Eduard Willy Kurt Herbert von Dirksen (2 April 1882 – 19 December 1955) was a German diplomat (and from 1936 when he joined the party, specifically a Nazi diplomat) who was the last German ambassador to Britain before World War II. Early life Dirksen was born into a recently-ennobled family whose members been Prussian civil servants for generations. His father, Willibald, was ennobled by Emperor Wilhelm I in 1887 and was granted a large estate together with Gröditzberg Castle (now Grodziec Castle) in Silesia as a reward for his services to the House of Hohenzollern. Willibald was a conservative nationalist who, after his retirement, held a seat in the Reichstag for the anti-Semitic Reichspartei and was described as a "fanatical admirer" of Wilhelm II, whom he visited regularly while in exile in the Netherlands. Dirksen's mother, Viktoria, came from a wealthy banking family and was once helpful to Adolf Hitler, which benefited Dirksen's career during Nazi Germany. In his memoirs, Dirksen boasted that he was "proud of my purely Germanic blood", as the Dirksen family had been ennobled in 1887 "before a whole batch of more or less Jew-tainted families were ennobled by the liberalistic Emperor Frederick III" in 1888. As the Dirksens were parvenu nobility, unlike the ancient Junker families, they felt very insecure, and from the age of five onward, Herbert was forced to undergo a strict training regime to produce an "exemplary bearing" to allow him to be accepted by the Junkers. Dirsken had wanted to enter the exclusive Auswärtiges Amt (Foreign Office), but his father forced him to enter the Prussian civil service to prepare him to manage the family's estate in Silesia. As a university student at Heidelberg, the snobbish Dirksen joined the most exclusive fraternity whose membership were mostly aristocrats, which was a source of considerable pride to him. In 1905, he graduated with a Referendar (junior barrister) legal degree, and in 1907, he went on a tour around the world. After his graduation from university, Dirksen become a reserve officer with the Third Guard Uhlan regiment, based in Potsdam, which he always noted accepted only men from the aristocracy as officers. After working as an assistant judge, in 1910, Dirksen went on a four-month trip to Rhodesia, South Africa and German East Africa, where he was thinking about settling. During World War I, Dirksen served in the German Army as a lieutenant and