Adolf Georg von Maltzan
Adolf Georg Otto "Ago" von Maltzan, Freiherr zu Wartenberg und Penzlin (31 July 1877 Kleinvarchow Mecklenburg, Germany - 23 September 1927 near Schleiz, Thuringia) was a German diplomat.
Life
Maltzan was born in 1877 as the first child of Ulrich von Maltzan and his wife, Adelheit Bierbaum/ He came from the noble family of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern family of Maltzahn. Maltzan spent his childhood on Kleinvarchow and in 1891 - after the death of the grandfather Adolf von Maltzan - in Gross Luckow (now part of Dahmen).
This was followed by a visit to the Katharineum in Lübeck until the Easter school in 1896,[1] and from 1896 onwards the study of law studies at the Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and the Silesian Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Breslau. In 1896 he became a member of the Corps Borussia Bonn.[2] After completing his studies and the military service, Maltzan entered the Diplomatic Service of the German Reich in 1906.
There he was first employed as Legation Secretary in Rio de Janeiro (1907), Kristiania (1909), St. Petersburg (1911) and Peking (1912). Among other things, he spent his diplomatic examinations (1908) and took over his "Heimatposten" at the Foreign Office in Berlin, the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and the Prussian Embassy in Stuttgart. In 1912, finally, the promotion to the legation council followed.
During the First World War, Maltzan served as a representative of the German Foreign Office from 1917 onwards, and from December 1917 onwards he worked in The Hague.
In 1919/1920, Maltzan, as Reichskommissar for the East, was responsible for the newly created Baltic countries of Estonia and Latvia, where he organized the withdrawal of German troops there, and at the same time the protection of East Prussia. Following this, Maltzan became a ministerial director since 1921 and undersecretary since 1922, head of the Russian Department of the German Foreign Office. As such, Maltzan was instrumental in the conclusion of the Treaty of Rapallo between Germany and Soviet Russia (from the end of 1922 Soviet Union) signed on 16 April 1922. His friend, Werner von Rheinbaben, later described him as "the soul of German Ostpolitik," the "best horse in the stable of the German diplomatic service," and said that Maltzan had "defined the orientation of German Russia policy until 1933." Other Maltzanians, as politicians, who "put everything, all relations, tradition, and even the interests of Germany under an irresistible caricature back behind his personal interest."[3]
In 1924 (handing over the credentials on March 12, 1925), Maltzan was Ambassador to Washington, D.C.
During a home stay in 1927 Maltzan died, when his plane crashed on the way from Munich to Berlin over the Thuringian Schleiz. His body was buried on the parental estate in Grand Luckow.
References
Sources
- Winfried Baumgart (1987), "Maltzan, Adolf Georg Otto Freiherr von, Freiherr zu Wartenberg u. Penzlin", Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) (in German), 15, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, pp. 743–744; (full text online)
- Niels Joeres: Der Architekt von Rapallo. Der deutsche Diplomat Ago von Maltzan im Kaiserreich und in der frühen Weimarer Republik. Dissertation, Heidelberg 2006, (PDF online).
- Niels Joeres: Forschungsbericht Rapallo - Zeitgeschichte einer Kontroverse. In: Francia. Ser. 3, Bd. 34, 2007, ZDB-ID 0937-7751, S. 103–126.
- This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the German Wikipedia.