Hillenbrand, Martin J(oseph) 1915-2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 1, 1915, in Youngstown, OH; died February 2, 2005, in Athens, GA. Government official, diplomat, and author. Hillenbrand was an expert on international affairs who held important offices in the U.S. Department of State's foreign service department during the cold war years in Europe. With a B.A. earned in 1937 from the University of Dayton, he did his graduate work at Columbia University, where he received an M.A. in 1938. Hillenbrand then joined the foreign service in 1939, working in Switzerland, Burma, India, and Mozambique during World War II. After the war, he completed his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1948, while also serving as consul in Bremen, Germany, during the late 1940s. The next two decades were largely spent—with the exception of four years in Paris—focusing on Germany, which was then divided between East and West and was a focal point of cold war tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union. Serving as director of the Office of German Affairs from 1958 until 1962, Hillenbrand was head of the Berlin Task Force during the Berlin Wall crisis. From 1963 until 1967, he was deputy chief of mission in Bonn, West Germany, as well as chair of the Fulbright Commission in Germany. Hillenbrand continued his distinguished career in government as U.S. ambassador to Hungary from 1967 until 1969, when he was named assistant secretary of state for European affairs. For his final years of foreign service, from 1972 until 1977, he served in the vital role of ambassador to West Germany. Retiring from the Department of State, Hillenbrand joined the Atlantic Institute for International Affairs in Paris as that organization's director-general until 1982. He spent his later years in academia, passing on his knowledge of international affairs to his students. As Dean Rusk Professor of International Relations at the University of Georgia, he also directed the institution's Center for Global Policy Studies and codirected the Center for East-West Trade Policy. Finally, in 1997, Hillenbrand retired and wrote about his experiences in Fragments of Our Time: Memoirs of a Diplomat (1998). He was also the author of the earlier book Power and Morals (1949) and editor of The Future of Berlin (1980), among other publications.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

New York Times, February 18, 2005, p. A21.

ONLINE

University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs Web site, http://www.uga.edu/spia/ (April 1, 2005).