Fleischer majored in electrical engineering, English and educational science. He has worked as an engineer in Saudi-Arabia and in South Korea, and as a junior researcher at Hannover University and on a research-vessel in the North Atlantic. After a two years’ postgraduate at the Academy of the German Foreign Service, he assumed his first diplomatic posting with the German Embassy in Beijing in 1987. He subsequently served in Bonn as desk officer for nuclear non-proliferation, in Abuja as head of the Embassy Office, in Brussels as political counsellor with the permanent mission of Germany to NATO, in Berlin as head of division for peacekeeping and conflict prevention, in New York as economic counsellor with the permanent mission of Germany to the UN and, until summer 2011, again in Beijing as minister-counsellor with the German Embassy. He then returned to Berlin to assume the newly established position of International Cyber Policy Coordinator at the Federal Foreign Office.

Martin Fleischer is married and has two grown up sons. He is an active jazz-musician, a passionate sailor and a visiting professor at the University of Qingdao/China.