Friedrich-Werner Erdmann Matthias Johann Bernhard Erich Graf von der Schulenburg (20 November 1875 – 10 November 1944) was a German diplomat who served as the last German ambassador to the Soviet Union before Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, during World War II. He began his diplomatic career before World War I, serving as consul and ambassador in several countries. After a prolonged conflict with the Nazi regime, he turned against the main Nazi Party and joined the conspiracy against Adolf Hitler. After the failed 20 July plot in 1944 to assassinate Hitler, Schulenburg was accused of being a co-conspirator and eventually executed. He was a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John, which was regarded with disfavour by the Nazis. Diplomatic career Schulenburg was born in Kemberg, in the Prussian Province of Saxony, to Count Bernhard Friedrich Wilhelm von der Schulenburg, he was from the Brandenburgish Schulenburg family, which was part of the Uradel (or old nobility). Friedrich-Werner was distantly related to the 17th-Century Saxon Generalfeldmarschall Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg and was a cousin to Friedrich Graf von der Schulenburg. After one year serving in the army, he studied law in Lausanne, Munich, and Berlin, and in 1901 joined the Foreign Office's consular service as a junior civil servant (Assessor). By 1903, he had been appointed as vice-consul at Germany's consulate general in Barcelona, and in the years that followed he found himself working at consulates in Lemberg, Prague, Warsaw, and Tbilisi. With the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Schulenburg returned to the military, and after the First Battle of the Marne was promoted to captain in October 1914 and put in charge of an artillery battery. In 1915, he was posted as German liaison officer to the Ottoman Army on the Armenian Front. In October 1915, he arrived in Erzurum and succeed Max Scheubner-Richter as the German Vice Consul. In 1916, he took over the command of the Georgian Legion in the struggle against the Russian Empire until its collapse in 1917. During his time in the military, he received the Iron Cross and some high Ottoman honours. After the German Empire's collapse, he was captured by the British and interned on the Mediterranean island of Prinkipo (now called Büyükada). He returned to Germany in 1919. Schulenburg was then reinstated in the Foreign Office Service and