Branch: Government
Born: 30 April 1893 in Wesel, Rhine Province, Kingdom
of Prussia, German Empire.
Died: 16 October 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany.
Appointment's:
Reich Minister for Foreign Affairs 4 February 1938 to 30 April
1945
German Ambassador to the Court of St. James 1936 to 1938
Decorations:
Other: Personnel
Articles:
Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop was born on
30 April 1893 and was the Foreign Minister of Germany from
1938 until 1945. Joachim von Ribbentrop was later hanged for
war crimes after the Nuremberg Trials. Joachim von Ribbentrop
was born in Wesel, Rhenish Prussia, to Richard Ulrich Friedrich
Joachim Ribbentrop, a career army officer, and his wife, Johanne
Sophie Hertwig. Joachim von Ribbentrop was educated irregularly
at private schools in Germany and Switzerland.From 1904 to
1908, Joachim von Ribbentrop took French courses in a school
at Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress. A former
teacher later recalled that Joachim von Ribbentrop was the
most stupid in his class, full of vanity and very pushy.
His
father was cashiered from the Imperial German Army in 1908
after repeatedly disparaging Kaiser
Wilhelm
II for his alleged homosexuality and the Joachim von Ribbentrop
family were often short of money. Fluent in both French and
English, young Joachim von Ribbentrop lived at various times
in Grenoble, France, and London, before travelling to Canada
in 1910.Initially, Joachim von Ribbentrop planned to emigrate
to German East Africa, where he hoped to become a planter.But
during a summer holiday in Switzerland in 1909, Joachim von
Ribbentrop fell in love with a wealthy young socialite named
Catherine Bell, from a Montreal banking family, which led
him to substitute Canada for Tanganyika as his preferred destination.Until
1914, Joachim von Ribbentrop hoped to marry Bell. He worked
for the Molsons Bank on Stanley Street in Montreal and then
for the engineering firm M. P. and J. T. Davis on the Quebec
Bridge reconstruction. He was also employed by the National
Transcontinental Railway, which constructed a line from Moncton
to Winnipeg. He worked as a journalist in New York City and
Boston and then rested to recover from tuberculosis in Germany.
He returned to Canada and set up a small business in Ottawa
importing German wine and champagne. In 1914, he competed
for Ottawa's famous Minto iceskating team, participating in
the Ellis Memorial Trophy tournament in Boston in February.
When World War I began, Joachim von Ribbentrop left Canada
(which, as part of the British Empire, was at war with Germany)
for the neutral United States.He sailed from Hoboken, New
Jersey on 15 August 1914 on the Holland America ship The Potsdam,
bound for Rotterdam. He then returned home and enlisted in
the 125th Hussar Regiment.
He served first on the Eastern Front, but was later transferred
to the Western Front. He earned a commission and was awarded
the Iron Cross. In 1918 1st Lieutenant Joachim von Ribbentrop
was stationed in Istanbul as a staff officer. During his time
in Turkey, he became friends with another staff officer named
Franz
von Papen
In 1919 Joachim von Ribbentrop met Anna Elisabeth Henkell
(Annelies to her friends), a wealthy Wiesbaden champagne producer's
daughter. They married on 5 July 1920, and Joachim von Ribbentrop
travelled Europe as a wine salesman. He and Annelies had five
children. She was often described as a Lady Macbeth type who
dominated her husband. Joachim von Ribbentrop persuaded his
aunt Gertrud Joachim von Ribbentrop to adopt him in May 1925,
which allowed him to add the aristocratic von to his name.
Early National Socialist Career
In 1928, Joachim von Ribbentrop was introduced to
Adolf
Hitler as a businessman with foreign connections who gets
the same price for German champagne as others get for French
champagne.Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, with whom Joachim
von Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars in the
First World War, arranged the introduction.Joachim von Ribbentrop
and his wife joined the National Socialist German Workers'
Party on 1 May 1932. His NSDAP card number was 1,199,927.
Joachim von Ribbentrop began his political career that summer
by offering to be a secret emissary between Chancellor
Franz
von Papen, his old wartime friend, and
Adolf
Hitler.His offer was initially refused. Six months later,
though,
Adolf
Hitler and
Franz
von Papen accepted his help.
Their change of heart occurred after General Kurt von Schleicher
ousted
Franz
von Papen in December 1932. This led to a complex set
of intrigues that saw
Franz
von Papen and various friends of President
Paul
von Hindenburg negotiating with
Adolf
Hitler to oust von Schleicher. On 22 January 1933, Meissner
and Hindenburg's son met
Adolf
Hitler,
Hermann
Göring, and Frick at Joachim von Ribbentrop's home
in Berlin's exclusive Dahlem district.Over dinner,
Franz
von Papen made the fateful concession that if von Schleicher's
government were to fall, he would abandon his demand for the
Chancellorship and instead use his influence with President
Paul
von Hindenburg to ensure that
Adolf
Hitler got the chancellorship
Adolf Hitler
met privately with Hindenburg for over an hour. Afterwards,
Hindenburg was a changed man. He stood ready to convince his
father to accept
Adolf
Hitler's demand for the chancellorship The end result
was that
Adolf
Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Joachim
von Ribbentrop's assistance in arranging the meeting and lending
his home for the purpose endeared him to
Adolf
Hitler.
Joachim von Ribbentrop , in turn, greatly admired
Adolf
Hitler. He was emotionally dependent on
Adolf
Hitler's favour to the extent that he suffered from psychosomatic
illnesses if
Adolf
Hitler was unhappy with him.In 1933, he was given honorary
SS officer rank of SS-Standartenführer. His SS membership
number was 63,083.
But Joachim von Ribbentrop was not popular with the National
Socialist Party's Alte Kämpfer (Old Fighters) they nearly
all disliked him. British historian Lawrence Rees described
Joachim von Ribbentrop as the National Socialist almost all
the other leading Nazis hated.
Joseph
Goebbels expressed a common view when he confided to his
diary that Joachim von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married
his money, and he swindled his way into office. To compensate
for this, Joachim von Ribbentrop became a fanatical National
Socialist and vociferous anti-Semite.
During most of the Weimar Republic era, Joachim von Ribbentrop
was apolitical and displayed no anti-Semitic prejudices.A
visitor to a party Joachim von Ribbentrop threw in 1928 recorded
that Joachim von Ribbentrop had no political views beyond
a vague admiration for Gustav Stresemann, fear of Communism,
and a wish to restore the monarchy. Several Berlin Jewish
businessmen who did business with Joachim von Ribbentrop in
the 1920s and knew him well later expressed astonishment at
the vicious anti-Semitism Joachim von Ribbentrop later displayed
in the Third Reich, saying that they did not see any indications
that he had held such views when they knew him. Indeed, as
a wealthy partner in his father-in-law's champagne firm, Joachim
von Ribbentrop did business with Jewish bankers, and organised
the Impegroma Importing Company (Import und Export großer
Marken) with Jewish financing.
But Joachim von Ribbentrop emerged as one of the National
Socialist Party's leading hardliners He refused even to consider
the idea which some of the other National Socialist leaders
were open to, though only on pragmatic grounds as a way of
encouraging Jewish emigration that German Jews be allowed
to take their personal possessions with them when they left
Germany.The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, once
asked Joachim von Ribbentrop that very question. The answer
was unequivocally no.
The Jews in Germany were without exception pickpockets, murderers
and thieves. The property they possessed had been acquired
illegally. The German government had therefore decided to
assimilate them with the criminal elements of the population.
The property which they had acquired illegally would be taken
from them. They would be forced to live in districts frequented
by the criminal classes. They would be under police observation
like other criminals. They would be forced to report to the
police as other criminals were obligated to do. The German
government could not help it if some of these criminals escaped
to other countries that seemed so anxious to have them. It
was not, however, willing for them to take the property, which
had resulted from their illegal operations with them.
Diplomatic Career
Joachim von Ribbentrop became
Adolf
Hitler's favourite foreign-policy adviser, partly by dint
of his familiarity with the world outside Germany, but also
by shameless flattery and sycophancy.Germany's professional
diplomats told
Adolf
Hitler the truth about what was happening abroad in National
Socialist Germany's early years. But Joachim von Ribbentrop
told
Adolf
Hitler what he wanted
Adolf
Hitler to hear. One German diplomat later recalled that
Joachim von Ribbentrop didn't understand anything about foreign
policy. His sole wish was to please
Adolf
Hitler. In particular, Joachim von Ribbentrop acquired
the habit of listening carefully to what
Adolf
Hitler was saying, memorising the Führer's pet ideas,
and then later presenting
Adolf
Hitler's ideas as his own a practice that much impressed
Adolf Hitler
as proving Joachim von Ribbentrop was an ideal National Socialist
diplomat.Joachim von Ribbentrop quickly learned that
Adolf
Hitler always favoured the most radical solution to any
problem, and accordingly tended his advice in that direction
as a Joachim von Ribbentrop aide recalled.
When
Adolf
Hitler said 'Grey', Joachim von Ribbentrop said 'Black,
black, black'. He always said it three times more, and he
was always more radical. I listened to what
Adolf
Hitler said one day when Joachim von Ribbentrop wasn't
present, 'With Joachim von Ribbentrop it is so easy, he is
always so radical. Meanwhile, all the other people I have,
they come here, they have problems, they are afraid, they
think we should take care and then I have to blow them up,
to get strong. And Joachim von Ribbentrop was blowing up the
whole day and I had to do nothing. I had to brake much better!'
Another factor that aided Joachim von Ribbentrop's rise was
Adolf Hitler's
distrust of, and disdain for, Germany's professional diplomats.
He suspected that they did not entirely support his revolution.But
the Foreign Office diplomats loyally served the National Socialist
regime and only rarely gave
Adolf
Hitler grounds for criticism.The Foreign Office diplomats
were ultra-nationalist, authoritarian, and anti-Semitic. As
a result, there was enough overlap in values between the two
groups to allow most of them to work comfortably for the Nazis.
When the National Socialists came to power, there was only
one resignation from the Foreign Office, German Ambassador
to the United States Friedrich Wilhelm von Prittwitz und Gaffron
resigned because he could not in good conscience serve the
National Socialist regime. Every other senior diplomat remained
at his post. But for the most part, even those diplomats who
did not entirely agree with the National Socialists were still
inclined to serve the regime as the best way of serving Germany.Despite
this,
Adolf
Hitler never quite trusted the Foreign Office and was
always on the lookout for someone like Joachim von Ribbentrop
to carry out his foreign policy goals.
Undermining Treaty Versailles
The Nazis and Germany's professional diplomats shared the
goal of totally destroying the Treaty of Versailles and restoring
Germany as a great power with the Nazis. In October 1933,
German Foreign Minister Baron
Konstantin
von Neurath presented a note at the World Disarmament
Conference announcing that it was unfair that Germany should
remain disarmed by Part V of the Versailles treaty, and demanded
that the other powers either disarm to Germany's level, or
that they abolish Part V and allow Germany Gleichberechtigung
equality of armaments. When France rejected
Konstantin
von Neurath note, Germany stormed out of the League of
Nations and the World Disarmament Conference, and all but
announced its intention to unilaterally violate Part V. Consequently,
there were several calls in France that autumn for a preventive
war to put an end to the National Socialist regime while Germany
was still more-or-less disarmed.
But in November, Joachim von Ribbentrop arranged a meeting
between de Brinon, who wrote for the Le Matin newspaper, and
Adolf Hitler,
during which
Adolf
Hitler stressed what he claimed to be his love of peace
and his friendship towards France.
Adolf
Hitler's meeting with de Brinon had a huge impact on French
public opinion, and helped to put an end to the calls for
a preventive war by convincing many in France that
Adolf
Hitler was a man of peace who only wanted to do away with
Part V.
Special Commissioner for Disarmament
In April 1934,
Adolf
Hitler named Joachim von Ribbentrop Special Commissioner
for Disarmament. The appointment arose in large part because
of doubts created in foreign capitals over just what precisely
Joachim von Ribbentrop's diplomatic status was.
In his early years,
Adolf
Hitler's aim in foreign affairs was to persuade the world
that he wished to reduce military spending by making idealistic
but very vague disarmament offers in the 1930s, the term disarmament
was used to describe arms-limitation agreements. At the same
time, the Germans always resisted making concrete arms-limitations
proposals, and they went ahead with increased military spending
on grounds that other powers would not take up German arms
limitation offers.Joachim von Ribbentrop was tasked with ensuring
that the world remained convinced that Germany sincerely wanted
an arms limitation treaty while also ensuring that no such
treaty ever materialised In the first part of his assignment,
Joachim von Ribbentrop was partly successful, but in the second
part he more than fulfilled
Adolf
Hitler's expectations.
On 17 April 1934, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou issued
the so-called Barthou note which led to concerns on the part
of
Adolf Hitler
that the French would ask for sanctions against Germany for
violating Part V of the Versailles treaty. Joachim von Ribbentrop
volunteered to stop the rumoured sanctions, and visited London
and Rome. During his visits, Joachim von Ribbentrop met with
Simon and Benito Mussolini, and asked them to postpone the
next meeting of the Bureau of Disarmament, in exchange for
which Joachim von Ribbentrop offered nothing in return other
than promising better relations with Berlin. The meeting,
though, went ahead as scheduled. But because no sanctions
were sought against Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop could
claim success. In fact, Joachim von Ribbentrop's efforts had
nothing to do with the lack of sanctions.
Competition with Konstantin von Neurath
Joachim von Ribbentrop's increasing foreign-policy profile
rubbed many professional diplomats, especially
Konstantin
von Neurath, the wrong way. Up to the time he became Germany's
Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop aggressively competed
with
Konstantin
von Neurath's Foreign Office and sought to undercut
Konstantin
von Neurath at every turn. For example, as Special Commissioner,
Joachim von Ribbentrop was allowed to see all diplomatic correspondence
relating to disarmament, but he refused to share it with
Konstantin
von Neurath or
Bernhard
von Bülow. Joachim von Ribbentrop used this privilege
to go through the incoming diplomatic messages, snatching
certain messages, taking them to
Adolf
Hitler and having a reply written without
Konstantin
von Neurath or
Bernhard
von Bülow being informed first.
Joachim von Ribbentrop also engaged in diplomacy on his own.
He visited France and met Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.During
the meeting, Joachim von Ribbentrop suggested that Barthou
meet
Adolf
Hitler at once to sign a Franco German nonaggression pact.
Joachim von Ribbentrop wanted to buy time to complete German
rearmament by removing preventive war as a French policy option.
The Barthou-Joachim von Ribbentrop meeting infuriated
Konstantin
von Neurath because the two had met without bothering
to inform the Foreign Office beforehand.
For his part,
Konstantin
von Neurath held his rival in contempt. He could not take
seriously anyone whose written German, to say nothing of his
English and French, was as full of spelling errors and grammatical
mistakes as Joachim von Ribbentrop's . Others, notably former
State Secretary Prince
Bernhard
von Bülow, shared
Konstantin
von Neurath contempt,
Bernhard
von Bülow could not regard as a serious competitor
a man who had no formal training in diplomacy, who could not
write a report in correct German, who did not listen carefully
enough to the remarks of foreign statesmen to interpret them
correctly, and who insisted upon seeing possibilities of alliance
with Britain where none existed.Once,
Konstantin
von Neurath's instructed a Joachim von Ribbentrop aide
not to correct any of Joachim von Ribbentrop's spelling mistakes.
Dienststelle Joachim von Ribbentrop
In August 1934, Joachim von Ribbentrop founded an organisation
linked to the National Socialist Party called the Büro
Joachim von Ribbentrop later renamed the Dienststelle Joachim
von Ribbentrop . It functioned as an alternative foreign ministry.The
Dienststelle Joachim von Ribbentrop , which had its offices
directly across from the Foreign Office's building on the
Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, had in its membership a collection
of
Adolf Hitler
jugend alumni, dissatisfied businessmen, former reporters,
and ambitious National Socialist Party members, all of whom
tried to conduct a foreign policy independent of, and often
contrary to, the Foreign Office.
Though the Dienststelle Joachim von Ribbentrop concerned itself
with German foreign relations with every part of the world,
a special emphasis was put on Anglo German relations, as Joachim
von Ribbentrop knew that
Adolf
Hitler favoured an alliance with Britain.As such, Joachim
von Ribbentrop worked hard during his early diplomatic career
to realise
Adolf
Hitler's dream of an anti-Soviet Anglo German alliance.
Joachim von Ribbentrop made frequent trips to Britain, and
upon his return he always reported to
Adolf
Hitler that most British people longed for an alliance
with Germany. In November 1934, Joachim von Ribbentrop visited
Britain where he met with George Bernard Shaw, Sir Austen
Chamberlain, Lord Cecil, and Lord Lothian. On the basis of
Lord Lothian's praise for the natural friendship between Germany
and Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop informed
Adolf
Hitler that all elements of British society wished for
closer ties with Germany. His report delighted
Adolf
Hitler, causing him to remark that Joachim von Ribbentrop
was the only person who told him the truth about the world
abroad.Because the Foreign Office's diplomats were not so
sunny in their appraisal of the prospects for an alliance,
Joachim von Ribbentrop's influence with
Adolf
Hitler increased. Joachim von Ribbentrop's personality,
with his disdain for diplomatic niceties, meshed with what
Adolf Hitler
felt should be the relentless dynamism of a revolutionary
regime.
Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large
Adolf Hitler
rewarded Joachim von Ribbentrop by appointing him Reich Minister
Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large. In that capacity, Joachim
von Ribbentrop negotiated the Anglo German Naval Agreement
(A.G.N.A.) In 1935 and the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936.
Anglo German Naval Agreement
Konstantin
von Neurath did not think the A.G.N.A. was possible. So
to discredit his rival, he appointed Joachim von Ribbentrop
head of the delegation sent to London to negotiate it.Once
the talks began, Joachim von Ribbentrop , who possessed a
certain elan and sense of audacity, issued Sir John Simon
an ultimatum.He informed Simon that if Germany's terms were
not accepted in their entirety, the German delegation would
go home. Simon was angry with this demand and walked out of
the talks under the grounds that It is not usual to make such
conditions at the beginning of negotiations.But to everyone's
surprise, the next day the British accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop's
demands and the A.G.N.A. was signed in London on 18 June 1935
by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British
Foreign Secretary. This diplomatic success did much to increase
Joachim von Ribbentrop's prestige with
Adolf
Hitler, who called the day the A.G.N.A. was signed the
happiest day in my life. He believed it marked the beginning
of an Anglo German alliance, and ordered celebrations throughout
Germany to mark the event.
Immediately after the A.G.N.A. was signed, Joachim von Ribbentrop
followed up with the next step that was intended to create
the Anglo German alliance, namely the Gleichschaltung (coordination)
of all societies demanding the restoration of Germany's former
colonies in Africa. On 3 July 1935, it was announced that
Joachim von Ribbentrop would now head the efforts to recover
Germany's former African colonies.
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop believed that demanding
colonial restoration would pressure the British into making
an alliance with the Reich on German terms. But there was
a certain difference of opinion between Joachim von Ribbentrop
and
Adolf Hitler,
Joachim von Ribbentrop sincerely wished to recover the former
German colonies, whereas for
Adolf
Hitler, colonial demands were just a negotiating tactic,
Germany would renounce its demands in exchange for a British
alliance.
The Anti-Comintern Pact
The Anti-Comintern Pact of November 1936 marked an important
change in German foreign policy. The Foreign Office had traditionally
favoured a policy of friendship with China with an informal
Sino-German alliance being created by the late 1920s.
Konstantin
von Neurath very much believed in maintaining Germany's
good relations with China and distrusted Japan.Joachim von
Ribbentrop was opposed to the Foreign Office's pro-China orientation
and instead favoured an alliance with Japan. To this end,
Joachim von Ribbentrop often worked closely with General Hiroshi
Oshima, who served first as the Japanese military attaché,
and then as Ambassador in Berlin, to strengthen German-Japanese
ties despite furious opposition from the Wehrmacht and the
Foreign Office, which preferred closer Sino-German ties. The
origins of the Anti-Comintern Pact went back to the summer
and fall of 1935, when in an effort to square the circle between
seeking a rapprochement with Japan and Germany's traditional
alliance with China, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Oshima devised
the idea of an anti-Communist alliance as a way to bind China,
Japan, and Germany together.But when the Chinese made it clear
that they had no interest in such an alliance especially given
that the Japanese regarded Chinese adhesion to the proposed
pact as way of subordinating China to Japan, both
Konstantin
von Neurath and War Minister Field Marshal
Werner
von Blomberg persuaded
Adolf
Hitler to shelve the proposed treaty lest it damage Germany's
good relations with China.Joachim von Ribbentrop for his part,
who valued Japanese friendship far more than Chinese friendship,
argued that Germany and Japan should sign the pact even without
Chinese participation.By November 1936, a revival of interest
in a German-Japanese pact in both Tokyo and Berlin led to
the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact in Berlin. When the
Pact was signed, invitations were sent to Italy, China, Britain,
and Poland to join. But of the invited powers, only the Italians
would ultimately sign. The Anti-Comintern Pact marked the
beginning of the shift on Germany's part from China's ally
to Japan's ally.
Veterans Exchanges
In 1935, Joachim von Ribbentrop arranged for a series of much-publicised
visits of World War I veterans to Britain, France, and Germany.
Joachim von Ribbentrop persuaded the British Legion the leading
veterans' group in Britain and many French veterans' groups
to send delegations to Germany to meet German veterans as
the best way to promote peace. At the same time, Joachim von
Ribbentrop arranged for members of the Frontkämpferbund,
the official German World War I veterans' group, to visit
Britain and France to meet veterans there.The veterans' visits
and attendant promises of never again did much to improve
the New Germany's image in Britain and France. In July 1935,
Brigadier Sir Francis Featherstone-Godley led the British
Legion's delegation to Germany. The Prince of Wales, the Legion's
patron, made a much-publicised speech at the Legion's annual
conference in June 1935 stating he could think of no better
group of men than those of the Legion to visit and carry the
message of peace to Germany, and stated that he hoped that
Britain and Germany would never fight again. As for the contradiction
between German rearmament and his message of peace, Joachim
von Ribbentrop argued to whoever would listen that the German
people had been humiliated by the Versailles treaty, that
Germany wanted peace above all, and German violations of Versailles
were part of an effort to restore Germany's self-respect By
the 1930s, much of British opinion had been convinced that
the treaty was monstrously unfair and unjust to Germany, so
as a result, many in Britain like Thomas Jones were very open
to Joachim von Ribbentrop s message that if only Versailles
could be done away with, then European peace would be secured.
Courting England's 200 families
His efforts paid dividends. Joachim von Ribbentrop was able
to persuade an impressive array of British high society to
visit
Adolf
Hitler in Germany. That Joachim von Ribbentrop possessed
the power to set up meetings with
Adolf
Hitler and represented himself as
Adolf
Hitler's personal envoy made him for a time a much-courted
figure in Britain. The most notable guest Joachim von Ribbentrop
brought to
Adolf
Hitler was former Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
Adolf
Hitler's British guests were a mélange of aristocratic
Germanophiles such as Lord Londonderry, professional pacifists
such as George Lansbury and Lord Allen, retired politicians,
ex-generals, fascists such as Admiral Barry Domvile and Sir
Oswald Mosley, journalists such as Lord Lothian and G. Ward
Price, academics such as the historian Philip Conwell-Evans,
and various businessmen like the newspaper magnate Lord Rothermere
and the merchant banker Lord Mount Temple. But very few of
these people were actual decision-makers in the British government.Neither
Adolf Hitler
nor Joachim von Ribbentrop seemed to comprehend that when
luminaries such as these declared their support for closer
Anglo German ties, they were speaking as private citizens,
not on behalf of Whitehall. A German diplomat, Truetzschler
von Falkenstein, complained after the war that Joachim von
Ribbentrop , having had contact with only a small group in
England representatives of the so-called two hundred families
did not know the great mass of the English people. The England
with which he had hoped to collaborate was the England of
this select group, since he believed that its members controlled
Britain. Another German diplomat commented that Joachim von
Ribbentrop had the strange idea to conduct international relations
through aristocrats.Yet another German diplomat noted that,
Joachim von Ribbentrop did not have the capacity to form an
overview to see things in perspective. In England, for example,
he relied upon people like Conwell-Evans who had no real influence.Earlier,
speaking of Joachim von Ribbentrop's activities and of the
views of his British friends, Leopold von Hoesch, the German
Ambassador in London from 1932 to 1936, warned that Berlin
should not pay any attention to the Londonderry and Lothians,
who in no way represented any important section of British
opinion
Ambassador to Britain
In August 1936,
Adolf
Hitler appointed Joachim von Ribbentrop Ambassador to
Britain with orders to negotiate the Anglo German alliance.
Get Britain to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, that is what
I want most of all. I have sent you as the best man I've
got. Do what you can. But if in future all our efforts are
still in vain, fair enough, then I'm ready for war as
well. I would regret it very much, but if it has to be, there
it is. Do your best. I will follow your efforts with interest.
Joachim von Ribbentrop arrived to take up his position in
October 1936. The two-month delay between his appointment
and his arrival owed to the fracas following State Secretary
Prince
Bernhard
von Bülow death. Joachim von Ribbentrop immediately
suggested that he should succeed
Bernhard
von Bülow as State Secretary.But
Konstantin
von Neurath informed
Adolf
Hitler that he would rather resign than have Joachim von
Ribbentrop in the post. So
Konstantin
von Neurath appointed his son-in-law, Hans Georg von Mackensen,
to the office.
Adolf
Hitler, for his part, had been impressed by
Konstantin
von Neurath's skilful efforts at defusing the Rhineland
remilitarisation crisis earlier that year. And he concluded
that Joachim von Ribbentrop's talents better suited him to
serving as Ambassador than as State Secretary. Joachim von
Ribbentrop spent two months trying to get
Adolf
Hitler to reconsider before reluctantly leaving for Britain.
The vain, arrogant, and tactless Joachim von Ribbentrop was
not the man for such a mission, but it is doubtful that even
a more skilled diplomat could have fulfilled
Adolf
Hitler's dream. His time in London was marked by an endless
series of social gaffes and blunders that worsened his already
poor relations with the British Foreign Office.
The trouble began immediately. He created a storm in the British
press soon after his arrival by suggesting that the two countries
might find common ground opposing communism's spread.
The Führer is convinced that there is only one real danger
to Europe and to the British Empire as well, and that is the
spreading further of communism, this most terrible of all
diseases-terrible because people generally seem to realise
its danger only when it is too late. A closer collaboration
in this sense between our two countries is not only important
but a vital necessity in the common struggle for the upholding
of our civilisation and our culture.
The Daily Telegraph regretted that Germany's ambassador could
offer no better basis for improved Anglo German relations
beyond a mutual hatred for a third country. His arrival at
the German Embassy was equally tumultuous. A former aide recalled
that Joachim von Ribbentrop threw the German Embassy into
chaos due to his erratic personality.
Joachim von Ribbentrop rose, muttering badtempered. Dressed
in his pyjamas, he received the junior secretaries and press
attachés in his bathroom. He scolded, threatened, gesticulated
with his razor and shouted at his valet. As he took his bath,
he ordered people to be summoned from Berlin, accepted and
cancelled, appointed and dismissed, and dictated through the
door to a nervous stenographer. He cursed people in their
absence, calling them saboteurs and communist. It was my task
to put his calls through his valet stood within splashing
distance holding a white telephone. Joachim von Ribbentrop
believed only ministers ranked above him, everyone else, including
his ambassadorial colleagues, had to kept waiting on the line.
Sometimes they did not share this view and rang off.
At about eleven-thirty he would finally appear at his office.
His waiting room would be crammed with impatient messengers,
visitors, diplomats, officials... I had to console them with
feeble excuses such as that His Excellency was not very well,
or engaged in an urgent state call to Berlin. For the rest
of the morning he listened to reports from members of the
Embassy staff, unless I had to accompany him to the British
Foreign Office. When Joachim von Ribbentrop strutted through
the Foreign Office corridors like a peacock, his head thrown
back, it was a miracle that he did not fall over. His deportment
aroused great mirth among the British officials, who often
grinned at me with a pitying look.
To help with his move to London, and with the design of the
new German Embassy Joachim von Ribbentrop had built the existing
Embassy was insufficiently grand for Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Joachim von Ribbentrop , at his wife's suggestion, hired a
Berlin interior decorator named Martin Luther. Luther proved
to be a master intriguer and became Joachim von Ribbentrop's
favourite hatchet man.
Joachim von Ribbentrop did not understand the King's limited
role in government he thought King Edward VIII could dictate
British foreign policy. He convinced
Adolf
Hitler that he had Edward's support but this, like his
belief that he had impressed British society, was a tragic
delusion. Joachim von Ribbentrop often woefully misunderstood
both British politics and society. During the abdication crisis
of December 1936, Joachim von Ribbentrop reported to Berlin
that the reason the crisis had occurred was an anti-German
Jewish-Masonic-reactionary conspiracy to depose Edward whom
Joachim von Ribbentrop represented as a staunch friend of
Germany, and that civil war would soon break out in Britain
between the King's supporters and those of Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin's. Joachim von Ribbentrop's civil-war statements
were greeted with incredulity by those British people who
heard them. This led to a false sense of confidence about
British intentions with which he unwittingly deceived his
Adolf Hitler.
Joachim von Ribbentrop's habit of summoning tailors from the
best British firms, making them wait for hours and then sending
them away without seeing him with instructions to return the
next day, only to repeat the process, did immense damage to
his reputation in British high society.London's tailors retaliated
for this abuse by telling all their well off clients that
Joachim von Ribbentrop was impossible to deal with. In an
interview, Spitzy stated Joachim von Ribbentrop behaved very
stupidly and very pompously and the British don't like pompous
people. In the same interview, Spitzy called Joachim von Ribbentrop
pompous, conceited and not too intelligent, and stated he
was an utterly insufferable man to work for. In addition,
the fact that Joachim von Ribbentrop chose to spend as little
time as possible in London in order to stay close to
Adolf
Hitler irritated the British Foreign Office immensely,
as Joachim von Ribbentrop's frequent absences prevented the
handling of many routine diplomatic matters.Punch referred
to him the Wandering Aryan for his frequent trips home. As
Joachim von Ribbentrop alienated more and more people in Britain,
Hermann
Göring warned
Adolf
Hitler that Joachim von Ribbentrop was a stupid ass.
Adolf
Hitler dismissed
Hermann
Göring's concerns but after all, he knows quite a
lot of important people in England, leading
Hermann
Göring to reply Mein Führer, that may be right,
but the bad thing is, they know him.
In February 1937, Joachim von Ribbentrop committed a notable
social gaffe by unexpectedly greeting King George VI with
a stiff armed National Socialist salute, the gesture nearly
knocked over the King, who was walking forward to shake Joachim
von Ribbentrop's hand. Joachim von Ribbentrop further compounded
the damage to his image and caused a minor crisis in Anglo
German relations by insisting that henceforward all German
diplomats were to greet heads of state with the German greeting,
who were in turn to return the fascist salute. The crisis
was resolved when
Konstantin
von Neurath pointed out to
Adolf
Hitler that under Joachim von Ribbentrop's rules, if the
Soviet Ambassador were to give the communist clenched-fist
salute, then
Adolf
Hitler would be obliged to return it. On
Konstantin
von Neurath's advice,
Adolf
Hitler disavowed Joachim von Ribbentrop's demand that
King George receive and give the German greeting.
Most of Joachim von Ribbentrop's time was spent either demanding
that Britain sign the Anti-Comintern Pact or that London return
the former German colonies in Africa.But he also devoted considerable
time to courting what he called the men of influence as the
best way to achieve an Anglo German alliance. Joachim von
Ribbentrop believed the British aristocracy comprised some
sort of secret society that ruled from behind the scenes,
and if he could befriend enough members of Britain's secret
government, he could bring about the alliance. Almost all
of the initially favourable reports Joachim von Ribbentrop
provided to Berlin about the alliance's prospects were based
on friendly remarks about the New Germany from various British
aristocrats like Lord Londonderry and Lord Lothian the rather
cool reception that Joachim von Ribbentrop received from British
Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats did not make much
of an impression on him at first. In 1935, Sir Eric Phipps,
the British Ambassador to Germany, complained to London about
Joachim von Ribbentrop's British associates in the Anglo German
Fellowship, that they created false German hopes as in regards
to British friendship and caused a reaction against it in
England, where public opinion is very naturally hostile to
the National Socialist regime and its methods. In September
1937, the British Consul in Munich, writing about the group
Joachim von Ribbentrop had brought to the Nuremberg Party
Rally, reported that there were some serious persons of standing
among them and that an equal number of Joachim von Ribbentrop's
British contingent were eccentrics and few, if any, could
be called representatives of serious English thought, either
political or social, while they most certainly lacked any
political or social influence in England. In June 1937, when
Lord Mount Temple, the Chairman of the Anglo German Fellowship,
asked to see the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
after meeting
Adolf
Hitler in a visit arranged by Joachim von Ribbentrop ,
Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Undersecretary
wrote a memo stating that.
The Prime Minister should certainly not see Lord Mount Temple
nor should the Secretary of State. We really must put a stop
to this eternal butting in of amateurs and Lord Mount Temple
is a particularly silly one. These activities which are practically
confined to Germany render impossible the task of diplomacy.
After Vansittart's memo, members of the Anglo German Fellowship
ceased to see Cabinet ministers after going on Joachim von
Ribbentrop arranged trips to Germany.
In February 1937, before a meeting with the Lord Privy Seal,
Lord Halifax, Joachim von Ribbentrop suggested to
Adolf
Hitler that Germany, Italy, and Japan begin a worldwide
propaganda campaign with the aim of forcing Britain to return
the former German colonies in Africa.
Adolf
Hitler turned down this idea of Joachim von Ribbentrop's,
but nonetheless during his meeting with Lord Halifax, Joachim
von Ribbentrop spent much of the meeting demanding that Britain
sign an alliance with Germany and return the former German
colonies. The German historian Klaus Hildebrand noted that
as early as the Joachim von Ribbentrop Halifax meeting the
differing foreign policy views of
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop were starting to emerge
with Joachim von Ribbentrop more interested in restoring the
pre-1914 German Imperium in Africa than conquest of Eastern
Europe. Following the lead of Andreas Hillgruber, who argued
that
Adolf
Hitler had a Stufenplan stage by stage plan for world
conquest, Hildebrand argued that Joachim von Ribbentrop may
not have fully understood what
Adolf
Hitler's Stufenplan was, or alternatively in pressing
so hard for colonial restoration was trying to score a personal
success that might improve his standing with
Adolf
Hitler. In March 1937, Joachim von Ribbentrop attracted
much adverse comment in the British press when he gave a speech
at the Leipzig Trade Fair in Leipzig, where he declared that
German economic prosperity would be satisfied either through
the restoration of the former German colonial possessions,
or by means of the German people's own strength. The implied
threat that if colonial restoration did not occur, then the
Germans would take back by force their former colonies attracted
a large deal of hostile commentary on the inappropriateness
of an Ambassador threatening his host country in such a manner.
His aggressive and overbearing manner towards everyone except
his wife and
Adolf
Hitler meant that to know him was to dislike him. His
negotiating style, a strange mix of bullying bluster and icy
coldness coupled with lengthy monologues praising
Adolf
Hitler, alienated many. The American historian Gordon
A. Craig once observed that of all the voluminous memoir literature
of the diplomatic scene of 1930s Europe, there are only two
positive references to Joachim von Ribbentrop . Of the two
references, General
Leo
Geyr von Schweppenburg, the German military attaché
in London, commented that Joachim von Ribbentrop had been
a brave soldier in World War I, while the wife of the Italian
Ambassador to Germany, Elisabetta Cerruti, called Joachim
von Ribbentrop one of the most diverting of the National Socialists.
In both cases the praise was limited, with Cerruti going on
to write that only in the Third Reich was it possible for
someone as superficial as Joachim von Ribbentrop to rise to
be a minister of foreign affairs, while
Leo
Geyr von Schweppenburg called Joachim von Ribbentrop an
absolute disaster as Ambassador in London. The British historian-television
producer Laurence Rees noted for his 1997 series The Nazis,
A Warning from History that every single person interviewed
for the series who knew Joachim von Ribbentrop expressed a
passionate hatred for him. One German diplomat, Herbert Richter,
called Joachim von Ribbentrop lazy and worthless while another,
Manfred von Schröder, was quoted as saying Joachim von
Ribbentrop was vain and ambitious. Rees concluded that No
other National Socialist was so hated by his colleagues.
In November 1937, Joachim von Ribbentrop was placed in a highly
embarrassing situation when his forceful advocacy of the return
of the former German colonies led to the British Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden and the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos offering
to open talks on returning the former German colonies, in
return for which the Germans would make binding commitments
to respect their borders in Central and Eastern Europe. Since
Adolf Hitler
was not really interested in obtaining the former colonies,
especially if the price was a brake on expansion into Eastern
Europe, Joachim von Ribbentrop was forced to turn down the
Anglo-French offer that he had largely brought about. Immediately
after turning down the Anglo-French offer on colonial restoration,
Joachim von Ribbentrop for reasons of pure malice ordered
the Reichskolonialbund to increase the agitation for the former
German colonies, a move which exasperated both the Foreign
Office and Quai d'Orsay.
Joachim von Ribbentrop's inability to achieve the alliance
that he had been sent out for frustrated him, as he feared
it could cost him
Adolf
Hitler's favour, and it made him a bitter Anglophobe.
As the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, noted
in his diary in late 1937, Joachim von Ribbentrop had come
to hate Britain with all the fury of a woman scorned. Joachim
von Ribbentrop and
Adolf
Hitler for that matter never understood that British foreign
policy aimed at the appeasement of Germany, not an alliance.
When Joachim von Ribbentrop travelled to Rome in November
1937 to oversee Italy's adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact,
he made clear to his hosts that the pact was really directed
against Britain. As Count Ciano noted in his diary, the Anti-Comintern
Pact was anti-Communist in theory, but in fact unmistakably
anti-British. Believing himself to be in a state of disgrace
with
Adolf
Hitler over his failure to achieve the British alliance,
Joachim von Ribbentrop spent December 1937 in a state of depression,
and together with his wife, wrote two lengthy documents for
Adolf Hitler
denouncing Britain. In the first of his two reports to
Adolf
Hitler, which was presented on 2 January 1938, Joachim
von Ribbentrop stated that England is our most dangerous enemy.
In the same report, Joachim von Ribbentrop advised
Adolf
Hitler to abandon the idea of a British alliance, and
instead embrace the idea of an alliance of Germany, Japan,
and Italy, to destroy the British Empire.
Joachim von Ribbentrop wrote in his Memorandum for the
Adolf
Hitler that a change in the status quo in the East to
Germany's advantage can only be accomplished by force, and
that the best way to achieve this change was to build a global
anti-British alliance system. Besides converting the Anti-Comintern
Pact into an anti-British military alliance, Joachim von Ribbentrop
argued that German foreign policy should work to furthermore,
winning over all states whose interests conform directly or
indirectly to ours. By the last statement, Joachim von Ribbentrop
clearly implied that the Soviet Union should be included in
the anti-British alliance system he had proposed.
Rumoured affair with Wallis Simpson
Joachim von Ribbentrop's time in London was also marked by
scandal. Many members of Britain's upper classes believed
that he was having an affair with Wallis Simpson, British
businessmen Edward Simpson's wife and King Edward VIII's mistress.
According to files declassified by the United States Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Mrs. Simpson was believed to
be a regular guest at Joachim von Ribbentrop's social gatherings
at the German Embassy in London where it was thought the two
struck up a romantic relationship. The Americans believed
that Joachim von Ribbentrop used Simpson's access to the King
to funnel important information about the British to his superiors.
The Germans supposedly paid Simpson for this information and
she was happy to continue the arrangement so long as she was
paid. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) took the matter
seriously enough to advise President Roosevelt of their findings
he once commented to a confidante that Simpson played around.
With the Joachim von Ribbentrop.
The truth of the matter is still very much in doubt. Simpson,
who later married the former king he had abdicated to marry
her and was known in later life as the Duchess of Windsor,
noted in her book The Heart Has Its Reasons that she met Joachim
von Ribbentrop on only two occasions and had no personal relationship
with him.
Foreign Minister of the Reich
In early 1938
Adolf
Hitler asserted his control of the military-foreign policy
apparatus by, in part, sacking
Konstantin
von Neurath. At this point,
Adolf
Hitler was not carrying out a foreign policy that had
carried a high risk of war, but was now carrying out a foreign
policy aiming at war. And Joachim von Ribbentrop was deemed
the more willing instrument to realise
Adolf
Hitler's foreign-policy aims.
On 4 February 1938, Joachim von Ribbentrop succeeded
Konstantin
von Neurath as Foreign Minister. Joachim von Ribbentrop's
appointment was generally taken at the time and since as indicating
that German foreign policy was moving in a more radical direction.
In contrast to
Konstantin
von Neurath's less bellicose and cautious nature, Joachim
von Ribbentrop unequivocally supported war in 1938 to 1939.
Joachim von Ribbentrop's time as Foreign Minister can be divided
into three periods. In the first, from 1938 to 1939, he tried
to persuade other states to align themselves with Germany
for the coming war. In the second, from 1939 to 1943, Joachim
von Ribbentrop attempted to persuade other states to enter
the war on Germany's side or at least maintain pro-German
neutrality. In the final phase, from 1943 to 1945, he had
the task of trying to keep Germany's allies from leaving her
side. During the course of all three periods, Joachim von
Ribbentrop met frequently with leaders and diplomats from
Italy, Japan, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, and Hungary. During
all this time, Joachim von Ribbentrop feuded with various
other National Socialist leaders at one point in August 1939
an armed clash took place between supporters of Joachim von
Ribbentrop and those of Propaganda Minister
Joseph
Goebbels over the control of a radio station in Berlin
that was meant to broadcast German propaganda abroad
Joseph
Goebbels claimed exclusive control of all propaganda both
at home and abroad whereas Joachim von Ribbentrop asserted
a claim to monopolise all German propaganda abroad. As Foreign
Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop was highly concerned with
counteracting the damage that he himself inflicted on the
Foreign Office's influence. Friedrich Gaus, chief of the Foreign
Office's legal division, testified at Nuremberg that.
He Joachim von Ribbentrop used to say that everything the
Foreign Office lost in the way of terrain under
Konstantin
von Neurath he wanted to win back and, with all his passion,
he fought for this aim in a manner which can only be understood
by somebody who actually saw it.
Gaus went on to testify that My main activity was 90 per cent
concerned with competency conflicts. And as time went by,
Joachim von Ribbentrop started to oust the Foreign Office's
old diplomats from their senior positions and replace them
with men from the Dienststelle. As early as 1938, 32% of the
offices in the Foreign Ministry were held by men who previously
served in the Dienststelle.Joachim von Ribbentrop was widely
disliked by the old diplomats. Herbert von Dirksen, who was
German Ambassador in London from 1938 to1939, described his
predecessor, Joachim von Ribbentrop , as an unwholesome, half
comical figure. Herbert von Dirksen was later to write that
he at first hoped that now that Joachim von Ribbentrop was
Foreign Minister this would mean the end of the Dienststelle
for no man can intrigue against himself. That Joachim von
Ribbentrop was able to perform even this miracle only came
home to me much later.Many of the people Joachim von Ribbentrop
appointed to head German embassies, especially the amateur
diplomats from the Dienststelle, were grossly incompetent.
This limited the Foreign Office's effectiveness. Joachim von
Ribbentrop's first move as Foreign Minister was to sack Mackensen
who, as
Konstantin
von Neurath's son-in-law, was totally unacceptable to
him as State Secretary and replace him with Baron Ernst von
Weizsäcker , a former naval officer turned career diplomat
who joined the Foreign Office in 1920. Though Joachim von
Ribbentrop had competed with the Foreign Office in the past,
his appointment as Foreign Minister was welcomed by the career
diplomats who saw Joachim von Ribbentrop as a National Socialist
champion who would improve the agency's standing with
Adolf
Hitler. The Foreign Office took Ernst von Weizsäcker
's appointment as a sign that Joachim von Ribbentrop was a
man, who, though personally disagreeable and unpleasant, was
one they could work under, no radical changes were in the
offing. Besides appointing Ernst von Weizsäcker State
Secretary, Joachim von Ribbentrop fired Ulrich von Hassell
as Ambassador to Italy and replaced him with Mackensen, appointed
Herbert von Dirksen to London to serve as his successor as
Ambassador to Britain and prompted the military attaché
in Tokyo General Eugen Ott to Ambassador to replace Herbert
von Dirksen. The appointment of a general as Ambassador to
Japan reflected Joachim von Ribbentrop's belief that German
and Japanese relations were in the future to be of a mainly
military nature. As time went by, Joachim von Ribbentrop took
to restructuring the Foreign Office by creating new offices
like the Agency for News Analysis which fought with the Propaganda
Ministry for control of German propaganda abroad, and by creating
an inner circle of loyalists, many of whom had come from the
Dienststelle.
One of Joachim von Ribbentrop's first acts as Foreign Minister
was to achieve a total volte-face in Germany's Far Eastern
policies. Joachim von Ribbentrop was instrumental in February
1938 in persuading
Adolf
Hitler to reorganise the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo
and to renounce German claims upon her former colonies in
the Pacific, which were now held by Japan.By April 1938, Joachim
von Ribbentrop had ended all German arms shipments to China
and had all of the German Army officers serving with the Kuomintang
government of Chiang Kai-shek recalled with the threat that
the families of the officers in China would be sent to concentration
camps if the officers did not return to Germany immediately.
In return, the Germans received little thanks from the Japanese,
who refused to allow any new German businesses to be set up
in the part of China they had occupied, and continued with
their policy of attempting to exclude all existing German
together with all other Western businesses from Japanese-occupied
China. At the same time, the ending of the informal Sino-German
alliance led Chiang to terminate all of the concessions and
contracts held by German companies in Kuomintang China.
Munich Agreement and Czechoslovakia's destruction
Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker the State Secretary 1938 to
1943 opposed the general trend in German foreign policy towards
attacking Czechoslovakia, he feared that it might cause a
general war that Germany would lose. Ernst von Weizsäcker
had no moral objections to the idea of destroying Czechoslovakia
he was only opposed to the timing of the attack. Ernst von
Weizsäcker favoured the idea of a chemical destruction
of Czechoslovakia in which Germany, Hungary, and Poland would
close their frontiers to destablise Czechoslovakia economically.
He strongly disliked Joachim von Ribbentrop's idea of a mechanical
destruction of Czechoslovakia via war, which he saw as too
risky. But despite all of their reservations and fears about
Joachim von Ribbentrop whom they saw as recklessly seeking
to plunge Germany into a general war before the Reich was
ready neither Ernst von Weizsäcker nor any of the other
professional diplomats were prepared to confront their chief.
Before the Anglo German summit at Berchtesgaden on 15 September
1938, Henderson and Ernst von Weizsäcker worked out a
private arrangement that
Adolf
Hitler and Chamberlain were to meet with no advisers present
as a way of excluding the ultra hawkish Joachim von Ribbentrop
from attending the talks.
Adolf
Hitler's interpreter Paul Schmidt later recalled that
it was felt that our Foreign Minister would prove a disturbing
element at the Berchtesgaden summit. In a moment of pique
at his exclusion from the Chamberlain
Adolf
Hitler meeting, Joachim von Ribbentrop refused to hand
over to Chamberlain Schmidt's notes of the summit, a move
which caused much annoyance on the British side. Joachim von
Ribbentrop spent the last weeks of September 1938 looking
forward very much to the German-Czechoslovak war he expected
to break out on 1 October 1938. Joachim von Ribbentrop regarded
the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat for Germany, as
it deprived Germany of the opportunity to wage the war to
destroy Czechoslovakia that Joachim von Ribbentrop wanted
to see the Sudetenland issue, which was the ostensible subject
of the German-Czechoslovak dispute, had been just a pretext
for German aggression. During the Munich Conference, Joachim
von Ribbentrop spent much of his time brooding unhappily in
the corners. Joachim von Ribbentrop told the head of
Adolf
Hitler's Press Office, Fritz Hesse, that the Munich Agreement
was first-class stupidity. All it means is that we have to
fight the English in a year, when they will be better armed.
It would have been much better if war had come now. Like
Adolf
Hitler, Joachim von Ribbentrop was determined that in
the next crisis, Germany would not have its professed demands
met in another Munich-type summit, and that the next crisis
to be caused by Germany would result in the war that Chamberlain
had cheated the Germans out of at Munich. In the aftermath
of Munich,
Adolf
Hitler was in a violently anti-British mood caused in
part by his rage over being cheated out of the war to annihilate
Czechoslovakia that he very much wanted to have in 1938, and
in part by his realisation that Britain would neither ally
herself nor stand aside in regard to Germany's ambition to
dominate Europe.As a consequence, after Munich, Britain was
considered to be the main enemy of the Reich, and as a result,
the influence of ardently Anglo phobic Joachim von Ribbentrop
correspondingly rose with
Adolf
Hitler.
Partly for economic reasons, and partly out of fury over being
cheated out of war in 1938, in early 1939,
Adolf
Hitler decided to destroy the rump state of Czechoslovakia
as Czechoslovakia had been renamed in October 1938. Joachim
von Ribbentrop played an important role in setting in motion
the crisis that was to result in the end of Jacko Slovakia
by ordering German diplomats in Bratislava to contact Father
Jozef Tiso, the Premier of the Slovak regional government,
and pressuring him to declare independence from Prague. When
Tiso proved reluctant to do so on the grounds that the autonomy
that had existed since October 1938 was sufficient for him,
and to completely sever links with the Czechs would leave
Slovakia open to being annexed by Hungary, Joachim von Ribbentrop
had the German Embassy in Budapest contact the Regent, Admiral
Miklós Horthy. Admiral Horthy was advised that the
Germans might be open to having more of Hungary restored to
former borders, and that the Hungarians should best start
concentrating troops on their northern border at once if they
were serious about changing the frontiers. Upon hearing of
the Hungarian mobilisation, Tiso was presented with the choice
of either declaring independence with the understanding that
the new state would be in the German sphere of influence,
or seeing all of Slovakia absorbed into Hungary. When as a
result, Tiso had the Slovak regional government issue a declaration
of independence on 14 March 1939, the ensuing crisis in Czech-Slovak
relations was used as a pretext to summon the Czechoslovak
President Emil Hácha to Berlin over his failure to
keep order in his country. On the night of 14-15 March 1939,
Joachim von Ribbentrop played a key role in the German annexation
of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia by bullying the Czechoslovak
President Hácha into transforming his country into
a German protectorate at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery
in Berlin. On 15 March 1939, German troops occupied the Czech
area of Czechoslovakia, which then became the Reich Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia. On 20 March 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop
summoned the Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbys
to Berlin and informed him that if a Lithuanian plenipotentiary
did not arrive at once to negotiate turning over the Memelland
to Germany the Luftwaffe would raze Kaunas to the ground.
As a result of Joachim von Ribbentrop's ultimatum on 23 March,
the Lithuanians agreed to return Memel (modern Klaipeda, Lithuania)
to Germany.
In March 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop assigned the largely
ethnic Ukrainian Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czechoslovakia,
which had just proclaimed its independence as the Republic
of Carpatho-Ukraine, to Hungary, which then proceeded to annex
it after a short war. The significance of this lies in that
there had been many fears in the Soviet Union in the 1930s
that the Germans would use Ukrainian nationalism as a tool
for breaking up the Soviet Union. The establishment of an
autonomous Ukrainian region in Czechoslovakia in October 1938
had promoted a major Soviet media campaign against its existence
on the grounds that this was part of a Western plot to support
separatism in the Soviet Ukraine. By allowing the Hungarians
to destroy Europe's only Ukrainian state, Joachim von Ribbentrop
had signified that Germany was not interested at least for
the moment in sponsoring Ukrainian nationalism. This in turn
helped to improve German-Soviet relations by demonstrating
that German foreign policy was now primarily anti-Western
rather than anti-Soviet.
Initially, Germany hoped to transform Poland into a satellite
state, but by March 1939 German demands had been rejected
by the Poles three times, which led
Adolf
Hitler to decide, with enthusiastic support from Joachim
von Ribbentrop , upon the destruction of Poland as the main
German foreign policy goal of 1939. On 21 March 1939,
Adolf
Hitler first went public with his demand that Danzig rejoin
the Reich and for extraterritorial roads across the Polish
Corridor. This marked a significant escalation of the German
pressure on Poland, which until then had been confined to
private meetings between German and Polish diplomats. That
same day, on 21 March 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop presented
a set of demands to the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski
about Poland allowing the Free City of Danzig to return to
Germany in such violent and extreme language that it led to
the Poles to fear their country was on the verge of an immediate
German attack.Joachim von Ribbentrop had used such extreme
language, in particular his remark that if Germany had a different
policy towards the Soviet Union then Poland would cease to
exist, that it led to the Poles ordering partial mobilisation
and placing their armed forces on the highest state of alert
on 23 March 1939. In a protest note at Joachim von Ribbentrop's
behaviour, Colonel Beck reminded the German Foreign Minister
that Poland was an independent country and was not some sort
of German protectorate which Joachim von Ribbentrop could
bully at will. Joachim von Ribbentrop in turn sent out instructions
to the German Ambassador in Warsaw, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke,
that if Poland agreed to the German demands, then Germany
would ensure that Poland could partition Slovakia with Hungary
and be ensured of German support for annexing the Ukraine.
If the Poles rejected his offer, then Poland would be considered
an enemy of the Reich. On March 26, in an extremely stormy
meeting with the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski, Joachim
von Ribbentrop accused the Poles of attempting to bully Germany
by their partial mobilisation and violently attacked them
for only offering consideration of the German demand about
the extraterritorial roads. The meeting ended with Joachim
von Ribbentrop screaming that if Poland were to invade the
Free City, then Germany would go to war to destroy Poland.
When the news of Joachim von Ribbentrop's remarks was leaked
to the Polish press despite Colonel Beck's order to the censors
on 27 March, it caused anti-German riots in Poland with the
local N.S.D.A.P headquarters in the ethnically mixed town
of Lininco destroyed by a mob. On 28 March Colonel Beck told
Hans-Adolf von Moltke that if any attempt to change the status
of Danzig unilaterally would be regarded by Poland as a casus
belli. Though the Germans were not planning an attack on Poland
in March 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop's bullying behaviour
towards the Poles destroyed whatever faint chance there was
of Poland allowing Danzig to return to Germany.
The German occupation of the Czech area of Czechoslovakia
on the Ides of March, in total contravention of the Munich
Agreement that had been signed less than six months before,
infuriated British and French public opinion and lost Germany
all sympathy. Such was the state of public fury that it appeared
possible for several days afterwards that the Chamberlain
government might fall due to a backbencher rebellion. Even
Joachim von Ribbentrop s standard line that Germany was only
reacting to an unjust Versailles treaty, and really only wanted
peace with everyone, which had worked so well in the past,
failed to carry weight. Reflecting the changed mood, the Conservative
M.P Alfred Duff Cooper wrote in a letter to The Times.
Some of us are getting rather tired of the sanctimonious attitude
which seeks to take upon our shoulders the blame for every
crime committed in Europe. If Germany had been left stronger
in 1919 she would sooner have been in a position to do what
she is doing today.
Moreover, the British government had genuinely believed in
the German claim that it was only the Sudetenland that concerned
them, and that Germany was not seeking to dominate Europe.
By occupying the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, Germany lost
all credibility with its claim to be only righting the alleged
wrongs of Versailles. Shortly afterwards, false reports spread
in mid-March 1939 by the Romanian minister in London, Virgil
Tilea, that his country was on the verge of an immediate German
attack, led to a dramatic U-turn in British policy of resisting
commitments in Eastern Europe. Joachim von Ribbentrop denied
correctly that Germany was going to invade Romania, but since
his denials were issued in almost identical language to the
denials that he had issued in early March, when he denied
that anything was being planned against the Czechs, this increased
rather than diminished the to Romanian war scare
of March 1939. From the British point of view, it was regarded
as highly desirable to keep Romania and its oil out of German
hands since Germany had hardly any natural supplies of oil,
the ability of the Royal Navy to successfully impose a blockade
represented a British trump card both to deter war, and if
necessary, win a war. If Germany were to occupy oil-rich Romania,
this would undercut all of the British strategic assumptions
based on Germany's need to import oil from the Americas. Since
Poland was regarded as the East European state with the most
powerful army, it became imperative to tie Poland to Britain
as the best way of ensuring Polish support for Romania, since
it was the obvious quid pro quo that Britain would have to
do something for Polish security if the Poles were to be induced
to do something for Romanian security. On 31 March 1939, the
British Prime Minister Chamberlain announced before the House
of Commons the British to guarantee of Poland, which
committed Britain to go to war to defend Polish independence,
though pointedly the to guarantee excluded Polish
frontiers. As a result of the guarantee of Poland,
Adolf
Hitler began to speak with increasing frequency of a British
encirclement policy, and used the to encirclement
policy as the excuse for denouncing in a speech before the
Reichstag on 28 April 1939 the A.G.N.A and the Non-Aggression
Pact with Poland.
In late March, Joachim von Ribbentrop had the German chargé
d'affaires in Turkey, Hans Kroll, start pressuring Turkey
into an alliance with Germany. The Turks assured Hans Kroll
that they had no objection to Germany making the Balkans their
economic sphere of influence, but would regard any move to
make the Balkans into a sphere of German political influence
as most unwelcome.
In April 1939, when Joachim von Ribbentrop announced at a
secret meeting of the Foreign Office's senior staff that Germany
was ending talks with the Poles and was instead going to destroy
Poland in an operation late that year, the news was greeted
joyfully by those present. Anti Polish feelings had long been
rampant in the agency, and so in marked contrast to their
cool attitude about attacking Czechoslovakia in 1938, diplomats
like Ernst von Weizsäcker were highly enthusiastic about
the prospect of war with Poland in 1939.Professional diplomats
like Ernst von Weizsäcker who had never accepted the
legitimacy of Poland, which they saw as an abomination created
by the Versailles treaty, were whole hearted in their support
of a war to wipe Poland off the map. This degree of unity
within the German government with both the diplomats and the
military united in their support of
Adolf
Hitler's anti-Polish policy, which stood in contrast to
their views the previous year about destroying Czechoslovakia,
very much encouraged
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop with their chosen course
of action.
In April 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop received intelligence
that Britain and Turkey were negotiating an alliance intended
to keep Germany out of the Balkans.On April 23, 1939 the Turkish
Foreign Minister Sükrü Saracoglu told the British
Ambassador of his nation's fears of Italian claims of the
Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum and German control of the Balkans,
and suggested an Anglo Soviet Turkish alliance as the best
way of countering the Axis.As the Germans had broken the Turkish
diplomatic codes, Joachim von Ribbentrop was well aware as
he warned in a circular to German embassies that Anglo Turkish
talks had gone much further than what the Turks would care
to tell us. Joachim von Ribbentrop appointed
Franz
von Papen Germany's ambassador in Ankara with instructions
to win Turkey to an alliance with Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop
had been attempting to appoint
Franz
von Papen as an Ambassador to Turkey since April 1938.
His first attempt ended in failure when the Turkish President
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who remembered
Franz
von Papen well with considerable distaste from World War
I, refused to accept him as Ambassador, complaining in private
the nomination of
Franz
von Papen must have been meant as some sort of German
sick joke. The German Embassy in Ankara had been vacant ever
since the retirement of the previous ambassador Friedrich
von Keller in November 1938, and Joachim von Ribbentrop was
only able to get the Turks to accept
Franz
von Papen as Ambassador when the Turkish Foreign Minister
Sükrü Saracoglu complained to Hans Kroll in April
1939 about when the Germans were ever going to sent a new
ambassador.
Franz
von Papen attempt to address Turkish fears of Italian
expansionism by getting Joachim von Ribbentrop to have Count
Galeazzo Ciano promise the Turks that they had nothing to
fear from Italy backfired when the Turks found the Italo-German
effort to be both patronising and insulting.
Instead of focusing on talking to the Turks, Joachim von Ribbentrop
and
Franz
von Papen became entangled in a feud over
Franz
von Papen demand that he by-pass Joachim von Ribbentrop
and send his dispatches straight to
Adolf
Hitler. As a former Chancellor,
Franz
von Papen had granted this privilege of bypassing the
Foreign Minister while he was Ambassador to Austria. Joachim
von Ribbentrop's friendship with
Franz
von Papen, which went back to 1918, ended over this issue.
At the same time, Joachim von Ribbentrop took to shouting
at the Turkish Ambassador in Berlin, Mehemet Hamdi Arpag,
as part of the effort to win Turkey over as a German ally.
Joachim von Ribbentrop believed that Turks were so stupid
that only by shouting at them could one make them understand.
One of the consequences of Joachim von Ribbentrop's heavy-handed
behaviour was the signing of the Anglo Turkish alliance of
12 May 1939.
From early 1939 onwards, Joachim von Ribbentrop had become
the leading advocate within the German government of reaching
an understanding with the Soviet Union as the best way of
pursuing both the short-term anti-Polish, and long-term anti-British
foreign policy goals. Joachim von Ribbentrop first seems to
have considered the idea of a pact with the Soviet Union after
an unsuccessful visit to Warsaw in January 1939, when the
Poles again refused Joachim von Ribbentrop's demands about
Danzig, the extraterritorial roads across the Polish Corridor
and the Anti-Comintern Pact. During the Molotov-Joachim von
Ribbentrop Pact negotiations, Joachim von Ribbentrop was overjoyed
by a report from his Ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich
Werner von der Schulenburg, of a speech by the Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin before the 18th Party Congress in March 1939
that was strongly anti-Western, which Schulenburg reported
meant that the Soviet Union might be seeking an accord with
Germany. Joachim von Ribbentrop followed up Schulenburg's
report by sending Dr. Julius Schnurre of the Foreign Office's
trade department to negotiate a German-Soviet economic agreement.
At the same time, Joachim von Ribbentrop's efforts to convert
the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British alliance met
with considerable hostility from the Japanese over the course
of the winter of 1938 to1939, but with the Italians Joachim
von Ribbentrop enjoyed some apparent success. Because of Japanese
opposition to participation in an anti-British alliance, Joachim
von Ribbentrop decided to settle for a bilateral German-Italian
anti-British treaty. Joachim von Ribbentrop's efforts were
crowned with success with the signing of the Pact of Steel
in May 1939, though this was accomplished only by falsely
assuring Mussolini that there would be no war for the next
three years.
Pact with the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the Second
World War
Joachim von Ribbentrop played a key role in the conclusion
of a Soviet-German Non-aggression pact, the Molotov-Joachim
von Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939, and in the diplomatic action
surrounding the attack on Poland. In public, Joachim von Ribbentrop
expressed great fury at the Polish refusal to allow for Danzig's
return to the Reich, or to grant Polish permission for the
extraterritorial highways, but since these matters were only
intended after March 1939 to be a pretext for German aggression,
Joachim von Ribbentrop always refused in private to allow
for any talks between German and Polish diplomats about these
matters. It was Joachim von Ribbentrop's fear that if German-Polish
talks did take place, there was the danger that the Poles
might back down and agree to the German demands as the Czechoslovaks
had done in 1938 under Anglo-French pressure, and thereby
deprive the Germans of their excuse for aggression. To further
block German-Polish diplomatic talks, Joachim von Ribbentrop
had the German Ambassador to Poland, Count Hans-Adolf von
Moltke, recalled, and refused to see the Polish Ambassador,
Józef Lipski. On 25 May 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop
sent a secret message to Moscow to tell the Soviet Foreign
Commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, that if Germany attacked Poland
Russia's special interests would be taken into consideration.
Throughout 1939, in private,
Adolf
Hitler always referred to Britain as his main opponent,
but portrayed the coming destruction of Poland as a necessary
prelude to any war with Britain. A notable contradiction existed
in
Adolf Hitler's
strategic planning between embarking on an anti-British foreign
policy, whose major instruments consisted of a vastly expanded
Kriegsmarine and a Luftwaffe capable of a strategic bombing
offensive that would take several years to build e.g. Plan
Z for expanding the Kriegsmarine was a five year plan, and
engaging in reckless short-term actions such as attacking
Poland that were likely to cause a general war. Joachim von
Ribbentrop , for his part, because of his status as the National
Socialist British expert, resolved
Adolf
Hitler's dilemma by supporting the anti-British line and
by repeatedly advising
Adolf
Hitler that Britain would not go to war for Poland in
1939. Joachim von Ribbentrop informed
Adolf
Hitler that any war with Poland would last for only 24
hours, and that the British would be so stunned with this
display of German power that they would not honour their commitments.
Along the same lines, Joachim von Ribbentrop told the Italian
Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano on 5 May 1939 It is
certain that within a few months not one Frenchman nor a single
Englishman will go to war for Poland. Joachim von Ribbentrop
supported his analysis of the situation by only showing
Adolf
Hitler diplomatic dispatches that supported his view that
neither Britain or France would honour their commitments to
Poland. In this, Joachim von Ribbentrop was particularly supported
by the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, who
reported that Chamberlain knew the social structure of Britain,
even the conception of the British Empire, would not survive
the chaos of even a victorious war, and so would back down
over Poland. Furthermore, Joachim von Ribbentrop had the German
Embassy in London provide translations from pro-appeasement
newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express for
Adolf
Hitler's benefit, which had the effect of making it seem
that British public opinion was more strongly against going
to war for Poland then was actually the case.The British historian
Victor Rothwell wrote that the newspapers that Joachim von
Ribbentrop used to provide his press summaries for
Adolf
Hitler, such as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail,
were out of touch not only with British public opinion, but
also with British government policy in regard to Poland.The
press summaries Joachim von Ribbentrop provided were particularly
important, as Joachim von Ribbentrop had managed to convince
Adolf Hitler
that the British government secretly controlled the British
press, and just as in Germany, nothing appeared in the British
press that the British government did not want to appear.
Furthermore, the Germans had broken the British diplomatic
codes and were reading the messages between the Foreign Office
in London to and from the Embassy in Warsaw. The decrypts
showed that there was much tension in Anglo Polish relations
with the British pressuring the Poles to allow Danzig to rejoin
the Reich and the Poles staunchly resisting all efforts to
pressure them into concessions to Germany. On the basis of
such decrypts,
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop believed that the British
were bluffing with their warnings that they would go to war
to defend Polish independence. During the summer of 1939,
Joachim von Ribbentrop sabotaged all efforts at a peaceful
solution to the Danzig dispute, leading the American historian
Gerhard Weinberg to comment that perhaps Chamberlain's haggard
appearance did him more credit than Joachim von Ribbentrop's
beaming smile as the countdown to a war that would kill millions
inexorably gathered pace.
Neville Chamberlain's European Policy in 1939 was based upon
creating a peace front of alliances linking Western and Eastern
European states to serve as a tripwire meant to deter any
act of German aggression The new to containment strategy
adopted in March 1939 comprised giving firm warnings to Berlin,
increasing the pace of British rearmament and attempting to
form an interlocking network of alliances that would block
German aggression anywhere in Europe by creating such a formidable
deterrence to aggression that
Adolf
Hitler could not rationally chose that option. Underlying
the basis of the to containment of Germany was the
so-called X documents provided by Carl Friedrich Goerdeler
over the course of the winter of 1938 to 1939 which suggested
that the German economy, under the strain of massive military
spending was on the verge of collapse, and which led British
policymakers to the conclusion that if
Adolf
Hitler could be deterred from war and if his regime was
contained long enough, then the German economy would collapse,
and with it, presumably the National Socialist regime. At
the same time, British policy-makers were afraid if
Adolf
Hitler were contained, and faced with a collapsing economy
he would commit a desperate to mad dog act of aggression
as a way of lashing out. Hence, the emphasis on pressuring
the Poles to allow the return of Danzig to Germany as a way
of peacefully resolving the crisis by allowing
Adolf
Hitler to back down without losing face. As part of a
dual strategy to avoid war via deterrence and appeasement
of Germany, British leaders warned that they would go to war
if Germany attacked Poland while at the same time tried to
avoid war by holding unofficial talks with such would be pacemakers
like the British newspaper proprietor Lord Kemsley, the Swedish
businessman Axel Wenner-Gren and an another Swedish businessmen
Birger Dahlerus who attempted to work out the basis for a
peaceful return of Danzig. Joachim von Ribbentrop and
Adolf
Hitler misunderstood the British attempts to provide for
a peaceful settlement of the Danzig crisis as a sign that
Britain would not go to war for Poland.
In May 1939, as part of his efforts to bully Turkey into joining
the Axis, Joachim von Ribbentrop had arranged for the cancellation
of the delivery of 60 heavy howitzers from the koda
Works, which the Turks had paid for in advance. The German
refusal either to deliver the artillery pieces or refund the
125 million Reichsmarks the Turks had paid in advance for
them was to be a major strain on German-Turkish relations
in 1939, and had the effect of causing Turkey's politically
powerful army to resist Joachim von Ribbentrop s entreaties
to join the Axis. As part of the fierce diplomatic competition
in Ankara in the spring and summer of 1939 between
Franz
von Papen on the one hand, and on the other the French
Ambassador, René Massigli, and the British Ambassador,
Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, to win the allegiance of Turkey
to either the Axis or the Allies, Joachim von Ribbentrop suffered
a major reversal in July 1939 when Massigli was able to arrange
for major French arms shipments to Turkey on credit, to replace
the weapons the Germans refused to deliver to the Turks.
In June 1939, Franco German relations were strained when the
head of the French section of the Dienststelle Joachim von
Ribbentrop , Otto Abetz, was expelled from France following
allegations that he had bribed two French newspaper editors
to print pro-German articles. Joachim von Ribbentrop was enraged
by Otto Abetz's expulsion, and attacked Count Johannes von
Welczeck, the German Ambassador in Paris, over his failure
to have the French reanimate Otto Abetz. In July 1939, Joachim
von Ribbentrop's claims about Bonnet's alleged statement of
December 1938 were to lead to a lengthy war of words via a
series of letters to the French newspapers between Bonnet
and Joachim von Ribbentrop over just what precisely Bonnet
had said to Joachim von Ribbentrop . In the spring and summer
of 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop used Bonnet's alleged statement
to convince
Adolf
Hitler that France would not go to war in the defence
of Poland, despite the frequent denials by Bonnet that he
ever made such a statement which would not have been legally
binding even had Bonnet had made the alleged statement only
a formal renunciation of the Franco Polish treaty by the French
National Assembly would end the French commitment to Poland.
On 11 August 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop met the Italian
Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian Ambassador
to Germany, Count Bernardo Attolico, in Salzburg. During that
meeting, both Ciano and Attolico were horrified to learn from
Joachim von Ribbentrop that Germany planned to attack Poland
that summer, and that the Danzig issue was just a pretext
for aggression. When Ciano asked if there was anything Italy
could do to broker a Polish-German settlement that would avert
a war, he was told by Joachim von Ribbentrop that We want
war!. Joachim von Ribbentrop expressed his firmly-held belief
that neither Britain nor France would go to war for Poland,
but if that should occur, he fully expected the Italians to
honour the terms of the Pact of Steel which was both an offensive
and defensive treaty, and declare war not only on Poland,
but on the Western powers if necessary. Joachim von Ribbentrop
told his Italian guests that the localisation of the conflict
is certain and the probability of victory is infinite.Joachim
von Ribbentrop brushed away Ciano's fears of a general war
because France and England cannot intervene because they are
insufficiently prepared militarily and because they have no
means of injuring Germany. Ciano complained furiously that
Joachim von Ribbentrop had violated his promise given only
that spring, when Italy signed the Pact of Steel, that there
would be no war for the next three years. Ciano said that
it was absurd to believe that the Reich could attack Poland
without triggering a wider war and that now the Italians were
left with the choice of either going to war when they needed
three more years to rearm or being forced into the humiliation
of having to violate the terms of the Pact of Steel by declaring
neutrality which would make the Italians appear cowardly.
Ciano complained in his diary that his arguments had no effect
(niente da fare) on Joachim von Ribbentrop , who simply refused
to believe any information that did not fit in with his preconceived
notions. Despite Ciano's efforts to persuade Joachim von Ribbentrop
to put off the attack on Poland until 1942, so as to allow
the Italians time to get ready for war, Joachim von Ribbentrop
was adamant that Germany had no interest in a diplomatic solution
of the Danzig question and only wanted a war to wipe Poland
off the map. The Salzburg meeting marked the moment when Ciano's
dislike of Joachim von Ribbentrop was transformed into outright
hatred, and of the beginning of his disillusionment with the
pro-German foreign policy that he had championed up to that
time.
On 21 August 1939,
Adolf
Hitler received a message from Stalin reading The Soviet
Government has instructed me to say they agree to Joachim
von Ribbentrop's arrival on 23 August. That same day,
Adolf
Hitler ordered German mobilisation The extent that
Adolf
Hitler was influenced by Joachim von Ribbentrop's advice
can be seen in
Adolf
Hitler's orders for a limited mobilisation against Poland
alone. Ernst von Weizsäcker recorded in his diary throughout
the spring and summer of 1939 repeated statements from
Adolf
Hitler that any German-Polish war would be only a localised
conflict and provided that the Soviet Union could be persuaded
to stay neutral, there was no danger of a general war.
Adolf
Hitler believed that British policy was based upon securing
Soviet support for Poland, which led him to perform a diplomatic
U-turn and support Joachim von Ribbentrop's policy of rapprochement
with the Soviet Union as the best way of ensuring a local
war. This was especially the case as decrypts showed the British
military attaché to Poland arguing that Britain could
not save Poland in the event of a German attack, and only
Soviet support offered the prospect of Poland holding out.
The signing of the nonaggression Pact in Moscow on 23 August
1939 was the crowning achievement of Joachim von Ribbentrop's
career. Joachim von Ribbentrop flew to Moscow, where, over
the course of a thirteen hour visit, Joachim von Ribbentrop
signed both the nonaggression Pact and the secret protocols,
which partitioned much of Eastern Europe between the Soviets
and the Germans. Joachim von Ribbentrop had only expected
to see the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov, and
was most surprised to be holding talks with Joseph Stalin.
During his trip to Moscow, Joachim von Ribbentrop's talks
with Stalin and Molotov proceed very cordially and efficiently
with the exception of the question of Latvia, which
Adolf
Hitler had instructed Joachim von Ribbentrop to try to
claim for Germany. When Stalin claimed Latvia for the Soviet
Union, Joachim von Ribbentrop was forced to telephone Berlin
for permission from
Adolf
Hitler to concede Latvia to the Soviets. After finishing
his talks with Stalin and Molotov, Joachim von Ribbentrop
, at a dinner with the Soviet leaders, launched into a lengthy
diatribe against the British Empire, with frequent interjections
of approval from Stalin, and then exchanged toasts with Stalin
in honour of German-Soviet friendship. For a brief moment
in August 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop convinced
Adolf
Hitler that the nonaggression Pact with the Soviet Union
would cause the fall of the Chamberlain government, and lead
to a new British government that would abandon the Poles to
their fate. Joachim von Ribbentrop argued that with Soviet
economic support especially in the form of oil, Germany was
now immune to the effects of a British naval blockade, and
as such, the British would never take on Germany. On 23 August
1939 at a secret meeting of the Reich's top military leadership
at the Berghof,
Adolf
Hitler argued neither Britain nor France would go to war
for Poland without the Soviet Union, and fixed X-Day, the
date for the invasion of Poland for 26 August.
Adolf
Hitler added that My only fear is that at the last moment
some Schweinehund will make a proposal for mediation. Unlike
Adolf Hitler,
who saw the nonaggression Pact as merely a pragmatic device
forced on him by circumstances, namely the refusal of Britain
or Poland to play the roles
Adolf
Hitler had allocated to them, Joachim von Ribbentrop regarded
the nonaggression Pact as integral to his anti-British policy.
The signing of the Molotov-Joachim von Ribbentrop Pact on
August 23, 1939 not only won Germany an informal alliance
with the Soviet Union, but also neutralised Anglo-French attempts
to win Turkey to the to peace front. The Turks always
believed that it was essential to have the Soviet Union as
an ally to counter Germany, and the signing of the German-Soviet
pact undercut completely the assumptions behind Turkish security
policy. The Anglo-French effort to include the Balkans into
the peace front had always rested on the assumption that the
cornerstone of the to peace front in the Balkans
was to be Turkey, the regional superpower Because of the Balkans
were rich in raw materials like iron, zinc and above all oil
that could help Germany survive a British blockade, it was
viewed as highly important by the Allies to keep German influence
in the Balkans to a minimum, hence British efforts to link
British promises to support Turkey in the event of an Italian
attack in exchange for Turkish promises to help defend Romania
from a German attack. British and French leaders believed
that the deterrent value of the peace front could be increased
if Turkey were a member and if the Turkish Straits were open
to Allied ships. This would not only allow the Allies to send
over the Black Sea troops and supplies to Romania, but also
through Romania to Poland.
On 25 August 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop's influence with
Adolf Hitler
wavered for a moment when the news reached Berlin of the ratification
of the Anglo Polish military alliance and a personal message
from Mussolini telling
Adolf
Hitler that Italy would dishonour the Pact of Steel if
Germany attacked Poland. This was especially damaging to Joachim
von Ribbentrop , as he always assured
Adolf
Hitler that Italy's attitude is determined by the Rome-Berlin
Axis. As a result of the message from Rome and the ratification
of the Anglo Polish treaty,
Adolf
Hitler cancelled the invasion of Poland which was planned
for 26 August, and instead ordered it held back until 1 September
in order to give Germany some time to break up the unfavourable
international alignment. Though Joachim von Ribbentrop continued
to argue that Britain and France were bluffing, both he and
Adolf Hitler
were prepared as a last resort to risk a general war by invading
Poland. Because of Joachim von Ribbentrop's firmly held views
that Britain was Germany's most dangerous enemy and that an
Anglo German war was thus inevitable, it scarcely mattered
to him when his much desired war with Britain came. The Greek
historian Aristotle Kaillis wrote that it was Joachim von
Ribbentrop's influence with
Adolf
Hitler together with his insistence that the Western powers
would in the end not go to war for Poland that was the most
important reason why
Adolf
Hitler did not cancel Fall Weiß all together instead
of postponing X-day for six days. Joachim von Ribbentrop told
Adolf Hitler
that his sources showed that Britain would only be militarily
prepared to take on Germany at the earliest in 1940 or more
probably 1941, so this could only mean that the British were
bluffing.Even if the British were serious in their warnings
of war, Joachim von Ribbentrop took the view that since a
war with Britain was inevitable, the risk of a war with Britain
was an acceptable one and accordingly he argued that Germany
should not shy away from such challenges.
On 27 August 1939, Chamberlain sent the following letter to
Adolf Hitler,
which was intended to counteract reports Chamberlain had heard
from intelligence sources in Berlin that Joachim von Ribbentrop
had convinced
Adolf
Hitler that the Molotov-Joachim von Ribbentrop Pact would
ensure that Britain would abandon Poland. In his letter to
Adolf Hitler,
Chamberlain wrote,
Whatever may prove to be the nature of the German-Soviet Agreement,
it cannot alter Great Britain's obligation to Poland which
His Majesty's Government have stated in public repeatedly
and plainly and which they are determined to fulfil. It has
been alleged that, if His Majesty's Government had made their
position more clear in 1914, the great catastrophe would have
been avoided. Whether or not there is any force in that allegation,
His Majesty's Government are resolved that on this occasion
there shall be no such tragic misunderstanding. If the case
should arise, they are resolved, and prepared, to employ without
delay all the forces at their command, and it is impossible
to foresee the end of hostilities once engaged. It would be
a dangerous illusion to think that, if war once starts, it
will come to an early end even if a success on any one of
the several fronts on which it will be engaged should have
been secured
.
Joachim von Ribbentrop for his part told
Adolf
Hitler that Chamberlain's letter was just a bluff, and
urged his master to call it.
On the night of 30-31 August 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop
had an extremely heated exchange with the British Ambassador,
Sir Nevile Henderson, who objected to Joachim von Ribbentrop's
demand, given at about midnight, that if a Polish plenipotentiary
did not arrive in Berlin that night to discuss the German
final offer, then the responsibility for the outbreak of war
would not rest on the Reich. Henderson stated that the terms
of the German final offer were very reasonable, but argued
that Joachim von Ribbentrop's time limit for Polish acceptance
of the final offer was most unreasonable, and furthermore,
demanded to know why Joachim von Ribbentrop insisted upon
seeing a special Polish plenipotentiary and could not present
the final offer to Józef Lipski or provide a written
copy of the final offer. The Henderson-Joachim von Ribbentrop
meeting became so tense that the two men almost came to blows.
The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the Henderson-Joachim
von Ribbentrop meeting in this way.
When Joachim von Ribbentrop refused to give a copy of the
German demands to the British Ambassador Henderson at midnight
of 30-31 August 1939, the two almost came to blows. Ambassador
Henderson, who had long advocated concessions to Germany,
reorganised that here was a deliberately conceived alibi the
German government had prepared for a war it was determined
to start. No wonder Henderson was angry Joachim von Ribbentrop
on the other hand could see war ahead and went home beaming.
As intended by Joachim von Ribbentrop , the narrow time limit
for acceptance of the final offer made it impossible for the
British government to contact the Polish government in time
about the German offer, let alone for the Poles to arrange
for a Polish plenipotentiary envoy to arrive in Berlin that
night, thereby allowing Joachim von Ribbentrop to claim that
the Poles had rejected the German final offer. As it was,
a special meeting of the British cabinet called to consider
the final offer, they declined to pass on the message to Warsaw
under the grounds this was not a serious proposal on the part
of Berlin. The rejection of the German proposal was one of
the pretexts used for the German aggression against Poland
on 1 September 1939. The British historian D.C. Watt wrote
Two hours later, Berlin Radio broadcast the sixteen points,
adding that Poland had rejected them. Thanks to Joachim von
Ribbentrop, they had never even seen them. On 31 August Joachim
von Ribbentrop met with Attolico to tell him that Poland's
rejection of the generous German 16 point peace plan meant
that Germany had no interest in Mussolini's offer to call
a conference about the status of Danzig. Besides the Polish
rejection of the German final offer, the aggression against
Poland was justified by the Gleiwitz incident and other SS-staged
incidents on the German-Polish border.
As soon as the news broke in the morning of 1 September 1939
that Germany had invaded Poland, the Italian dictator Benito
Mussolini launched another desperate peace mediation plan
intended to stop the German-Polish war from becoming a world
war. Mussolini's motives were in no way altruistic, but he
was instead motivated entirely by a wish to escape the self-imposed
trap of the Pact of Steel, which had obligated Italy either
to go to war at a time when the country was entirely unprepared
or to suffer the humiliation of having to declare neutrality,
which make him appear cowardly. The French Foreign Minister
Georges Bonnet acting on his own initiative told the Italian
Ambassador to France, Baron Raffaele Guariglia, that France
had accepted Mussolini's peace plan. Bonnet had Havas issued
a statement at midnight on 1 September saying, The French
government has today, as have several other Governments, received
an Italian proposal looking to the resolution of Europe's
difficulties. After due consideration, the French government
has given a positive response. Though the French and the Italians
were serious about Mussolini's peace plan, which called for
an immediate ceasefire and a four-power conference à
la Munich to consider Poland's borders, the British Foreign
Secretary Lord Halifax stated that unless the Germans withdrew
from Poland immediately, then Britain would not attend the
proposed conference. Joachim von Ribbentrop finally scuttled
Mussolini's peace plan by stating that Germany had utterly
no interest in a ceasefire, in a withdrawal from Poland and
in attending the proposed peace conference.
When on the morning of 3 September 1939 Chamberlain followed
through with his threat of a British declaration of war if
Germany attacked Poland, a visibly shocked
Adolf
Hitler asked Joachim von Ribbentrop Now what?, a question
to which Joachim von Ribbentrop had no answer except to state
that there would be a similar message forthcoming from the
French Ambassador Robert Coulondre, who arrived later that
afternoon to present the French declaration of war. Ernst
von Weizsäcker later recalled that On 3 September., when
the British and French declared war,
Adolf
Hitler was surprised, after all, and was to begin with,
at a loss. The British historian Richard Overy wrote that
what
Adolf
Hitler thought he was starting in September 1939 was only
a local war between Germany and Poland, and his decision to
do so was largely because he vastly underestimated the risks
of a general war. In part due to Joachim von Ribbentrop's
influence, it has been often observed that
Adolf
Hitler went to war in 1939 with the country he wanted
as his ally namely the United Kingdom as his enemy, and the
country he wanted as his enemy namely the Soviet Union as
his ally.
After the outbreak of World War II, Joachim von Ribbentrop
spent most of the Polish campaign travelling with
Adolf
Hitler. On 27 September 1939, Joachim von Ribbentrop made
a second visit to Moscow, where at meetings with the Soviet
Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov and Joseph Stalin, he
was forced to agree to revising the Secret Protocols of the
nonaggression Pact in the Soviet Union's favour, most notably
agreeing to Stalin's demand that Lithuania go to the Soviet
Union. The imposition of the British blockade had made the
Reich highly dependent upon Soviet economic support, which
placed Stalin in a strong negotiating position with Joachim
von Ribbentrop. On 1 March 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop received
Sumner Welles, the American Undersecretary of State, who was
on a peace mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and
did his best to abuse his American guest. Welles asked Joachim
von Ribbentrop what terms Germany might be willing to negotiate
a compromise peace under, before the Phoney War became a real
war. Joachim von Ribbentrop told Welles that only a total
German victory could give us the peace we want. Welles reported
to Roosevelt that Joachim von Ribbentrop had a completely
closed and very stupid mind. On 10 March 1940, Joachim von
Ribbentrop visited Rome where he met Mussolini, who promised
him that Italy would soon enter the war. For his one day Italian
trip, Joachim von Ribbentrop was accompanied by a staff of
35, including a gymnastics coach, a masseur, a doctor, two
hairdressers, plus various legal and economic experts from
the Foreign Office. After the Italo-German summit at the Brenner
Pass on 18 March 1940, which was attended by
Adolf
Hitler and Mussolini, Count Ciano wrote in his diary,
Everyone in Rome dislikes Joachim von Ribbentrop . On 7 May
1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop founded a new section of the
Foreign Office, the Abteilung Deutschland (Department of Internal
German Affairs), under Martin Luther, to which was assigned
the responsibility for all anti-Semitic affairs. On 10 May
1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop summoned the Dutch, Belgian and
Luxembourg ambassadors to present them with notes justifying
the German invasion of their countries, several hours after
the Germans had invaded those nations. Much to Joachim von
Ribbentrop's fury, someone leaked the plans for the German
invasion to the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, which led Joachim
von Ribbentrop to devote the next several months to conducting
an unsuccessful investigation into who leaked the news. This
investigation tore apart the agency as colleagues were encouraged
to denounce each other.
With his appointment as Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop
became more abrasive and arrogant. On 19 May 1940 Joachim
von Ribbentrop met the new Italian Ambassador Dino Alfieri,
who described the meeting as follows.
He commented at length on the dazzling successes of the German
armies, extolling the military genius of the
Adolf
Hitler. Who had revealed himself as the greatest military
genius since Napoleon. He spoke of the inevitable clash between
the young nations and the old of the necessity of breaking
the ring with which the Judaeo-democratic-plutocratic powers
were trying to encircle Germany and Italy and of the need
to create a new European civilisation What he said was neither
new, remarkable, nor particularly interesting. He talked for
more than an hour in a voice which never varied in tone, resting
one hand in palm of the other and periodically glancing at
his fingernails. He insisted on my remaining for lunch. The
food and wine were excellent, but the conversation tedious
to a degree. Afterwards, he suggested we go into the garden.
There he repeated in a different form all that he had already
said, for all the world as if he had a gramophone fixed in
his brain. When I took leave, he subjected me to an interminable
handshake, meanwhile fixing his cold blue eyes on mine, and
repeating almost word for word what he said to me on arrival.
I felt I should never be able to establish any human contact
with this man.
In early June 1940, when Mussolini informed
Adolf
Hitler that he at long last would enter the war on 10
June 1940,
Adolf
Hitler was most dismissive, in private calling Mussolini
a cowardly opportunist who broke the terms of the Pact of
Steel in September 1939 when the going looked rough, and was
only entering the war in June 1940 after it was clear that
France was beaten and it appeared that Britain would soon
make peace. Joachim von Ribbentrop , through he shared
Adolf
Hitler's assessment of the Italians, nonetheless welcomed
Italy coming into war partially because it seemed to affirm
the importance of the Pact of Steel, which Joachim von Ribbentrop
had negotiated and partly because with Italy now an ally,
the Foreign Office had more to do. Joachim von Ribbentrop
championed the so-called Madagascar Plan in June 1940 to deport
all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar after the presumed imminent
defeat of Britain.
Relations with wartime allies
Joachim von Ribbentrop, a Francophile, argued that Germany
should allow Vichy France a limited degree of independence
within a binding Franco German partnership. To this end, Joachim
von Ribbentrop appointed a colleague, Otto Abetz, from the
Dienststelle Ambassador to France with instructions to promote
the political career of Pierre Laval, who Joachim von Ribbentrop
had decided was the French politician most favourable to Germany.
The Foreign Office's influence in France varied, as there
were many other agencies competing for power there. But in
general, from late 1943 to mid-1944, the Foreign Office was
second only to the SS in terms of power in France.
From the latter half of 1937, Joachim von Ribbentrop had championed
the idea of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan
that would partition the British Empire between them. After
signing the Soviet-German nonaggression Pact, Joachim von
Ribbentrop expanded on this idea for an Axis alliance to include
the Soviet Union to form a Eurasian bloc that would destroy
maritime states such as Britain. The German historian Klaus
Hildebrand argued that besides
Adolf
Hitler's foreign policy programme, there were three other
factions within the National Socialist Party who had alternative
foreign policy programmes, whom Hildebrand dubbed the agrarians,
the revolutionary socialists, and the Wilhelmine Imperialists.
Another German diplomatic historian, Wolfgang Michalka argued
that there was a fourth alternative National Socialist foreign
policy programme, and that was Joachim von Ribbentrop's concept
of a Euro-Asiatic bloc comprising the four totalitarian states
of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan. Unlike the
other factions, Joachim von Ribbentrop's foreign policy programme
was the only one that
Adolf
Hitler allowed to be executed during the years 1939 to
1941, though it was more due to the temporary bankruptcy of
Adolf Hitler's
own foreign policy programme that he had laid down in Mein
Kampf and Zweites Buch following the failure to achieve an
alliance with Britain, than to a genuine change of mind. Joachim
von Ribbentrop's foreign policy conceptions differed from
Adolf Hitler's
in that Joachim von Ribbentrop's concept of international
relations owed more to the traditional Wilhelmine Machtpolitik
than to
Adolf
Hitler's racist and Social Darwinist vision of different
races locked in a merciless and endless struggle over Lebensraum.
The different foreign policy conceptions held by
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop were illustrated in
their reaction to the Fall of Singapore in 1942, Joachim von
Ribbentrop wanted this great British defeat to be a day of
celebration in Germany, whereas
Adolf
Hitler forbade any celebrations on the grounds that Singapore
represented a sad day for the principles of white supremacy.
Another area of difference was that Joachim von Ribbentrop
had an obsessive hatred for Britain which he saw as the main
enemy and the Soviet Union as important ally in the anti-British
struggle whereas
Adolf
Hitler saw the alliance with the Soviet Union as only
tactical, and was nowhere as anti-British as his Foreign Minister.
In August 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop oversaw the Second
Vienna Award, which saw about 40% of Transylvania region of
Romania returned to Hungary. The decision to award so much
of Romania to the Hungarians was
Adolf
Hitler's, as Joachim von Ribbentrop himself spent most
of the Vienna conference loudly attacking the Hungarian delegation
for their coolness towards attacking Czechoslovakia in 1938
and then demanding more than their fair share of the spoils.
When Joachim von Ribbentrop finally got around to announcing
his decision, the Hungarian delegation who had expected Joachim
von Ribbentrop to rule in favour of Romania broke out in cheers
while the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu fainted.
Without perhaps realising it, Joachim von Ribbentrop by placing
Romania within the German sphere of influence undermined the
main rationale for cooperation with the Soviet Union, since
control of Romanian oil meant that Germany was no longer dependent
upon Soviet oil.
In the fall of 1940, Joachim von Ribbentrop made a sustained
but unsuccessful effort to have Spain enter the war on the
Axis side. During his talks with the Spanish foreign minister,
Ramón Serrano Súñer, Joachim von Ribbentrop
affronted Súñer with his tactless behaviour,
especially his suggestion that Spain cede the Canary Islands
to Germany. An angry Súñer replied that he would
rather see the Canaries sink into the Atlantic then cede an
inch of Spanish territory. An area where Joachim von Ribbentrop
enjoyed more success arose in September 1940, when he had
the Far Eastern agent of the Dienststelle Joachim von Ribbentrop,
Dr. Heinrich Georg Stahmer, start negotiations with the Japanese
foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, for an anti-American alliance
(the German Ambassador to Japan, General Eugen Ott, was excluded
from the talks on Joachim von Ribbentrop's orders).The end
result of these talks was the signing in Berlin on 27 September
1940 of the Tripartite Pact by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Count
Ciano, and Japanese Ambassador Saburo Kurusu. Joachim von
Ribbentrop hoped that the prospect of facing the Tripartite
Pact would deter the United States from supporting Britain,
but since the Pact was more or less openly directed against
the United States (the Pact made a point of stressing that
the unnamed great power it was directed against was not the
Soviet Union), it had the opposite effect on American public
opinion than the one intended.
In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert
Wagner oversaw the almost total expulsion of the Jews into
unoccupied France not only from the parts of Alsace-Lorraine
that had been annexed that summer to the Reich, but also from
their Gaues as while. Joachim von Ribbentrop treated the ensuring
complaints by the Vichy French government over the expulsions
in a most dilatory fashion.
In November 1940, during the visit of the Soviet Foreign Commissar
Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin, Joachim von Ribbentrop tried
hard to get the Soviet Union to sign the Tripartite Pact.
Joachim von Ribbentrop argued that the Soviets and Germans
shared a common enemy in the form of the British Empire, and
as such, it was in the best interests of the Kremlin to enter
the war on the Axis side. Joachim von Ribbentrop presented
a proposal to Molotov where after the defeat of Britain, the
Soviet Union would have India and the Middle East, Italy the
Mediterranean area, Japan the British possessions in the Far
East (presuming of course that Japan would enter the war),
and Germany would take Central Africa and Britain itself.
Molotov was open to the idea of the Soviet Union entering
the war on the Axis side, but demanded as the price of Soviet
entry into the war that Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey,
Hungary and Yugoslavia be recognised as in the exclusive Soviet
sphere of influence. Joachim von Ribbentrop's efforts to persuade
Molotov to abandon his demands about Europe as the price of
Soviet entry into the war as a German ally were entirely unsuccessful.
After Molotov left Berlin, the Soviet Union indicated that
it wished to sign the Tripartite Pact and enter the war on
the Axis side. Though Joachim von Ribbentrop was all for taking
Stalin's offer,
Adolf
Hitler by this point had decided that he wanted to attack
the Soviet Union. The German Soviet Axis talks led nowhere.
As World War II went on, Joachim von Ribbentrop's once-friendly
relations with the SS became increasingly strained. In January
1941, the nadir of SS-Auswärtiges Amt relations was reached
when the Iron Guard attempted a coup in Romania, with Joachim
von Ribbentrop supporting Marshal Ion Antonescu's government
and Himmler supporting the Iron Guard. In the aftermath of
the failed coup in Bucharest, the Foreign Office assembled
evidence that the SD had backed the coup, which led to Joachim
von Ribbentrop sharply restricting the powers of the SD police
attachés, who since October 1939 had operated largely
independently of the German embassies at which they had been
stationed. In the spring of 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop appointed
an assemblage of SA men to German embassies in Eastern Europe,
with Manfred von Killinger going to Romania, Siegfried Kasche
to Croatia, Adolf Beckerle to Bulgaria, Dietrich von Jagow
to Hungary, and Hans Ludin to Slovakia. The major qualifications
of all these men, none of whom had previously held a diplomatic
position before, were that they were close friends of Luther,
and as a way of splitting the SS (the traditional rivalry
between the SS and SA was still running strong).
In March 1941, Japan's Germanophile foreign minister Yosuke
Matsuoka visited Berlin. On 29 March 1941, during a conversation
with Matsuoka, Joachim von Ribbentrop as instructed by
Adolf
Hitler told the Japanese nothing about the upcoming Operation
Barbarossa, as
Adolf
Hitler believed that he could defeat the Soviet Union
on his own and preferred that the Japanese attack Britain
instead.
Adolf
Hitler did not wish for any information that might lead
the Japanese into attacking the Soviet Union to reach their
ears. Joachim von Ribbentrop tried to convince Matsuoka to
urge the government in Tokyo to attack the great British naval
base at Singapore, claiming the Royal Navy was too weak to
retaliate due to its involvement in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Matsuoka responded to this by stating preparations to occupy
Singapore were under way.
In the winter of 1940 to 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop strongly
pressured Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, despite
advice from the German Legation in Belgrade that such a move
would probably lead to the overthrow of Crown Prince Paul,
the Yugoslav Regent. Joachim von Ribbentrop's intention with
pressuring Yugoslavia into signing the Tripartite Pact was
to gain transit rights through that country, which would allow
the Germans to invade Greece. On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia
reluctantly signed the Tripartite Pact, which led to the overthrow
of Prince Paul the next day in a bloodless coup by the Yugoslav
military. When
Adolf
Hitler ordered Yugoslavia's invasion, Joachim von Ribbentrop
was opposed, though only because the Foreign Office was likely
to be excluded from ruling the occupied Yugoslavia. As
Adolf
Hitler was displeased with Joachim von Ribbentrop over
his opposition to attacking Yugoslavia, he then broke down
and took to his bed for the next couple of days. When Joachim
von Ribbentrop recovered, he sought a chance for increasing
the agency's influence by giving Croatia independence.Joachim
von Ribbentrop chose the Ustaa to rule Croatia, and
had Edmund Veesenmayer successfully conclude talks in April
1941 with General Slavko Kvaternik of the Ustaa on having
his party rule Croatia after the German invasion. Reflecting
his displeasure with the German Legation in Belgrade, which
had advised against pressuring Yugoslavia into signing the
Tripartite Pact, when the Bombing of Belgrade took place on
6 April 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop refused to have the staff
of the German Legation withdrawn in advance, who were thus
left to survive the fire-bombing of Belgrade as best they
could.
Joachim von Ribbentrop liked and admired Stalin, and was against
the attack on the USSR in 1941. He passed a word to a Soviet
diplomat, Please tell Stalin I was against this war, and that
I know it will bring great misfortune to Germany. In the spring
of 1941, upon hearing of the coup in Baghdad that brought
Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power, Joachim von Ribbentrop dispatched
Dr. Fritz Grobba on a secret mission to Iraq to make contact
with the new government. When Grobba reported that the Iraqis
as Arab nationalists saw the British and the Jews as their
enemies and wished to ally themselves with Germany against
their common foes, Joachim von Ribbentrop was delighted and
become obsessed with the idea of an Iraqi-German alliance.
In pursuit of his Iraq project, Joachim von Ribbentrop strongly
pushed for German aid to the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani government
in Iraq, where he saw a great opportunity for striking a blow
at British influence in the Middle East. It was Joachim von
Ribbentrop's hope that a striking German success in Iraq might
lead to
Adolf
Hitler abandoning his plans for Operation Barbarossa,
and focusing instead on the struggle with Britain.The abject
failure of Joachim von Ribbentrop's Iraq scheme in May 1941
had a totally opposite effect to the one intended. When it
came to time for Joachim von Ribbentrop to present the German
declaration of war on 22 June 1941 to the Soviet Ambassador,
General Vladimir Dekanozov, Paul Schmidt described the scene.
It is just before four on the morning of Sunday, 22 June 1941
in the office of the Foreign Minister. He is expecting the
Soviet Ambassador, Dekanozov, who had been phoning the Minister
since early Saturday. Dekanozov had an urgent message from
Moscow. He had called every two hours, but was told the Minister
was away from the city. At two on Sunday morning, Joachim
von Ribbentrop finally responded to the calls. Dekanozov was
told that Joachim von Ribbentrop wished to meet with him at
once. An appointment was made for 4 am
Joachim von Ribbentrop is nervous, walking up and down from
one end of his large office to the other, like a caged animal,
while saying over and over, The Führer is absolutely
right. We must attack Russia, or they will surely attack us!
Is he reassuring himself? Is he justifying the ruination of
his crowning diplomatic achievement? Now he has to destroy
it because that is the Führer's wish.
When Dekanozov finally appeared, Joachim von Ribbentrop read
out a short statement saying that the Reich had been forced
into military countermeasures because of an alleged Soviet
plan to attack Germany in July 1941. Joachim von Ribbentrop
did not actually present a declaration of war to General Dekanozov,
instead confining himself to reading out the statement about
Germany being forced to take military countermeasures.
Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference
for focusing the war effort against Britain, on 28 June 1941,
Joachim von Ribbentrop began a sustained effort to have Japan
attack the Soviet Union without bothering to inform
Adolf
Hitler first. But Joachim von Ribbentrop's motives in
seeking to have Japan enter the war were more anti-British
then anti-Soviet. On 10 July 1941 Joachim von Ribbentrop ordered
General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador to Japan.
Go on with your efforts to bring about the earliest possible
participation of Japan in the war against Russia. The natural
goal must be, as before, to bring about the meeting of Germany
and Japan on the trans-Siberian Railroad before winter sets
in. With the collapse of Russia, the position of the Tripartite
Powers in the world will be so gigantic that the question
of the collapse of England, that is, the absolute annihilation
of the British Isles, will only be a question of time. An
America completely isolated from the rest of the world would
then be faced with the seizure of those of the remaining positions
of the British Empire important to the Tripartite Powers.
As part of his efforts to bring Japan into Barbarossa, on
1 July 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop had Germany break off
diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek and instead recognized
the Japanese-puppet government of Wang Jingwei as China's
legitimate government. In addition, Joachim von Ribbentrop
hoped that recognizing Wang would be seen as a coup which
might add to the prestige of the pro-German Japanese Foreign
Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, who was opposed to opening American-Japanese
talks. Despite Joachim von Ribbentrop's best efforts, Matsuoka
was sacked as Foreign Minister later in July 1941, and the
Japanese-American talks began.
Joachim von Ribbentrop was found to have had culpability in
the Holocaust on the grounds that he persuaded the leaders
of satellite countries of the Third Reich to deport Jews to
the National Socialist extermination camps. In August 1941,
when the question of whether to deport foreign Jews living
in Germany arose, Joachim von Ribbentrop argued against deportation
as a way of maximising the Foreign Office's influence. In
order to deport foreign Jews living in the Reich, Joachim
von Ribbentrop then had Luther negotiate agreements with the
governments of Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia to allow Jews
holding citizenship of those states to be deported. In September
1941, the Reich Plenipotentiary for Serbia, Felix Benzler,
reported to Joachim von Ribbentrop that the SS had arrested
8,000 Serbian Jews, whom they were planning to execute en
masse, and asked for permission to try to stop the massacre.
Joachim von Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who
in turn ordered Benzler to co-operate fully in the massacre.
In October 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop s prestige was badly
damaged by the discovery of the Soviet spy ring in Tokyo headed
by Richard Sorge, who was arrested by the Japanese while in
bed with the wife of General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador.
Sorge had been a close friend of General Ott, who had given
him a free rein at the Tokyo Embassy, and thus allowed him
to pass along all sorts of German secrets to Moscow. The resulting
scandal was another blow to the Foreign Office, made all the
worse in that it was the Japanese who had discovered and broken
up the Sorge spy ring without any German assistance.
In the fall of 1941, Joachim von Ribbentrop worked for both
the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and
Japan attacking the United States.In October 1941 Joachim
von Ribbentrop ordered General Ott to start applying pressure
on the Japanese to attack the Americans as soon as possible.
Joachim von Ribbentrop argued to
Adolf
Hitler that a war between the United States and Germany
was inevitable given the extent of American aid to Britain
and the increasingly frequent incidents in the North Atlantic
between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to
Britain, and that having such a war begin with a Japanese
attack on the United States was the best way to begin it.
Joachim von Ribbentrop told
Adolf
Hitler that because of his four years in Canada and the
United States before 1914, he was an expert on all things
American, and that the United States in his opinion was not
a serious military power. On 4 December 1941, the Japanese
Ambassador General Hiroshi Oshima told Joachim von Ribbentrop
that Japan was on the verge of war with the United States,
which led to Joachim von Ribbentrop promising him on behalf
of
Adolf Hitler
that Germany would join the war against the Americans. On
7 December 1941 Joachim von Ribbentrop was jubilant at the
news of Pearl Harbour, and did his utmost to support declaring
war on the United States, which he duly delivered to the American
Chargé d'Affaires Leland B. Morris on 11 December 1941.
In the winter and spring of 1942 following American entry
into war, all of the Latin American states except for Argentina
and Chile under American pressure declared war on Germany.
Joachim von Ribbentrop who considered taking declarations
of war from such small states as Costa Rica and Ecuador to
be deeply humiliating refused to see any of the Latin American
ambassadors and instead had Ernst von Weizsäcker take
the Latin declarations of war.
In April 1942, as part of a diplomatic counterpart to Case
Blue Joachim von Ribbentrop had assembled in Hotel Adlon in
Berlin a collection of anti-Soviet émigrés from
the Caucasus with the aim of having them declared leaders
of governments in exile. From Joachim von Ribbentrop's point
of view, this had the dual benefit of ensuring popular support
for the German Army as it advanced into the Caucasus and of
ensuring that it was the Foreign Office that ruled the Caucasus
once the Germans occupied the area.
Alfred
Rosenberg, the German Minister of the East, saw this as
an intrusion into his area of authority, and told
Adolf
Hitler that the émigrés at the Hotel Adlon
were a nest of Allied agents. Much to Joachim von Ribbentrop's
intense disappointment,
Adolf
Hitler sided with
Alfred
Rosenberg. For
Adolf
Hitler, the Soviet Union was to be Germany's Lebensraum
and he had no interest in even setting up puppet governments
in a region he planned to colonise
Despite the often fierce rivalry with the SS, the Foreign
Office played a key role in arranging the deportations of
Jews to the death camps from France 1942 to 1944, Hungary
1944 to 1945, Slovakia, Italy after 1943, and the Balkans.
Joachim von Ribbentrop assigned all of the Holocaust related
work to an old crony from the Dienststelle named Martin Luther,
who represented the Foreign Ministry at the Wannsee Conference.
In 1942, Ambassador Otto Abetz secured the deportation of
25,000 French Jews, and Ambassador Hans Ludin secured the
deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to the death camps.Only
once, in August 1942, did Joachim von Ribbentrop attempt to
impede the deportations, but only because of jurisdictional
disputes with the SS. Joachim von Ribbentrop halted deportations
from Romania and Croatia in the case of the former, he was
insulted because the SS were negotiating with the Romanians
directly, and in the case of the latter because the SS and
Luther were jointly pressuring the Italians in their zone
of occupation in Croatia to deport their Jews without first
informing Joachim von Ribbentrop , who was supposed to be
personally kept abreast of all developments in Italo-German
relations.In September 1942, after a meeting with
Adolf
Hitler, who was most unhappy with his Foreign Minister's
actions, Joachim von Ribbentrop promptly changed course and
ordered that the deportations be resumed immediately.
It should be noted that the professional diplomats, and not
just Joachim von Ribbentrop's cronies from the Dienststelle,
were highly involved in the to Final Solution. Typical
among them was the fiercely anti-Semitic Curt Prufer, who
joined the Foreign Office in 1907, served as the German Ambassador
to Brazil in 1938 to 1942, and then worked closely with the
exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni in recruiting
Balkan Muslims to kill Jews in 1943. As an Orientalist who
spoke fluent Arabic, Prufer was especially concerned with
relations with the Arabs. Through Prufer loathed the Nazis
and Joachim von Ribbentrop , whom he viewed as an inept bully
who was trashing his beloved agency, Prufer's hatred for the
Jews was even greater. But after the war, Prufer rewrote his
entire diaries in order to remake himself from an anti-Semitic
German ultra-nationalist into a National Socialist opponent
who was utterly disgusted by National Socialist anti-Semitism
his deception was not exposed until the 1980s by American
historian Donald McKale.
In November 1942, following Operation Torch, Joachim von Ribbentrop
met with Pierre Laval in Munich. He presented Laval with an
ultimatum for Germany's occupation of the French unoccupied
zone and Tunisia. Joachim von Ribbentrop also tried unsuccessfully
to arrange for the Vichy French troops in North Africa to
be formally placed under German command. In December 1942,
during a meeting with the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo
Ciano, who brought a message from Mussolini asking for the
Germans to go on the defensive in the Soviet Union in order
to focus on North Africa, Joachim von Ribbentrop joined with
Adolf Hitler
in belittling Italy's war effort. During the same meeting
in East Prussia with Count Ciano, Pierre Laval arrived and
promptly agreed to
Adolf
Hitler's and Joachim von Ribbentrop's demands that he
place French police under the command of more radical anti-Semitic
and conscript and send hundreds of thousands of French workers
to work in Germany's war industry.Ciano was amazed at the
way that Laval fell in with the German demands, and thought
it all typical Joachim von Ribbentrop that he should remind
Laval in a very tactless way how this forest had once served
as Napoleon's headquarters.
Another low point in Joachim von Ribbentrop's relations with
the SS occurred in February 1943, when the SD backed a Luther-led
internal putsch to oust Joachim von Ribbentrop as Foreign
Minister. Luther had become estranged from Joachim von Ribbentrop
because Frau Joachim von Ribbentrop treated Luther as a household
servant. She pressured her husband into ordering an investigation
into allegations of corruption on Luther's part. The putsch
failed largely because Himmler decided that a Foreign Ministry
headed by Luther would be a more dangerous opponent than the
Joachim von Ribbentrop version. At the last minute he withdrew
his support from Luther. In putsch's aftermath, Luther was
sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
In April 1943, during a summit meeting with Hungary's Admiral
Horthy, Joachim von Ribbentrop strongly and unsuccessfully
pressed the Hungarians to deport their Jewish population to
the death camps. Joachim von Ribbentrop's own views about
the Holocaust were well summarised when, during their meeting,
Joachim von Ribbentrop declared the Jews must either be exterminated
or taken to the concentration camps. There is no other possibility.Later,
when on trial for his life at Nuremberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop
claimed to have always been opposed to the Final Solution
and to have done everything in his power to stop it.
Declining influence
As the war went on, Joachim von Ribbentrop's influence waned.
Because most of the world was at war with Germany, the Foreign
Ministry's importance diminished. By January 1944, Germany
had diplomatic relations with only a handful of countries,
Argentina, Ireland, Vichy France, the Salo Republic in Italy,
Occupied Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania,
Croatia, Bulgaria, Switzerland, the Holy See, Spain, Portugal,
Turkey, Thailand, Japan, and the Japanese puppet states of
Manchukuo and the Wang Jingwei regime in China. Later that
year, Argentina and Turkey severed ties with Germany while
Finland, Romania, and Bulgaria all joined the Allies and declared
war on the Reich.
Adolf Hitler,
for his part, found Joachim von Ribbentrop increasingly tiresome
and sought to avoid him. The Foreign Minister's ever more
desperate pleas for permission to seek peace with at least
some of Germany's enemies the Soviet Union in particular certainly
played a role in their estrangement. As his influence declined,
Joachim von Ribbentrop increasingly spent his time feuding
with other National Socialist leaders over control of anti-Semitic
policies to curry
Adolf
Hitler's favour.
In March 1944,
Adolf
Hitler resolved to invade Hungary after learning of Hungary's
attempts to make peace with the Allies. A Hungarian defection
from the Axis threatened to undermine the entire German war
effort because Romanian oil from the Ploiesti oil-fields passed
through Hungary on the way to Germany. But Joachim von Ribbentrop
who was opposed to
Adolf
Hitler's plans lest Germany lose yet another ally talked
Adolf Hitler
into giving the Hungarians an ultimatum. Admiral Miklós
Horthy met with
Adolf
Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop at Schloss Klessheim
and was informed that he could either accept German occupation
or see Hungary invaded and destroyed. Horthy chose the former
course. After Operation Margarethe's success, Joachim von
Ribbentrop instructed the new Reich Plenipotentiary for Hungary,
Edmund Veesenmayer, to begin deporting Hungarian Jews to National
Socialist death camps.
Joachim von Ribbentrop suffered a major blow when many old
Foreign Office diplomats participated in the 20 July 1944
putsch and assassination attempt on
Adolf
Hitler. Joachim von Ribbentrop hadn't known of the plot,
but the involvement of so many current and former Foreign
Ministry members reflected badly on him.
Adolf
Hitler felt with some justification that Joachim von Ribbentrop's
bloated administration prevented him from keeping proper tabs
on his diplomats' activities. Joachim von Ribbentrop worked
closely with the SS, with which he had reconciled, to purge
the Foreign Office of those involved in the putsch.
Joachim von Ribbentrop also worked closely with the SS for
what turned out to be his last significant foreign-policy
move, Operation Panzerfaust, the coup that deposed Admiral
Horthy on 15 October 1944. Horthy was overthrown because he
had sought a separate peace with the Allies and had ordered
a halt to the deportations. He was replaced by Ferenc Szálasi,
and Hungary resumed deporting Jews.
In April 1945, Joachim von Ribbentrop attended
Adolf
Hitler's 56th birthday party in Berlin. Three days later,
Joachim von Ribbentrop attempted to meet with
Adolf
Hitler, only to be told to go away as
Adolf
Hitler had more important things to do than talk to him.
This was their last meeting.
The following month, Joachim von Ribbentrop was arrested by
Sergeant Jacques Goffinet, a French citizen who had joined
the Belgian SAS and was working with British forces near Hamburg.
Found with him was a rambling letter addressed to the British
Prime Minister Vincent Churchill criticising British foreign
policy for anti-German bias, blaming the British for the Soviet
occupation of eastern Germany, and thus for the advance of
Bolshevism into central Europe. The fact that Joachim von
Ribbentrop did not recall Churchill's given name reflected
either his general ignorance about the world beyond Germany,
or his distracted mental state at war's end.
Trial and execution
Joachim von Ribbentrop was a defendant at the Nuremberg Trials.
He was charged with crimes against peace, deliberately planning
a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Prosecutors presented evidence that Joachim von Ribbentrop
actively planned German aggression and to deport Jews to death
camps. He also advocated executing American and British airmen
shot down over Germany. The latter two charges carried the
penalty of death by hanging.
The Allies' International Military Tribunal found him guilty
on all counts. But even in prison, Joachim von Ribbentrop
remained loyal to
Adolf
Hitler Even with all I know, if in this cell
Adolf
Hitler should come to me and say 'Do this!', I would still
do it.
During trial, Joachim von Ribbentrop unsuccessfully sought
to deny his role in the war. For example, during his cross-examination,
British Prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe brought up claims
that Joachim von Ribbentrop had threatened Czechoslovak President
Emil Hácha with aggressive action.
Maxwell-Fyfe, What further pressure could you put on the head
of a country beyond threatening him that your Army would march
in, in overwhelming strength, and your air force would bomb
his capital? Joachim von Ribbentrop War, for instance. Gustave
Gilbert, an American Army psychologist, was allowed to examine
the National Socialist leaders who stood trial. Among other
tests, he administered a German version of the Wechsler-Bellevue
IQ test. Joachim von Ribbentrop scored 129, the 10th highest
among the National Socialist leaders tested. Yet at one point
during trial, a U.S. Army interpreter asked Baron Ernst von
Weizsäcker how
Adolf
Hitler could have made him a high official. Ernst von
Weizsäcker responded
Adolf
Hitler never noticed Joachim von Ribbentrop's babbling
because
Adolf
Hitler always did all the talking.
Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first politician to be hanged
on 16 October 1946
Hermann
Göring having committed suicide before his own hanging.
He was escorted up the 13 steps to the waiting noose and asked
if he had any final words. He calmly said, God protect Germany.
God have mercy on my soul. My final wish is that Germany should
recover her unity and that, for the sake of peace, there should
be understanding between East and West. As the hood was placed
over his head, Joachim von Ribbentrop added. I wish peace
to the world. After a slight pause the executioner pulled
the lever, releasing the trap door. Joachim von Ribbentrop's
neck snapped he died instantly. But he was not formally pronounced
dead for seventeen minutes. Pro-National Socialist sympathisers
have since seized upon this interval to construct medically
nonsensical statements such as The hangman botched the execution
and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty
minutes before he expired.
In 1953, Joachim von Ribbentrop's memoirs, Zwischen London
und Moskau (Between London and Moscow), were published.
This clip shows Joachim von Ribbentrop laying a wreath on
a war memorial in Munich.
For a complete list of
wikipedia