Alexander Ernst Alfred Hermann Freiherr von Falkenhausen (29 October 1878 – 31 July 1966) was a German general and military advisor to Chiang Kai-shek.

In 1897 he was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 91st Oldenburg Infantry Regiment of the Imperial German Army, taking part in quelling the Boxer Rebellion, and served as a military attaché in Japan from 1900 up until the First World War.

Chiang's decision to commit all of his new divisions in the Battle of Shanghai, despite objections from his own staff officers and von Falkenhausen, would cost him one-third of his best troops.

On Falkenhausen's 80th birthday in 1958, Wang Xiaoxi, the Nationalist Chinese ambassador to Belgium, awarded him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Tripod for his contributions in defending China.

Throughout his period of administration, Falkenhausen had co-operated with both Eggert Reeder and Dr. Werner Best, to try to apply the rules of the Hague Convention in their region, often against the wishes and instructions of their Wehrmacht and SS superiors.

[10] Though opposed to Nazi extremism towards the Jewish population, he yielded to pressure from Reinhard Heydrich's RSHA, leading in June 1942 to the deportation of 28,900 Jews.

While implementation of economic policy led to mass unemployment of Belgian Jewish workers, Reeder's efforts preserved existing national administrative structures and business relations within Belgium and northern France during the German occupation.

Part of this was the non-enforcement of the Reich Security Main Office order for all Jews to be marked by wearing a yellow Star of David at all times, until Helmut Knochen's conference in Paris on 14 March 1942.

"[13][14] Falkenhausen was a close friend of the anti-Hitler conspirators, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben and soon came to detest Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

A trial for their role in the deportation of Jews from Belgium but not for their deaths in Auschwitz, began in Brussels on 9 March 1951 and they were defended by the lawyer Ernst Achenbach.

On their return to West Germany three weeks after the end of the trial,[17] having served one third of their sentence, as required by Belgian law, they were pardoned by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.