Federal Foreign Office

The Federal Foreign Office is the foreign ministry of the Federal Republic of Germany, a federal agency responsible for both the country's foreign policy and its relationship with the European Union. It is a cabinet-level ministry. Since May 2025, Johann Wadephul has served as Foreign Minister, succeeding Annalena Baerbock. The primary seat of the ministry is at the ' square in the Mitte district, the historic centre of Berlin.
The term Auswärtiges Amt''' was the name of the Foreign Office established in 1870 by the North German Confederation, which then became the German Empire's Foreign Office in 1871. It is still the name of the German foreign ministry today. From 1871 to 1919, the Foreign Office was led by a Foreign Secretary, and since 1919, it has been led by the Foreign Minister of Germany.

History

Early years

Foundation

The Auswärtiges Amt was established in 1870 to form the foreign policy of the North German Confederation, and from 1871 of the German Empire. The Foreign Office was originally led by a state secretary, while the Chancellor, who usually also held the office of Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, remained in charge of foreign affairs.

Bismarck

In the first years of the German nation-state under Otto von Bismarck, the Foreign Office on Wilhelmstrasse No. 76 next to the Reich Chancellery had two departments: one for political affairs and the other for economic, legal and consular matters. After Bismarck's dismissal in 1890, another department for colonial policy was established, spun off as the separate Reichskolonialamt in 1907. Bismarck in order to maintain his control of the Auswärtiges Amt appointed his son Herbert von Bismarck as State Secretary. That Bismarck appointed his son as State Secretary reflected his determination to be his own foreign minister, and his need for an utterly loyal man to run the Auswärtiges Amt when he was not around. Bismarck would not accept opinions contrary to his own, and only those diplomats who were devoted to him rose to high rank. Bismarck greatly valued accurate information, and as such diplomats tended to report what they believed to be the truth back to Berlin.

An exclusive club

Right from the start, the Auswärtiges Amt was very socially exclusive. To join, one needed a university degree, preferably in jurisprudence and needed to prove that one had a considerable private income. In 1880, a candidate had to prove that he had a private income of at least 6,000 marks/annum in order to join; by 1900, the requirement was 10,000 marks/annum and by 1912, a candidate needed at least 15,000 marks/annum to join. This requirement explains why so many German diplomats married richer women because without the wealth of their wives they would never had been able to join the Auswärtiges Amt.
The income requirement to enter the AA was only dropped in 1918. Aristocrats were very much overrepresented in the Auswärtiges Amt. During the Imperial period, 69% of the 548 men who served in the Auswärtiges Amt were noblemen, and every single ambassador during the German Reich was an aristocrat. The most important department by far was the Political Department which between 1871 and 1918 was 61% aristocratic; middle-class men tended to serve in the less important Legal, Trade and Colonial Departments. In the 19th century, it was believed that only aristocrats had the proper social standing and graces to correctly represent the Reich abroad as ambassadors, which explains why no commoner was ever appointed ambassador during the Imperial era.
Additionally, during the entire duration of the "old" Auswärtiges Amt from 1871 to 1945, Catholics were underrepresented in the Auswärtiges Amt, comprising between 15 and 20% of the AA's personnel. The Auswärtiges Amt was largely a Protestant institution with Protestant candidates favored over Catholic candidates when it came to recruitment. Even more underrepresented were the Jews. During the Imperial period from 1871 to 1918, the Auswärtiges Amt had only three Jewish members, plus four Jews who had converted to Lutheranism in order to improve their career prospects. If Jews were not formally excluded, Jewish candidates were rarely accepted because of a climate of snobbish anti-Semitism, where Jews were considered to be too pushy, vulgar and lacking in social graces to be diplomats. There were also meritocratic elements within the AA. Besides for the income requirement, to enter the AA during the Imperial period, only candidates with the best grades at university and who knew two foreign languages were considered, and to join one had to pass what was widely considered to be one of the toughest diplomatic entrance exams in the world.

Wilhelm II

The reign of Emperor Wilhelm II was from 1888 to 1918.
In the years preceding World War I, the Auswärtiges Amt was responsible for the country's foreign policy under Emperor Wilhelm II, and played a key role in the Reich's pursuit of Weltpolitik, under which Germany sought to become the world's dominant power.
The Auswärtiges Amt was split into three factions competing against one another, namely one faction of men loyal to Bismarck, another faction loyal to Friedrich von Holstein, and yet another faction led by Prince Philipp von Eulenburg and Prince Bernhard von Bülow, who would later become chancellor. This constant plotting and scheming between these factions weakened the execution of German foreign policy. As a whole, the Wilhelmstrasse was never entirely in charge of foreign policy in the German Empire, but was instead just one out of several agencies, albeit a very important one that made and executed foreign policy.
In the years 1904–1907, the Reich attempted to form an alliance with the United States on the basis of the supposedly shared fear of the "Yellow Peril" with Wilhelm writing to the American President Theodore Roosevelt a series of letters telling him that Germany and the United States must join forces to stop the "yellow peril", especially Japan from conquering the world. It took the diplomats a long time to tell Wilhelm that Roosevelt was a Japanophile who was not impressed with Wilhelm's call for an alliance based on anti-Asian racism.

Ottomans and the Armenians

A nation with whom the Auswärtiges Amt was much concerned during the Imperial period was the Ottoman Empire, especially during the Armenian genocide. In 1915, the German ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Baron Hans von Wangenheim told the American ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Henry Morgenthau Sr.: "I do not blame the Turks for what they are doing to the Armenians... They are entirely justified". On September 28, 1915 Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the ambassador in Washington, D.C., stated to American journalists that reports of a systematic campaign of extermination against the Armenian minority in the Ottoman Empire were all "pure inventions", that these reports were all the work of British propaganda and no such campaign of extermination was taking place. Wangenheim's successor as ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Count Paul Wolff Metternich, was appalled by the Armenian genocide, and, unlike Wangenheim, Metternich was prepared to speak out against the genocide. In August 1916, the triumvirate known as the Three Pashas, which ruled the Ottoman Empire, informed the German government that if Count Metternich was not recalled, he would be declared persona non grata. Metternich was promptly recalled from Constantinople rather risk a public relations disaster which potentially could damage German-Ottoman relations in the middle of the war. As the Ottoman Empire today would be considered a third world country with almost no modern industry, the Ottoman government was entirely dependent upon weapons from Germany to fight World War I, giving the Reich a powerful form of leverage to apply against the Ottomans on behalf of the Armenians if only the political will in Berlin had been present. In a 2015 speech, the German president Joachim Gauck apologized for his country's inaction, stating that those diplomats who protested against the Armenian genocide were "ignored" by the leadership of Auswärtiges Amt, who valued good relations with the Ottoman empire more than they did the lives of the Armenians.

Post-imperial period

In 1919, the Foreign Office was reorganised as the Auswärtiges Amt and a modern structure was established. It was now under the authority of a foreign minister, though still called Amt for traditional reasons. In 1922, the Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was assassinated by members of the Organisation Consul, which reviled him both as a Jew and a supposed contributor to "creeping communism" for having negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo with Soviet Russia. The most notable head of the Foreign Office during the Weimar Republic was Gustav Stresemann, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929, who strived for a reconciliation with the French Third Republic, which earned him—together with Aristide Briand—the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. In an important sign of changed emphasis within the Auswärtiges Amt, in July 1930, the State Secretary and Stresemann's right-hand man was fired and replaced with the "crudely nationalist" Prince . The replacement of Schubert with Bülow marked the ascendency of the more nationalistic fraction within the Auswärtiges Amt who favored a more confrontational foreign policy with regards to France. In May 1932 Baron Konstantin von Neurath was appointed foreign minister in the "Cabinet of the President's Friends" headed by Franz von Papen. Neurath continued on as Foreign Minister under the governments of General Kurt von Schleicher and Adolf Hitler. During the Nazi period, Neurath found himself exposed to increasing competition from Nazi politicians like Alfred Rosenberg and Joachim von Ribbentrop. In February 1938, Hitler fired Neurath and replaced him with Ribbentrop.