutenant, which introduced him to the social circles at the court and to Berlin salons. In 1887, he married Jeanne Luckemeyer, a German American. A year later, the restored esteem of Herbert von Bismarck made it possible for him to be stationed with the embassy in Constantinople. In 1890, Bernstorff was sent to the Foreign Office in Berlin in order to take the two- year course prior to the diplomatic examination, which he passed in February 1892.
Soon after, he was assigned to the embassy in Belgrade, where he served as legation secretary; in the summer of 1894, he was transferred to Dresden, where he remained as legation secretary until the end of 1895. Bernstorff spent the next one-and-a-half years as second secretary at the embassy in St. Petersburg. In October 1897, he was named legation secretary at the Prussian legation in Munich, where he stayed for five years.In the autumn of 1902, Bernstorff received his first noteworthy post when he was appointed counselor of the embassy in London. In Ambassador Paul Count von Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht, he found a kindred spirit who believed that it was in Germany’s best interest to pursue a conciliatory policy toward its western neighbors. This view was not shared by circles around the Berlin court and the navy, but it lead to Bernstorff’s being supported by liberal- minded politicians and economists back home. In the spring of 1906, Bernstorff was named consul general in Cairo. When Hermann Speck Baron von Sternburg, the German ambassador in Washington, died in 1908, Bernstorff was appointed his successor. His ceaseless efforts between 1914 and 1917 to avoid a break between the two countries, supported by President Wilson yet so thoroughly sabotaged by Berlin, destroyed his energetic optimism and left him humiliated and broken. He was forced to return to Germany in February 1917, when diplomatic relations between the two countries were severed due to the resumed submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram, which had been sent to Mexico by the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann. The telegram’s content revealed that Germany had offered the Mexican government the lost territories of the American southwest in return for an alliance in the event of an American declaration of war. The public reacted with indignation and outrage, and on April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany.
In the last year of the war, Bernstorff accepted the post of ambassador to Constantinople.
In October 1918, when it could no longer be denied that Germany was losing the war, he was asked to succeed Paul von Hintze as foreign secretary, but he refused the offer. In anticipation of negotiations with President Wilson, Bernstorff was ordered back to Berlin in order to share his intimate knowledge of the United States. He was appointed head of the preparatory Commission for the Peace Negotiations, and advocated acceptance of the unpopular Treaty of Versailles. After the war, Bernstorff became an unfaltering supporter of the Weimar Republic and helped to organize the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (German Democratic Party) in 1919. He represented his party in the Reichstag from 1921 to 1928.On the international level, Bernstorff cofounded the Deutsche Liga ftir den Volkerbund (German Association for the League of Nations), and served as its president for ten years. In addition, he was elected president of the World Federation of Associations for the League of Nations. From 1926 to 1933, he headed the German delegation to the Preparatory Conference for Disarmament in Geneva. As a diplomat, Bernstorff was convinced that only a policy based on mutual respect and international negotiations would prevent future wars. When several of his friends were assassinated by radicals despising the republic in the 1920s, Bernstorff began to fear for his life, as he was soon viewed as a traitor because of his ideals. After the National Socialist German Worker’s Party’s (NSDAP) electoral success in 1933, he went into exile in Geneva in order to escape persecution.
Katja Wuestenbecker
See also Sternburg, Hermann Speck von;
Treaty of Versailles; World War I
References and Further Reading
Bernstorff, Johann H. von. My Three Years in America. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920.
Doerries, Reinhard R. Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German American Relations, 1908—1917. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.
Tinnemann, Ethel Mary. “Count Johann von Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908-1817.” PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1960.