The 'Pillar of Belgrave Square'

The German Embassy in Belgrave Square has been blessed with a series of outstanding Ambassadors. One man who deserves to be named among them in their capacity, as it were, as missionaries of peace and reconciliation, was not a professional diplomat at all -- Herbert Sulzbach, OBE. A Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, born in Frankfurt am Main, he served the Embassy for nearly 35 years as Cultural and Press Officer. But his humble status belied his true function as a man dedicated to the reconciliation of the British and the Germans and, incidentally, also the Germans and the Jews.

The Embassy could have had no better adviser than this small and dapper man with blue, seemingly innocent eyes, with few of the diplomatic gifts but passionately and persistently devoted to his Anglo-German causes. "Nie verzagen, Sulzbach fragen" (Never despair, consult Sulzbach) became, as Ambassador Rüdiger von Wechmar said, the Embassy's rule and new diplomatic arrivals in London learned to abide by it. Herbert Sulzbach became their "mentor and tutor, a solid pillar of continuity" in sometimes difficult times when Germans and British were changing from being enemies to allies and friends.

When Sulzbach died, aged 93, in July 1985, the Embassy organised a moving "Thanksgiving for his life", attended by many, Germans and British, who had come to love and respect the man who had been a German Lieutenant in World War One and a British Captain in World War Two, serving the Kaiser with that same goodness of character and loyalty as the King of England, and he was decorated by both.

In his humorous tribute Sir Bernard Braine MP, spoke of Sulzbach's force of personality and untiring energy as that of a saint though perhaps not officially recognised in the calendar of saints, "a cross between St. Paul and St. Vitus". He had the habit of "button-holing" everyone who could be useful for his work of reconciliation. No one was allowed to escape that greatest of all charmers, as Sir Bernard put it.

As a British officer and interpreter, Sulzbach had discovered his true vocation, to explain the principles of liberal democracy to embittered German prisoners of war, many of whom had never known anything except Nazism. Never was there a more sincere "propagandist" or "re-educator". He opened the eyes of thousands to the real world and after the War they elected him life-president of their "Featherstone Park Association" in Düsseldorf, so named after the officers' PoW camp in Northumberland. His Embassy function from 1950 until his "official" retirement in 1981, but practically to the end of his life, was to build upon his work of binding wounds and reconciliation by fostering trust and friendship between the country of his birth and his adopted country.

His life, Bernard Levin said at the same Memorial Service, "was infused by his profound and unshakable belief in the goodness of man. It enabled him to triumph over the setbacks of his own life broken by persecution and exile. He straddled two infinitely different worlds with the same courage and integrity shown in both, two faiths, two wars, two careers, and he was the soul of humanity in both." It was a moving and fitting tribute.