Peter Hermes

Peter Hermes was the son of Weimar minister and Nazi opponent Andreas Hermes. After wartime military service, he spent nearly five years in Soviet captivity and returned to Germany in 1950. He studied law in Bonn, wrote his doctorate on South Tyrolean autonomy, and entered diplomacy in 1955. ¹

Assignments in San Francisco, at the Holy See, and at the OECD preceded senior work on trade and economic relations in Bonn. He negotiated with Western allies and socialist states and became state secretary in 1975. As ambassador in Washington from 1979, he worked through disputes over nuclear deployments and consultations within the Atlantic alliance. He concluded his diplomatic career as ambassador to the Holy See and later published his memoirs. ¹