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 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]
On 2 January 1904, in Paris, Oberndorff married Marguerite de Stuers, daughter of Alphonse Lambert de Stuers, the Dutch ambassador to France, and of his former wife Margaret Laura Carey, originally of New York City,[5] a granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor Sr. After a divorce from Stuers, she married secondly Elliott Zborowski, was the mother of Louis Zborowski, and owned the Higham Park estate in England.[6]
The Oberndorffs had three children, Maria Teresa (born 1904 in London), Karl Alfons (born 1906 in Brussels), and Elisabeth von Oberndorff (born 1917 in Munich). Soon after the armistice of 1918, Countess Oberndorff took her children to Switzerland and then to Holland. She had inherited valuable commercial property in New York and challenged its seizure by the Office of the Alien Property Custodian.[7][5]
Oberndorff's son used the name Charles-Alphonse von Oberndorff and in 1928 married Jacqueline de Sauvan d'Aramon, a daughter of the Comte d'Aramon and his English wife Henrietta Bennet Bell. He was a painter and lived at Domaine d'Orio, Hendaye, France. They had five daughters and a son, Johannes Maria Frederik Fortunatus von Oberndorff, born in 1943. Their daughter Liduina Maria Fortunata (born 1933) married Sir Peter Petrie, 5th Baronet, a British diplomat. Charles-Alphonse von Oberndorff died in 1998 at The Hague.[8]
Rita Marie Louise Jacqueline Charlotte Fortunata von Oberndorff (born 1930), one of the daughters of Oberndorff's son Charles-Alphonse, in 1955 married firstly Raja Narendra Singh Ju Deo, son of H. H. Raja Mahipal Singh Ju Deo, 7th Raja of Sarila, at Dehradun, and secondly in 1975 Michel Labéguerie, a Basque nationalist politician and singer.[9] Following the death of her second husband, she succeeded him as Mayor of Cambo-les-Bains between 1980 and 1989 and was also President of the French Red Cross, living until 2017.[10]
Notes
123456789Dirk Hecht, "Diplomatie, Krieg und Waffenstillstand. Das Leben des Diplomaten Alfred Graf von Oberndorff" in Jahrbuch der Hambach-Gesellschaft 26 (2019), pp. 175–192
↑Auguste Rey, Le château de la Chevrette et Mme d'Epinay (1904), p. 265: "on célébrait le mariage du comte Alfred von Oberndorff, second secrétaire de l'ambassade d'Allemagne à Londres, avec Mlle de Stuers, fille du ministre plénipotentiaire des Pays-Bas à Paris."
↑Maria Keipert, ed. Biographisches Handbuch des deutschen Auswärtigen Dienstes 1871–1945, Vol. 2 (G–K) (Auswärtigen Amt, Historischer Dienst, 2005, ISBN3-506-71841-X)
12"Statement of Mr. Edward A. Thurston, Fall River, Mass." in Alien Property Custodian Act: Hearing Before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce of the House of Representatives, Sixty-sixth Congress, Second Session, on H.R. 12651 and H.R. 12884. March 23, April 2, April 27, 1920 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1920), pp. 23–29
↑"Count Alfred von Oberndorff", in Melville Henry Massue Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, The Titled Nobility of Europe: An International Peerage, Or "Who's Who," of the Sovereigns, Princes, and Nobles of Europe (Burke's Peerage, 1914), p. 1091
