Kurt Riezler

Kurt Riezler (February 11, 1882 – September 5, 1955) was a German philosopher and diplomat. A top-level cabinet adviser in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic, he negotiated Germany's underwriting of Russia's October Revolution and authored the 1914 September Program which outlined German war aims during World War I. The posthumous publication of his secret notes and diaries played a role in the "Fischer Controversy" among German historians in the early 1960s.

Riezler was born in Munich in 1882 to a prominent Catholic family; his grandfather had co-founded the Bayerische Hypotheken- und Wechselbank (now HypoVereinsbank, UniCredit Group). He studied classics at the University of Munich and was granted his doctorate in economic history with highest honors in 1905. His prize-winning thesis on the Oikonomika, a classical Greek treatise once attributed to Aristotle, was soon published. After working as a journalist for the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, a semi-official newspaper, he joined the press section of the German Foreign Office in 1907 and attracted the attention of Wilhelm II. When Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg became chancellor of Germany in 1909, Riezler became his chief adviser and confidant.

Riezler's duties in the chancellor's office concerned primarily, but not exclusively, foreign policy. In 1914 he authored the September Program which proposed as possible German war aims limited annexations, a hard peace for France, and a Belgian vassal state. In October 1917 he was posted to the German embassy in to arrange a cease-fire on the Eastern Front, and then to Moscow as the top aide to Germany's ambassador to Russia, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. Riezler was an eyewitness to Mirbach's assassination by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries on 9 July 1918, having unwittingly ushered the gunman Yakov Blumkin into Mirbach's presence.

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