Johann Heinrich Graf[notes 1] von Bernstorff (14 November 1862 – 6 October 1939) was a German politician and ambassador to the United States from 1908 to 1917.

During the crisis, contrary to Germany's official defenses, Bernstorff believed that Lusitania could not have been targeted specifically, and that it was "obviously sound policy to refrain as far as possible from any attack on passenger ships".

[11] Bernstorff saw his role as preserving diplomatic relations with the US "under all circumstances", and frequently acted without or exceeded instruction from Berlin, for which he was sometimes reprimanded.

Bernstorff was returned home on 3 February 1917, when US President Woodrow Wilson severed diplomatic relations with Germany after the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare.

Upon receiving the news, Colonel Edward M. House wrote to him: "It is too sad that your Government should have declared the unrestricted U-boat war at a moment when we were so near to peace.

Although Bernstorff himself officially denied all knowledge, most accounts agree that he was intricately involved as part of the German intelligence and sabotage offensive in America against Britain.

After the capture of the Annie Larsen and confiscation of its cargo, Bernstorff made efforts to recover the $200,000 worth of arms and insisted that they were meant for Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in German East Africa.

In September 1915, his agents attempted to influence the negotiations between American banks and the Anglo-French Financial Commission but failed to prevent an agreement from being reached.

Some of Bernstorff's other activities were exposed by the British Secret Service, which had obtained and distributed to the press a photograph of him "in a swimming costume with his arms around two similarly dressed women, neither of whom was his wife".

At the school's commencement in 1918, while the war was going on, University President William Faunce read a resolution of the board of fellows revoking the degree because "while he was Ambassador of the Imperial German Government to the United States and while the nations were still at peace, [Bernstorff] was guilty of conduct dishonorable alike in a gentleman and a diplomat".

In his memoirs, Bernstorff recounts a conversation with Talat Pasha after the massacres had been concluded: "When I kept on pestering him about the Armenian question, he once said with a smile: 'What on earth do you want?

[18] In 1926, he became the Chairman of Kurt Blumenfeld's Zionist German Pro-Palestine Committee (Deutsches Pro-Palästina Komitee) to support the foundation of a Jewish State in Palestine.

He found his final resting place at the cemetery of Genthod, a few metres from the grave of his son-in-law Raymond de Pourtalès (1882-1914), who was his secretary at the Embassy in Washington DC.