Alfred von Oberndorff

Alfred Maria Fortunatus Franziskus Caesar von Oberndorff (9 December 1870 – 16 March 1963), also Count Oberndorff, was a German diplomat.

He headed missions in Norway and Bulgaria and in 1918 was one of the signatories of the Armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War.

Early life

Oberndorff was born in Edingen-Neckarhausen, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the son of Carl Gustav Adolph Maria Fortunatus Philipp Gabriel von Oberndorff, a landowner and count of the Holy Roman Empire, and his wife Marie Therese Henriette Franziska Eleonora Charlotte von Varicourt-Albini.

The young Oberndorff was educated in law at Heidelberg University, the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and the University of Freiburg. He passed the first state law examination in the spring of 1892 and graduated Doctor Iuris at Heidelberg University 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. 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.

Oberndorff next returned to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin as head of foreign policy. In that capacity, he attended the negotiations for the Armistice of Compiègne, with Matthias Erzberger, who was minister without portfolio, Major General Detlof von Winterfeldt, representative of the Supreme Army Command to the Chancellor of Germany, Captain Ernst Vanselow, of the Imperial German Navy, and two translators. On 11 November 1918, the four men were the German signatories to the Armistice.

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.

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.

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. 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.