Manfred Freiherr von Killinger (14 July 1886 – 2 September 1944) was a German naval officer, Freikorps leader, military writer and Nazi politician.

Together with his aide Gustav Richter, he attempted to gain Romania's participation in the German-led Final Solution, thus pressuring Romanian authorities to divert focus from their own mass murder of Jews.

Born in Gut Lindigt (now part of Nossen) in the Kingdom of Saxony, and raised an Evangelical-Lutheran,[1] Killinger was from an aristocratic Swabian-Frankish family originally from the "knightly territory" of Kraichgau in Baden-Württemberg.

[6] Subsequently, Killinger was also involved in the Kapp Putsch against the Weimar Republic, provoked by the authorities' decision to disarm the Freikorps; following that, he organized another paramilitary group under the name Union of Front-Line Veterans, and joined the Munich-based antisemitic secret society known as the Germanenorden, which proclaimed its allegiance to the Aryan race and the Germanic peoples.

[2] In August, the Joseph Wirth cabinet and President Friedrich Ebert advanced legislation giving Minister of the Interior Georg Gradnauer the power to ban anti-republican organizations.

[13] This caused an uproar in Bavaria, which was then ruled by the right-wing People's Party-led coalition of Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who accused Wirth of favoring the Left.

[20] On 10 March 1933, after Hitler established the Nazi regime, Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick authorized Killinger to take control of Saxony as Reichskommissar, and to depose the Minister-President Walther Schieck (a member of the German People's Party).

[23] At the same time, Hitler reportedly called on Killinger not to allow violence to degenerate into disorder, and to confine repression to the Left and members of the German Jewish community.

[30] According to Time, Killinger, who had allegedly grown "unpopular" in the United States, was "recalled to the Reich to report on the bombing of a Nazi freighter in Oakland Estuary [in November 1938]".

[31] He was replaced by Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler's personal aide, whose mission, according to Time, was "to smooth ruffled U. S.-German relations and sell the Nazi regime to an unsympathetic U. S."[31] In 1940, Killinger was appointed as Germany's Ambassador to the newly created Slovak Republic.

[33] Starting in September, Wisliceny helped implement a series of racial antisemitic measures, which contrasted with previous religious discrimination policies and culminated in the deportation and murder of a majority of Slovak Jews in 1942.

[37] By early February, as Wehrmacht troops in Romania gave Antonescu their support,[38] Killinger investigated cases where members of the Gestapo, Schutzstaffel, or Sicherheitsdienst aided the latter, and reported these to his overseers.

[39] The latter denunciation centered on Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, the Gestapo chief in Bucharest, whom Killinger accused of having hidden 13 Iron Guardists in the Embassy building.

[40] In March, Antonescu declared Bolschwing a persona non grata;[40] he was recalled to Berlin, and later sent to a concentration camp,[41] and near the end of the war moved to Austria, joining up with the underground resistance and the Allies.

[47] This was one of several such episodes—German decisions to shoot or turn back the Jews expelled over the Dniester became widespread after the Wehrmacht began reporting that they were dying of hunger and alleged that they spread disease.

[49] Killinger continued to report on the way Romania had decided to carry out its own program of extermination, and, in August 1941, alarmed the authorities in Berlin with evidence that Antonescu had ordered 60,000 Jewish men from the Old Kingdom to be deported in Transnistria.

[54] This was a sign of the dissatisfaction of Romania after the Battle of Stalingrad, and Antonescu indicated that he only considered emigration as a solution to the Jewish Question, an argument which saved Jews in the Old Kingdom and southern Transylvania from deportation.

or "Thou Baron"), it accused Killinger of having supervised political and economic domination: A flower blossomed in my garden, one like a plumped-up red bird, with a golden kernel.

[57] Baroane contrasted with the prevalent mood in Romanian media, which offered open support to Nazism, Italian fascism, and other far right ideologies of the time, while publishing praises of German envoys such as Killinger.

As the Soviet Union fought its first battles on Romanian territory, Killinger signed some of his last reports, in which he claimed to have exposed a pro-Allied spy ring formed around writer Marthe Bibesco and other members of the upper class.

[60] As Antonescu was overthrown by opposition forces during the 23 August coup, Killinger, still present in Bucharest, committed suicide on 2 September in his office [ro] on Calea Victoriei in order to avoid capture by the Red Army.

[61] The New York Times reported in September 1944 that, shortly before his death, Killinger had "run amok", shooting junior members of his staff while shouting the words "We must all die for the Führer".

That said, in a 1953 testimony, Prince Albrecht von Hohenzollern [de] who had been an attaché of the German military mission in Romania and was in Bucharest at that time, recalled that before Killinger shot himself, he first killed his secretary with whom he was rumored to have been in an intimate relationship.