Werner Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Rheinbaben (19 November 1878 – 14 January 1975) was a German diplomat and author.Rheinbaben was born in Schmiedeberg, Silesia.
He later wrote of the 1914 July Crisis that it was Wilhelm von Stumm who downplayed the possibility of British intervention and strongly advised the Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to act quickly.
After the First World War, Stumm told Rheinbaben: "I erred in 1914 and advised Bethmann falsely".Rheinbaben was a member of the German delegation to the League of Nations.During the 1920s and early 1930s Rheinbaben was a politician belonging to the German People's Party.
He was a close political associate of Gustav Stresemann and wrote a sympathetic biography of him in 1928.
In 1968 he argued against the views of those post-1945 German historians who claimed that Germany had sought world domination, writing: "Poor Germany! You honestly did not reach for 'world hegemony'!"
This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) as part of a cooperation project. The German Federal Archive guarantees an authentic representation only using the originals (negative and/or positive), resp. the digitalization of the originals as provided by the Digital Image Archive.