Alfred von Oberndorff
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Alfred Maria Fortunatus Franziskus Caesar von Oberndorff (9 December 1870 – 16 March 1963), also Count Oberndorff, was a German diplomat.
He headed missions in Norway and Bulgaria and in 1918 was one of the signatories of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War.
Oberndorff was born in Edingen-Neckarhausen, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the son of Carl Gustav Adolph Maria Fortunatus Philipp Gabriel von Oberndorff, a landowner and count of the Holy Roman Empire, and his wife Marie Therese Henriette Franziska Eleonora Charlotte von Varicourt-Albini.[1] His father was a chamberlain at the Imperial and Royal Habsburg court in Vienna.[2]
The young Oberndorff was educated in law at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, Munich, and Freiburg. He passed the first state law examination in the spring of 1892 and graduated Doctor Iuris at Heidelberg on 9 August 1892. He entered into pupillage at the district court in Heidelberg, working also at the courts in Wiesloch and Pforzheim, and passed the second state law examination in the spring of 1895.[1]
Career
In December 1895, Oberndorff was admitted to the Imperial foreign service, and after a period of training joined the active diplomatic service of the German Empire in February 1897.[1]
In 1900, Oberndorff was appointed as second secretary at the German embassy in Madrid[1] and in 1904 held the same position at the embassy to the Court of St James's.[3] In 1905 he was posted as first secretary in Brussels and in 1907 returned to Madrid, with the rank of Counsellor. In 1910 he was posted to Vienna. Two years later, he got his first posting as a head of mission, serving from 1912 to 1916 as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Royal Norwegian Court in Kristiania, where he was when the First World War broke out. From 1916 to 1918 he headed the German mission in Sofia, Bulgaria, a significant promotion, as Bulgaria was one of the Central Powers and a German war ally.[1][4]
Oberndorff next returned to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin as head of foreign policy. In that capacity, he attended the negotiations for the Armistice of Compiègne, with Matthias Erzberger, who was minister without portfolio, Major General Detlof von Winterfeldt, representative of the Supreme Army Command to the Chancellor of Germany, Captain Ernst Vanselow, of the Imperial German Navy, and two translators. On 11 November 1918, the four men were the German signatories to the Armistice.[1]
In 1920 and 1921 Oberndorff was the first German chargé d'affaires in Warsaw after the Second Polish Republic had emerged as an independent state from the ruins of the Russian Empire. He was recalled to Berlin in February 1921.[1]
Oberndorff was a founding member of the Franco-German Study Commission, which in the 1920s advocated rapprochement between Germany and France. He continued to serve in the foreign ministry of the Weimar Republic and remained there for a few months after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler. He retired in July 1933, after the Enabling Act of 1933 and the Night of the Long Knives.[1]
Oberndorff died in Heidelberg in March 1963 and is buried in the family plot in Neckarhausen.[1]
