Hans Georg von Mackensen (26 January 1883 – 28 September 1947) was a German diplomat who served at different stages as "State Secretary" at the Foreign Ministry, German ambassador in Rome and a SS Group Leader ("Gruppenführer").
Early life Mackensen came from an established military family. His father, August von Mackensen (1849–1945), was eventually, in 1915, promoted to the rank of Field Marshal: Even after 1918, August von Mackensen would remain an unapologetic high-profile monarchist traditionalist who in 1941, despite his advanced age and the difficulties of travelling in war time, made his way to Doorn (near Utrecht) where, dressed in his full military uniform from the imperial years, he attended the funeral of the former German emperor. Hans Georg von Mackensen's mother, born Dorothea von Horn (1854–1905), also came from a family of minor aristocrats.
His younger brother, Eberhard von Mackensen became an army general. As a child Hans Georg grew up as a companion to Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, one of the emperor's younger sons. The two men became life-long friends.
Career In 1902, he entered the army as a trainee officer in the 1st Foot Guards regiment. He continued to serve after completing his training in 1907. However, in 1911 he withdrew from active service, becoming a reserve officer, in order to complete his study of Jurisprudence, after which he entered the Prussian legal service.
War years and entry to the diplomatic service During the First World War Mackensen returned to the army, serving between 1914 and 1917 as adjutant to his friend Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, and ending up with the rank of "Hauptmann" (Captain). After the war ended, he took a job with the Prussian Ministry of Justice, staying until May 1919, when he accepted an invitation to switch to the Foreign Ministry. In 1923 he was posted as a diplomatic envoy ("Gesandtschaftsrat II. Klasse") to the embassy in Rome between 1923 and 1926, which was followed by a posting to Brussels between 1926 and 1931. During his time in Rome, he served under his future father-in-law, Baron Konstantin von Neurath, who served as the German ambassador to Italy between 1921 and 1930.
Career progression as a diplomat Close family links on various sides to the aristocratic-military elite from the days of empire continued to help Mackensen's career progression in the diplomatic service of the German Republic. The Auswärtiges Amt was dominated by the aristocracy during the Kaiserreich. Aristocrats made up 1% of the German population, but comprised 69% of all German diplomats during the Imperial era. Despite the November revolution of 1918, the Auswärtiges Amt continued to dominated by an aristocratic network which ensured that noblemen continued to be disproportionately overrepresented in the German diplomatic corps right up to 1945. The orders given in 1919 to stop discriminating against commoners were widely ignored by the Auswärtiges Amt, who continued to favor aristocrats in terms of both recruitment and promotion. Commoners serving in Auswärtiges Amt were always regarded as "outsiders".
Despite his relative inexperience and youth, in 1929 he was given temporary charge over the German diplomatic mission to Tirana, at what was an exceptionally critical time for the developing relationship between Albania's ambitious new king and the rest of Europe. In July 1931, a couple of months after republican government replaced the Spanish monarchy, Mackensen was transferred again, to be appointed "first diplomat councillor" (Botschaftsrat) at the embassy in Madrid.
Régime change Following months of political deadlock, everything changed in January 1933 when the Hitler government, spotting a power vacuum, filled it: they lost no time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship. There are no indications that Hans Georg von Mackensen had taken much interest in the party politics of the German Republic up to this point. Nevertheless, in May 1933 he signed up as a member of the National Socialist ("Nazi") Party. In September 1933 his transfer to Budapest was announced, and in December he took up a posting as the new government's "first councillor" (Botschaftsrat) in the Hungarian capital. Ambassador-level diplomatic relations having at this stage not been established with former component states of the Austro-Hungarian empire, that made him Germany's senior "permanent diplomatic representative" in Budapest.
State Secretary Four years later Mackensen was recalled to Berlin where, on 16 April 1937, he took over as State Secretary at the Foreign Ministry. The appointment had been announced less than a month earlier, on 24 March 1937. He thereby became the senior non-politician at the Foreign Ministry. It was a position that had been vacant since the death the previous summer of the former incumbent, Bernhard von Bülow, possibly from natural causes. As State Secretary Mackensen's political boss was the German Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, who also happened to be his father-in-law.
On 8 July 1937, the Second Sino-Japanese war started with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. The war brought long-standing tensions between Neurath and Joachim von Ribbentrop to a boil. Ribbentrop, besides being the German ambassador in London, also headed the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, a sort of rival foreign office that competed with the Auswärtiges Amt. Neurath and Mackensen favored continuing the policy started under the Weimar republic of supporting the Kuomintang regime via arms sales, a military mission to train the National Revolutionary Army and industrial sales in exchange for China selling Germany certain strategical materials at below market prices. Ribbentrop for reasons that remain unclear had a violent hatred of the Chinese and a corresponding ardent admiration for the Japanese.
Ribbentrop was very close to the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, General Hiroshi Ōshima, and once the Sino-Japanese war started lobbied Adolf Hitler very strongly to withdraw the German military mission from China and end the arms sales to the Chinese. By contrast, both Neurath and Mackensen favored China over Japan, arguing for keeping the military mission in China and for continuing arms sales.
Ribbentrop had initially been rather vague about why he favored Japan over China, giving as his reasons merely that it was better to be with the "strong" (i.e. Japan) rather than the "weak" (i.e. China). However, by 1937, hurt by various social humiliations he suffered as ambassador in London, Ribbentrop had become a raging Anglophobe, which fitted in well with the increasing tendency towards an anti-British foreign policy. Ribbentrop started to play his trump card for a pro-Japanese foreign policy, arguing that China barely had a navy while Japan had the strongest navy in Asia, which led him to the conclusion that Japan was the better ally for the Reich in Asia.
The question of recognizing the Japanese sham state of Manchukuo was a litmus test for whether a state preferred closer relations with China vs. closer relations with Japan. Ribbentrop became increasingly vocal as 1937 went on in demanding that Germany recognise Manchukuo over the opposition of Neurath and Mackensen.
In August 1937 and again in September, the Austrian Foreign Minister Guido Schmidt visited Berlin, where Mackensen bullied him during both visits, demanding that the Austrian government allow the Austrian Nazis a greater role in the political process. Neurath had been in post since 1932, but on 4 February 1938 he was removed from office and replaced at short notice by Joachim von Ribbentrop, reflecting a determination on the part of Adolf Hitler to take a more "personally hands-on" approach to Germany's foreign policy.
On 20 February 1938, Hitler gave a speech before the Reichstag where he announced that Germany had just extended diplomatic recognition to Manchukuo. Despite his earlier opposition to recognizing Manchukuo, Mackensen supported this step, even through he knew that it would ruin Germany's relations with China. In one of his last acts as State Secretary, Mackensen had to accept the note of protest against the recognition of Manchukuo from Cheng Tien-fong, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin. Mackensen treated Cheng with much rudeness during the meeting, saying that China was an insignificant nation, and the Reich did not care about Chinese opinions. Ribbentrop was unwilling to accept the son-in-law of Neurath as State Secretary, and appointed Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker as the new State Secretary.
Ambassador in Rome As part of the ensuing reshuffle at the top of the diplomatic service, Hans Georg von Mackensen was appointed Ambassador to Rome in succession to Ulrich von Hassell, who had been recalled at short notice in the aftermath of the so-called Blomberg–Fritsch affair. Neurath believed that he had been fired as foreign minister at least in part because of his disagreements with Ribbentrop over East Asia. Mackensen was also closely associated with the pro-Chinese foreign policy advocated by Neurath, and Ribbentrop saw him as an obstacle to the pro-Japanese foreign policy he wanted to pursue. Macksensen might no longer be State Secretary, but the Rome embassy was, in the context of the diplomatic developments of the time, an exceptionally important posting. There were suggestions within and beyond the diplomatic establishment that his unusually rapid rise through the ranks of the German diplomatic service had been both the result of his inherited family connections and a direct reflection of Mackensen's uncritical and unhesitating execution of every order he received from his superiors, combined with an apparent reluctance to feed any ideas of his own back to Berlin.
Another individual who declined to be dazzled by Mackensen's diplomatic cachet was the French ambassador to Berlin, André François-Poncet: "J’ai visité l’Auswärtiges Amt; j’ai vu le père, et j’ai vu le fils, mais je n’ai pas vu le Saint Esprit". The American historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote that Mackensen was an "unimaginative diplomat" whose rise was due entirely to being an aristocrat with connections to powerful people. Mackensen had excellent relations with the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano with whom he was very close; by contrast his relations with Ciano's father-in-law, Benito Mussolini were not as close. The situation with Mackensen in Rome inverted the situation when Hassell was the German ambassador as Hassell had poor relations with Count Ciano and very good relations with Mussolini. Mackensen was a very committed supporter of the Nazi regime, and as ambassador in Rome he worked tirelessly to strengthen the Axis. Mussolini had appointed his son-in-law Ciano Foreign Minister in 1936 in order to overcome the reluctance of the professional diplomats of the Palazzo Chigi towards closer ties with Germany, thus providing a bond with Ciano who was also keen to strengthen the Axis alliance.