Herbert Behrendt was born in 1955 in the Black Forest in Germany and studied at Cologne University before going on to Oxford to read for an MPhil in modern European history. After working in journalism, he moved into the civil service in Germany, working first for the domestic government and then as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Behrendt’s postings included Bogota, Mexico City, Caracas, Havana, Kosovo and South Africa, and he has been honoured with the German Federal Order of Merit, the Order of Merit of the Colombian Parliament and as an Officer of the Royal Order of Knights of The King of Belgium. This narrative is excerpted from an interview with the Rhodes Trust on 15 May 2026.
Herbert Behrendt
Germany & University 1980
Oxford 1982: Celebrating with Champagne after the Degree Ceremony . Herbert & Tom (always a friend, tolerant & supportive).
Travelling Germany with HRH The Prince of Wales in 1995.
Decorated by HE Andres Pastrana, President of The Republic of Colombia, Bogota 1999.
End of a mission. Herbert (ret.). Pilgrim in Santiago de Compostela 2023 after completing 790 km.
‘It’s not surprising if you become a conscientious objector’
I grew up in Germany at a time when the Second World War was only ten years in the past and very much there in everybody’s mind. When I was in kindergarten, children still had relatives returning from prisoner-of-war camps. In general, I can say that my generation were all much poorer than those who had come before. We weren’t starving or anything, but I still remember when I was about five or six years old, being taken to the market to buy slices of watermelon, and this was the first time they had been available. When we went to visit relatives in Italy, I saw a truck full of watermelons and thought that Italy must be a very rich country!
I had a happy childhood and I was well looked after. I grew up mostly in Cologne, which still had many buildings in ruins at that time. I remember playing in a sandbox and finding marbles and showing them proudly to my aunt, and she told me to put them back, because they had belonged to children who had died in the bombing attacks. If you come from this type of environment, it’s not surprising if you become a conscientious objector, and that’s what happened to me. I did civil service instead of military service, and I worked at the main train station in Cologne, with the poor and the homeless and travellers.
On applying for the Rhodes Scholarship
I eventually studied modern European history at Cologne University and one day, just by chance, I came across a huge post saying, ‘Do you want to study at Oxford?’ Well, I applied, and to my great surprise I was then invited for interview and then, to my even greater surprise, I was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. I only had a very vague idea what this meant, but what appealed to me was that the will of the founder [Cecil Rhodes] had specified that Scholars should have certain talents and characteristics, and especially a sense of social responsibility.
‘I was overwhelmed by this cosmopolitan setup’
After I’d won the Scholarship, I got a letter from the secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship in Germany saying that I should apply to University College, and then, after that, one from the Warden of Rhodes House, Sir Edgar Williams, saying that they were expecting me at the start of the academic year. At that moment, I knew there was no escape! I packed my things and travelled over by boat and train, and I arrived at University College on a rainy day. I was received very nicely, but my English was mediocre at best and I was completely at a loss as to what was going to happen to me. But as I settled in, I made friends for life, and I was humbled by Oxford. I was overwhelmed by this cosmopolitan setup, with people from Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa, Tasmania, New Zealand. And they learned to live with me, because I was just as exotic to them as they were to me.
I had a shock when I realised how high the academic standards were for the MPhil, but I really worked very hard. I was very grateful for the chance to do it, and I cannot describe in words my happiness when I received the news that I had passed, which was a miracle to me.
‘You could very easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time’
Having received my degree from Oxford I was very unsure about what to do with my life. I knew one thing, which was that I did want to go into teaching. For me, there was something missing in the academic life. My feeling was that I wanted to know about politics, about the mechanisms, about how history is actually made, and therefore the closest thing to go into was journalism. It was a difficult time in the media world, but I managed to get myself into the ZDF (‘Second German Television’) news branch in the Bonn office, and this was the time when the German government was still based in Bonn. There, I learned about TV journalism, about political reporting, but I remember thinking, ‘Well, you don’t want to be a head or member of government and now you’re going to run around with a camera and a microphone to interview politicians. Is that really what you want?’
And then, by chance, I found out that there was a selection process going on for the staff of the senior German government spokesperson. I volunteered and I passed the exam and suddenly, I was a civil servant with a very interesting job. I started in a department where we had the task of keeping the Federal Chancellor informed about domestic and international events on a 24-hour basis. We worked in shifts, we had translators and analysts, and one of the requirements was multilingualism. If something really serious happened, you would pick up the phone and find yourself with a more or less interested head of government on the other end of the line. So, for example, I was the one who alerted the Chancellor that the Berlin Wall had come down. It was an event that changed the course of the twentieth century. After that, I wasn’t really sure what to do next. I spoke to my boss and he said that he would send me to the Foreign Office, and so, I became a diplomat.
There were several openings, and I could see that most of them seemed to be for people who wanted to have an easy life, either somewhere very elegant or somewhere where you could go to the beach. But then, there was Columbia. At this time, Columbia in the world news was dominated by stories about drug cartels, Pablo Escobar, the Medellín Cartel, the Valle Cartel. I said, ‘This is the place I want to be,’ and everyone though I was a little bit nuts. I had to learn a lot about international drug trafficking, and I stayed there until pretty well after Pablo Escobar was eventually brought down by the police and died in a shootout, and again, I had that sense of being there when something significant happened. When my time there was up, I returned to Germany and became deputy head of a department that looked after the business of European heads of state. That was a very different life, but then I had the chance to go back to Latin America. I moved around, but by that time I was married with a daughter and so we went to Columbia, because Bogata was safe to live in. Part of my role involved participating in negotiations to liberate people who had been taken hostage by the guerrillas. It was very interesting, though not without risk, because you could very easily be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but the psychology and emotional reward was very great. I sometimes thought at that time, ‘Well, the founder of the Rhodes Scholarship should be happy. I did well.’
I came back to Germany after that and had a very interesting life there, because I was in charge of projects around direct government communication. I met all kinds of world leaders as part of that work. And then, as I was nearing retirement, I was, again, given a list of countries where I could go. Some of the posts were very high prestige and I discussed all the possibilities with my family and we settled on South Africa, where I was in charge of the culture department. I had thought it would be a quiet role, but it turned out to be a place where there was lots of activity. This was just as Covid broke out, and we had to evacuate over 2,000 Germans by air, which was a quite a logistically tricky thing to do.
‘The Scholarship opened my mind to new environments’
I retired back to Germany and now I have come to reflect on my life, I think that perhaps it would have been interesting without the Rhodes Scholarship, but I must say that the Scholarship opened my mind to new environments, and it meant I was not afraid of going to places I didn’t know. It changed my life. I always took it very seriously, that all Rhodes Scholars are supposed to do something for the public good. I think we should never forget the vision of our founder that we should take social responsibility and contribute to making the world at least a little bit of a better place.