Joachim von Ribbentrop (30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis and as a perceived authority on foreign affairs.
On 16 October 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging. ==Early life== 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. From 1904 to 1908, Ribbentrop took French courses at Lycée Fabert in Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress.
On 16 October 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging. ==Early life== 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. From 1904 to 1908, Ribbentrop took French courses at Lycée Fabert in Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress.
In 1914, he competed for Ottawa's famous Minto ice-skating team and participated in the Ellis Memorial Trophy tournament in Boston in February. When the First World War began later in 1914, Ribbentrop left Canada, which as part of the British Empire was at war with Germany, and found temporary sanctuary in neutral United States.
On 15 August 1914, he sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Holland-America ship The Potsdam, bound for Rotterdam, and on his return to Germany enlisted in the Prussian 12th Hussar Regiment. Ribbentrop served first on the Eastern Front, then was transferred to the Western Front.
Ribbentrop told Hitler that because of his four years in Canada and the United States before 1914, he was an expert on all things American; he thought that the United States was not a serious military power.
In 1918, 1st Lieutenant Ribbentrop was stationed in Istanbul as a staff officer.
Ribbentrop's friendship with Papen, which went back to 1918, ended over that issue.
During his time in Turkey, he became a friend of another staff officer, Franz von Papen. In 1919, Ribbentrop met Anna Elisabeth Henkell ("Annelies" to her friends), the daughter of a wealthy Wiesbaden wine producer.
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 it and that Germany was not seeking to dominate Europe.
Craig and Felix Gilbert (eds.) The Diplomats 1919–39.
They were married on 5 July 1920, and Ribbentrop began to travel throughout Europe as a wine salesman.
Several Berlin Jewish businessmen who did business with Ribbentrop in the 1920s and knew him well later expressed astonishment at the vicious anti-Semitism he later displayed in the Third Reich, saying that they did not see any indications he had held such views.
The Foreign Office had traditionally favoured a policy of friendship with China, and an informal Sino-German alliance had emerged by the late 1920s.
Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1997). Oursler Jr., Fulton.
In 1925 his aunt, Gertrud von Ribbentrop, adopted him, which allowed him to add the nobiliary particle von to his name. ==Early career== In 1928, 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".
In 1925 his aunt, Gertrud von Ribbentrop, adopted him, which allowed him to add the nobiliary particle von to his name. ==Early career== In 1928, 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".
A visitor to a party Ribbentrop threw in 1928 recorded that Ribbentrop had no political views beyond a vague admiration for Gustav Stresemann, fear of Communism, and a wish to restore the monarchy.
In his early years, Hitler's goal in foreign affairs was to persuade the world that he wished to reduce the defence budget by making idealistic but very vague disarmament offers (in the 1930s, disarmament described arms limitation agreements).
Craig once observed that of all the voluminous memoir literature of the diplomatic scene of 1930s Europe, there are only two positive references to Ribbentrop.
This was significant as there had been many fears in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that the Germans would use Ukrainian nationalism as a tool to break up the Soviet Union.
Ribbentrop and his wife joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1932.
Six months later, however, Hitler and Papen accepted his help. Their change of heart occurred after General Kurt von Schleicher ousted Papen in December 1932.
He offered his house Schloss Fuschl for the secret meetings in January 1933 that resulted in Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany.
On 22 January 1933, State Secretary Otto Meissner and Hindenburg's son Oskar met Hitler, Hermann Göring, and Wilhelm Frick at Ribbentrop's home in Berlin's exclusive Dahlem district.
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 for the other powers to disarm to Germany's level or to Part V and allow Germany Gleichberechtigung ("equality of armaments").
"The Structure of Nazi Foreign Policy, 1933–45" pp. 49–94. Kaillis, Aristotle.
Hitler's Thirty Days To Power: January 1933.
It convinced many in France that Hitler was a man of peace, who wanted to do away only with Part V of the Versailles Treaty. ===Special Commissioner for Disarmament=== In 1934, Hitler named Ribbentrop Special Commissioner for Disarmament.
Ribbentrop was tasked with ensuring that the world remained convinced that Germany sincerely wanted an arms-limitation treaty, but he ensured that no such treaty was ever developed. On 17 April 1934, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou issued the so-called "Barthou note", which led to concerns on the part of Hitler that the French would ask for sanctions against Germany for violating Part V of the Versailles treaty.
The meeting of the Bureau of Disarmament went ahead as scheduled, but because no sanctions were sought against Germany, Ribbentrop could claim a success. ====Dienststelle Ribbentrop==== In August 1934, Ribbentrop founded an organization linked to the Nazi Party called the Büro Ribbentrop (later renamed the Dienststelle Ribbentrop).
In November 1934, Ribbentrop met with George Bernard Shaw, Sir Austen Chamberlain, Lord Cecil and Lord Lothian.
"'An Idyllic and Unruffled Atmosphere of Complete Anglo–German Misunderstanding': Aspects of the Operation of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop in Great Britain 1934–1939".
In that capacity, Ribbentrop negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) in 1935 and the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. ====Anglo-German Naval Agreement==== Neurath did not think it possible to achieve the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.
However, to everyone's surprise, the next day the British accepted Ribbentrop's demands, and the AGNA was signed in London on 18 June 1935 by Ribbentrop and Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British Foreign Secretary.
On 3 July 1935, it was announced that Ribbentrop would head the efforts to recover Germany's former African colonies.
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, Ribbentrop arranged for a series of much-publicised visits of First World War veterans to Britain, France and Germany.
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-publicized speech at the Legion's annual conference in June 1935 that stated that 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 that he hoped that Britain and Germany would never fight again.
This British governmental view, summarised by Robert, Viscount Cranborne, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was that Ribbentrop always was a second-rate man. In 1935, Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador to Germany, complained to London about Ribbentrop's British associates in the Anglo-German Fellowship.
He was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James's, the royal court of the United Kingdom, in 1936 and then Foreign Minister of Germany in February 1938. Before World War II, he played a key role in brokering the Pact of Steel (an alliance with Fascist Italy) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact).
In that capacity, Ribbentrop negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) in 1935 and the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. ====Anglo-German Naval Agreement==== Neurath did not think it possible to achieve the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.
Germany would renounce its demands in exchange for a British alliance. =====Anti-Comintern Pact===== The Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936 marked an important change in German foreign policy.
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.
Ribbentrop arrived to take up his position in October 1936.
Ribbentrop's 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. Invited to stay as a house guest of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry at Wynyard Hall in County Durham, in November 1936, he was taken to a service in Durham Cathedral, and the hymn Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken was announced.
During the abdication crisis in December 1936, Ribbentrop reported to Berlin that it had been precipitated by an anti-German Jewish-Masonic-reactionary conspiracy to depose Edward, whom Ribbentrop represented as a staunch friend of Germany, and that civil war would soon break out in Britain between supporters of Edward and those of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin.
Hitler dismissed Göring's concerns: "But after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England." That remark led Göring to reply "Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him". In February 1937, Ribbentrop committed a notable social gaffe by unexpectedly greeting George VI with the "German greeting", a stiff-armed Nazi salute: the gesture nearly knocked over the King, who was walking forward to shake Ribbentrop's hand at the time.
In September 1937, the British Consul in Munich, writing about the group that Ribbentrop had brought to the Nuremberg Rally, reported that there were some "serious persons of standing among them" but that an equal number of 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 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after meeting Hitler in a visit arranged by Ribbentrop, Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Permanent Under-Secretary of State, wrote a memo stating that: The P.M.
Rees concluded, "No other Nazi was so hated by his colleagues". In November 1937, Ribbentrop was placed in a highly-embarrassing situation since his forceful advocacy of the return of the former German colonies led British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos to offer 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.
Immediately after turning down the Anglo-French offer on colonial restoration, Ribbentrop, for reasons of pure malice, ordered the Reichskolonialbund to increase the agitation for the former German colonies, a move that exasperated both the Foreign Office and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary in late 1937, Ribbentrop had come to hate Britain with all the "fury of a woman scorned".
Ribbentrop and Hitler, for that matter, never understood that British foreign policy aimed at the appeasement of Germany, not an alliance with it. When Ribbentrop traveled 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.
Believing himself to be in a state of disgrace with Hitler over his failure to achieve the British alliance, Ribbentrop spent December 1937 in a state of depression and, together with his wife, wrote two lengthy documents for Hitler that denounced Britain.
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, Ribbentrop had championed the idea of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan that would partition the British Empire among them.
Joachim von Ribbentrop (30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis and as a perceived authority on foreign affairs.
He was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James's, the royal court of the United Kingdom, in 1936 and then Foreign Minister of Germany in February 1938. Before World War II, he played a key role in brokering the Pact of Steel (an alliance with Fascist Italy) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact).
With the appointment of Ribbentrop to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in February 1938, the Dienststelle itself lost its importance, and about a third of the staff of the office followed Ribbentrop to the Foreign Office. Ribbentrop engaged in diplomacy on his own, such as when he visited France and met Foreign Minister Louis Barthou.
In the first report to Hitler, which was presented on 2 January 1938, Ribbentrop stated that "England is our most dangerous enemy".
On 4 February 1938, Ribbentrop succeeded Neurath as Foreign Minister.
In contrast to Neurath's cautious and less bellicose nature, Ribbentrop unequivocally supported war in 1938 and 1939. 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.
As early as 1938, 32% of the offices in the Foreign Ministry were held by men who previously served in the Dienststelle. One of Ribbentrop's first acts as Foreign Minister was to achieve a total volte-face in Germany's Far Eastern policies.
Ribbentrop was instrumental in February 1938 in persuading Hitler to recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and to renounce German claims upon its former colonies in the Pacific, which were now held by Japan.
By April 1938, 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.
At the same time, the end of the informal Sino-German alliance led Chiang to terminate all concessions and contracts held by German companies in Kuomintang China. ===Munich Agreement and Czechoslovakia's destruction=== Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary from 1938 to 1943, opposed the general trend in German foreign policy towards attacking Czechoslovakia and feared that it might cause a general war that Germany would lose.
Ribbentrop spent the last weeks of September 1938 looking forward very much to the German-Czechoslovak war that he expected to break out on 1 October 1938.
As a consequence, Britain was considered after Munich to be the main enemy of the Reich, and as a result, the influence of ardently Anglophobic Ribbentrop correspondingly rose with Hitler. Partly for economic reasons, and partly out of fury over being "cheated" out of war in 1938, Hitler decided to destroy the rump state of Czecho-Slovakia, as Czechoslovakia had been renamed in October 1938, early in 1939.
When Tiso proved reluctant to do so on the grounds that the autonomy that had existed since October 1938 was sufficient for him and that to completely sever links with the Czechs would leave Slovakia open to being annexed by Hungary, Ribbentrop had the German embassy in Budapest contact the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy.
The establishment of an autonomous Ukrainian region in Czecho-Slovakia 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 Soviet Ukraine.
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 such as Weizsäcker were highly enthusiastic about the prospect of war with Poland in 1939.
Ribbentrop had been attempting to appoint Papen as an ambassador to Turkey since April 1938.
The German embassy in Ankara had been vacant ever since the retirement of the previous ambassador Friedrich von Keller in November 1938, and Ribbentrop was able to get the Turks to accept Papen as ambassador only when the Saracoğlu complained to Kroll in April 1939 about when the Germans were ever going to send a new ambassador.
At the same time, 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 1938–1939, but with the Italians, Ribbentrop enjoyed some apparent success.
Ribbentrop feared that if German–Polish talks took 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, depriving the Germans of their excuse for aggression.
Underlying the basis of the "containment" of Germany were the so-called "X documents", provided by Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, over the course of the winter of 1938–1939.
In July 1939, Ribbentrop's claims about an alleged statement of December 1938 made by French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet were to lead to a lengthy war of words via a series of letters to the French newspapers between Ribbentrop and Bonnet over precisely what Bonnet had said to Ribbentrop. On 11 August 1939, Ribbentrop met the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Count Bernardo Attolico, in Salzburg.
Though the French and the Italians were serious about Mussolini's peace plan, which called for an immediate ceasefire and a four-power conference in the manner of the Munich conference of 1938 to consider Poland's borders, British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax stated that unless the Germans withdrew from Poland immediately, Britain would not attend the proposed conference.
The decision to award so much of Romania to the Hungarians was Hitler's, as 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.
The Munich Crisis, 1938: Prelude to World War II.
How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–1939.
In contrast to Neurath's cautious and less bellicose nature, Ribbentrop unequivocally supported war in 1938 and 1939. 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, Ribbentrop attempted to persuade other states to enter the war on Germany's side or at least to maintain pro-German neutrality.
As a consequence, Britain was considered after Munich to be the main enemy of the Reich, and as a result, the influence of ardently Anglophobic Ribbentrop correspondingly rose with Hitler. Partly for economic reasons, and partly out of fury over being "cheated" out of war in 1938, Hitler decided to destroy the rump state of Czecho-Slovakia, as Czechoslovakia had been renamed in October 1938, early in 1939.
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 Czecho-Slovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin over his "failure" to keep order in his country.
On the night of 14–15 March 1939, Ribbentrop played a key role in the German annexation of the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia by bullying 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 areas of Czecho-Slovakia, which then became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. On 20 March 1939, Ribbentrop summoned Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys to Berlin and informed him that if a Lithuanian plenipotentiary did not arrive at once to negotiate to turn over the Memelland to Germany the Luftwaffe would raze Kaunas to the ground.
As a result of Ribbentrop's ultimatum on 23 March, the Lithuanians agreed to return Memel (modern Klaipėda, Lithuania) to Germany. In March 1939, Ribbentrop assigned the largely ethnically Ukrainian Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czecho-Slovakia, which had just proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, to Hungary, which then proceeded to annex it after a short war.
On 21 March 1939, Hitler first went public with his demand that Danzig rejoin the Reich and for "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor.
The same day, on 21 March 1939, 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.
Ribbentrop had used such extreme language, particularly 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.
Though the Germans were not planning an attack on Poland in March 1939, Ribbentrop's bullying behaviour towards the Poles destroyed any faint chance Poland allowing Danzig to return to Germany. The German occupation of the Czech areas of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March, in total contravention of the Munich Agreement, which had been signed less than six months before, infuriated British and French public opinion and lost Germany any sympathy.
By occupying the Czech parts of Czecho-Slovakia, Germany lost all credibility for 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 the British policy of resisting commitments in Eastern Europe.
But his denials were expressed in almost identical language to the denials that he had issued in early March, when he had denied that anything was being planned against the Czechs; thus they actually increased the "Romanian war scare" of March 1939.
As a result of the "guarantee" of Poland, Hitler began to speak with increasing frequency of a British "encirclement" policy, which he used as the excuse for denouncing, in a speech before the Reichstag on 28 April 1939, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland. ===Turkey=== In late March, Ribbentrop had the German chargé d'affaires in Turkey, Hans Kroll, start pressuring Turkey into an alliance with Germany.
The Turks assured Kroll that they had no objection to Germany making the Balkans its 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 Ribbentrop announced at a secret meeting of the senior staff of the Foreign Office that Germany was ending talks with Poland and was instead going to destroy it 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 such as Weizsäcker were highly enthusiastic about the prospect of war with Poland in 1939.
The degree of unity within the German government with both the diplomats and the military united in their support of Hitler's anti-Polish policy, which stood in contrast to their views the previous year about destroying Czechoslovakia, very much encouraged Hitler and Ribbentrop with their chosen course of action. In April 1939, Ribbentrop received intelligence that Britain and Turkey were negotiating an alliance intended to keep Germany out of the Balkans.
On 23 April 1939, Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu told the British ambassador of Turkish fears of Italian claims of the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum and German control of the Balkans, and he suggested an Anglo-Soviet-Turkish alliance as the best way of countering the Axis.
The German embassy in Ankara had been vacant ever since the retirement of the previous ambassador Friedrich von Keller in November 1938, and Ribbentrop was able to get the Turks to accept Papen as ambassador only when the Saracoğlu complained to Kroll in April 1939 about when the Germans were ever going to send a new ambassador.
One of the consequences of Ribbentrop's heavyhanded behaviour was the signing of the Anglo-Turkish alliance on 12 May 1939. From early 1939 onwards, 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.
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 Ribbentrop's demands about Danzig, the "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor and the Anti-Comintern Pact.
During the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact negotiations, Ribbentrop was overjoyed by a report from his ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, of a speech by 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.
Ribbentrop's efforts were crowned with success with the signing of the Pact of Steel in May 1939, but it was accomplished only by falsely assuring Mussolini that there would be no war for the next three years. ===Pact with Soviet Union and outbreak of World War II=== Ribbentrop played a key role in the conclusion of a Soviet-German non-aggression pact, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939 and in the diplomatic action surrounding the attack on Poland.
In public, Ribbentrop expressed great fury at the Polish refusal to allow for Danzig's return to the Reich or to grant Polish permission for the "extra-territorial" highways, but since the matters were intended after March 1939 to be only a pretext for German aggression, Ribbentrop always refused privately to allow for any talks between German and Polish diplomats about those matters.
On 25 May 1939, 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, Hitler always privately referred to Britain as his main opponent but portrayed the coming destruction of Poland as a necessary prelude to any war with Britain.
Along the same lines, Ribbentrop told 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". Ribbentrop supported his analysis of the situation by showing Hitler only the diplomatic dispatches that supported his view that neither Britain nor France would honour their commitments to Poland.
The new "containment" strategy adopted in March 1939 was to give firm warnings to Berlin, increase the pace of British rearmament and attempt to form an interlocking network of alliances that would block German aggression anywhere in Europe by creating such a formidable deterrence to aggression that Hitler could not rationally choose that option.
The German refusal either to deliver the artillery pieces or refund the 125 million Reichsmarks that the Turks had paid 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 Ribbentrop's entreaties to join the Axis.
In July 1939, Ribbentrop's claims about an alleged statement of December 1938 made by French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet were to lead to a lengthy war of words via a series of letters to the French newspapers between Ribbentrop and Bonnet over precisely what Bonnet had said to Ribbentrop. On 11 August 1939, Ribbentrop met the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Count Bernardo Attolico, in Salzburg.
The Salzburg meeting marked the moment when Ciano's dislike of Ribbentrop was transformed into outright hatred and of the beginning of his disillusionment with the pro-German foreign policy that he had championed. On 21 August 1939, Hitler received a message from Stalin: "The Soviet Government has instructed me to say they agree to Herr von Ribbentrop's arrival on 23 August".
Weizsäcker recorded in his diary throughout the spring and summer of 1939 repeated statements from Hitler that any German–Polish war would be a localized conflict and that there was no danger of a general war if the Soviet Union could be persuaded to stay neutral.
That 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 that only Soviet support offered the prospect of Poland holding out. The signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in Moscow on 23 August 1939 was the crowning achievement of Ribbentrop's career.
For a brief moment in August 1939, Ribbentrop convinced Hitler that the Non-Aggression 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.
On 23 August 1939, at a secret meeting of the Reichs top military leadership at the Berghof, Hitler argued that 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.
Unlike Hitler, who saw the Non-Aggression Pact as merely a pragmatic device forced on him by circumstances, the refusal of Britain or Poland to play the roles that Hitler had allocated to them, Ribbentrop regarded the Non-Aggression Pact as integral to his anti-British policy. The signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939 not only won Germany an informal alliance with the Soviet Union but also neutralized Anglo-French attempts to win Turkey to the "peace front".
That would allow the Allies to send troops and supplies to Romania over the Black Sea and through Romania to Poland. On 25 August 1939, Ribbentrop's influence with 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 that told Hitler that Italy would dishonour the Pact of Steel if Germany attacked Poland.
In his letter, Chamberlain wrote: Ribbentrop told Hitler that Chamberlain's letter was just a bluff and urged his master to call it. On the night of 30–31 August 1939, Ribbentrop had an extremely heated exchange with British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson, who objected to 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", the responsibility for the outbreak of war would not rest on the Reich.
The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the Henderson–Ribbentrop meeting: 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.
The "rejection" of the German proposal was one of the pretexts used for the German aggression against Poland on 1 September 1939.
Besides the Polish "rejection" of the German "final offer", the aggression against Poland was justified with 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, Mussolini launched another desperate peace mediation plan intended to stop the German–Polish war from becoming a world war.
The British historian Richard Overy wrote that what Hitler thought he was starting in September 1939 was only a local war between Germany and Poland and that his decision to do so was largely based on a vast underestimate of the risks of a general war.
Ribbentrop's influence caused it to have been often observed that Hitler went to war in 1939 with the country he wanted as his ally, the United Kingdom, as his enemy and the country he wanted as his enemy, the Soviet Union, as his ally. After the outbreak of World War II, Ribbentrop spent most of the Polish campaign travelling with Hitler.
On 27 September 1939, Ribbentrop made a second visit to Moscow.
Unlike the other factions, Ribbentrop's foreign policy programme was the only one that Hitler allowed to be executed during the years 1939–41, though it was more due to the temporary bankruptcy of 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.
Since October 1939 they had operated largely independently of the German embassies at which they had been stationed.
Ribbentrop told Hitler that his sources showed that Britain would not be militarily prepared to take on Germany at the earliest until 1940 or more probably 1941, so that meant that the British were bluffing.
On 1 March 1940, Ribbentrop received Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, who was on a peace mission for US President Franklin Roosevelt, and did his best to abuse his American guest.
On 10 March 1940, Ribbentrop visited Rome to meet with Mussolini, who promised him that Italy would soon enter the war.
After the Italo-German summit at the Brenner Pass on 18 March 1940, which was attended by Hitler and Mussolini, Count Ciano wrote in his diary: "Everyone in Rome dislikes Ribbentrop".
On 7 May 1940, 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, 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.
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=== Ribbentrop, a Francophile, argued that Germany should allow Vichy France a limited degree of independence within a binding Franco-German partnership.
Hitler saw the alliance with the Soviet Union as only tactical, and was nowhere as anti-British as his Foreign Minister. In August 1940, Ribbentrop oversaw the Second Vienna Award, which saw about 40% of the Transylvania region of Romania returned to Hungary.
When Ribbentrop finally got around to announcing his decision, the Hungarian delegation, which had expected Ribbentrop to rule in favour of Romania, broke out in cheers, while the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu fainted. In the autumn of 1940, Ribbentrop made a sustained but unsuccessful effort to have Spain enter the war on the Axis side.
An area in which Ribbentrop enjoyed more success arose in September 1940, when he had the Far Eastern agent of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, Dr.
The end result of these talks was the signing in Berlin on 27 September 1940 of the Tripartite Pact by Ribbentrop, Count Ciano, and Japanese Ambassador Saburō Kurusu. In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner oversaw the near total expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France; they deported them not only from the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed that summer to the Reich, but also from their Gaue as well.
Ribbentrop treated in a "most dilatory fashion" the ensuing complaints by the Vichy French government over the expulsions. In November 1940, during the visit of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin, Ribbentrop tried hard to get the Soviet Union to sign the Tripartite Pact.
Matsuoka responded that preparations to occupy Singapore were under way. In the winter of 1940–41, Ribbentrop strongly pressured the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, despite advice from the German Legation in Belgrade that such an action would probably lead to the overthrow of Crown Prince Paul, the Yugoslav Regent.
The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43.
In the autumn of 1941, due to American aid to Britain and the increasingly frequent "incidents" in the North Atlantic between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to Britain, Ribbentrop worked for the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and for Japan to attack the United States.
From 1941 onwards, Ribbentrop's influence declined. Arrested in June 1945, Ribbentrop was convicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust.
Ribbentrop told Hitler that his sources showed that Britain would not be militarily prepared to take on Germany at the earliest until 1940 or more probably 1941, so that meant that the British were bluffing.
In January 1941, the nadir of the relations between the SS and the Foreign Office was reached when the Iron Guard attempted a coup in Romania.
In the spring of 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to German embassies in eastern Europe, with Manfred von Killinger dispatched 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 helped to enable a split in the SS (the traditional rivalry between the SS and SA was still running strong). In March 1941, Japan's Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, a Germanophile, visited Berlin.
On 29 March 1941, during a conversation with Matsuoka, Ribbentrop, as instructed by Hitler, told the Japanese nothing about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler believed that he could defeat the Soviet Union on his own and preferred that the Japanese attack Britain instead.
On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia reluctantly signed the Tripartite Pact; the next day the Yugoslav military overthrew Prince Paul in a bloodless coup.
He had Edmund Veesenmayer successfully conclude talks in April 1941 with General Slavko Kvaternik of the Ustaša on having his party rule Croatia after the German invasion.
Reflecting his displeasure with the German Legation in Belgrade, which had advised against pushing Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, Ribbentrop refused to have the German Legation withdrawn in advance before Germany bombed Belgrade on 6 April 1941.
The staff was left to survive the fire-bombing as best it could. Ribbentrop liked and admired Joseph Stalin and was opposed to the attack on the Soviet Union 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." When it came to time for Ribbentrop to present the German declaration of war on 22 June 1941 to the Soviet Ambassador, General Vladimir Dekanozov, the interpreter 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.
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 Führers wish". When Dekanozov finally appeared, 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.
Ribbentrop did not present a declaration of war to General Dekanozov, confining himself to reading the statement about Germany being forced to take "military countermeasures". Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference to concentrate against Britain, Ribbentrop began a sustained effort on 28 June 1941, without consulting Hitler, to have Japan attack the Soviet Union.
On 10 July 1941 Ribbentrop ordered General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador to Japan to: 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.
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, Ribbentrop had Germany break off diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek and recognized the Japanese-puppet government of Wang Jingwei as China's legitimate rulers.
Despite Ribbentrop's best efforts, Matsuoka was sacked as foreign minister later in July 1941, and the Japanese-American talks began. After the war, Ribbentrop was found to have had culpability in the Holocaust based on his efforts to persuade the leaders of satellite countries of the Third Reich to deport Jews to the Nazi extermination camps.
In August 1941, when the question of whether to deport foreign Jews living in Germany arose, Ribbentrop argued against deportation as a way of maximizing the Foreign Office's influence.
In September 1941, the Reich Plenipotentiary for Serbia, Felix Benzler, reported to Ribbentrop that the SS had arrested 8,000 Serbian Jews, whom they were planning to execute en masse.
Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who ordered Benzler to co-operate fully in the massacre. In the autumn of 1941, Ribbentrop worked for the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and for Japan to attack the United States.
In October 1941 Ribbentrop ordered Eugen Ott, the German ambassador to Japan, to start applying pressure on the Japanese to attack the Americans as soon as possible.
On 4 December 1941, the Japanese Ambassador General Hiroshi Ōshima told Ribbentrop that Japan was on the verge of war with the United States.
On 7 December 1941, Ribbentrop was jubilant at the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and did his utmost to support a declaration of war on the United States.
Morris on 11 December 1941.
Despite Ciano's efforts to persuade Ribbentrop to put off the attack on Poland until 1942 to allow the Italians time to get ready for war, Ribbentrop was adamant that Germany had no interest in a diplomatic solution of the Danzig question but wanted a war to wipe Poland off the map.
The different foreign-policy conceptions held by Hitler and Ribbentrop were illustrated in their reaction to the Fall of Singapore in 1942: Ribbentrop wanted this great British defeat to be a day of celebration in Germany, whereas Hitler forbade any celebrations on the grounds that Singapore represented a sad day for the principles of white supremacy.
In the winter and spring of 1942, following American entry into war, the United States successfully pressured all of the Latin American states, except for Argentina and Chile, to declare war on Germany.
He had Weizsäcker accept their declarations of war instead. In April 1942, as part of a diplomatic counterpart to Case Blue, a military operation in southern Russia, Ribbentrop assembled a collection of anti-Soviet émigrés from the Caucasus in the Hotel Adlon in Berlin with the intention to have them declared leaders of governments-in-exile.
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 Ribbentrop try to restrict the deportations, but only because of jurisdictional disputes with the SS.
In September 1942, after a meeting with Hitler, who was unhappy with his foreign minister's actions, Ribbentrop changed course and ordered the deportations to be resumed immediately. In November 1942, following Operation Torch (the British-American invasion of North Africa), Ribbentrop met with French Chief of the Government Pierre Laval in Munich.
In December 1942, he met with the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who carried Mussolini's request urging the Germans to go on the defensive in the Soviet Union in order to focus on attacking North Africa.
He was also deeply involved in the "final solution"; as early as 1942 he had ordered German diplomats in Axis countries to hasten the process of sending Jews to death camps in the east.
In the second, from 1939 to 1943, Ribbentrop attempted to persuade other states to enter the war on Germany's side or at least to maintain pro-German neutrality.
The plan was never concluded. In the final phase, from 1943 to 1945, he had the task of trying to keep Germany's allies from leaving her side.
At the same time, the end of the informal Sino-German alliance led Chiang to terminate all concessions and contracts held by German companies in Kuomintang China. ===Munich Agreement and Czechoslovakia's destruction=== Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary from 1938 to 1943, opposed the general trend in German foreign policy towards attacking Czechoslovakia and feared that it might cause a general war that Germany would lose.
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, Ribbentrop had championed the idea of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan that would partition the British Empire among them.
To Ribbentrop's disappointment, Hitler sided with Rosenberg. 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 (1942–44), Hungary (1944–45), Slovakia, Italy (after 1943), and the Balkans.
He quickly agreed to Hitler's and Ribbentrop's demands that he place French police under the command of more radical anti-Semitics and transport hundreds of thousands of French workers to labor in Germany's war industry. Another low point in Ribbentrop's relations with the SS occurred in February 1943, when the SD backed a Luther-led internal putsch to oust Ribbentrop as foreign minister.
In the aftermath of the putsch, Luther was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In April 1943, during a summit meeting with Hungary's Regent Miklós Horthy, Ribbentrop strongly pressed the Hungarians to deport their Jewish population to the death camps, but was unsuccessful.
By January 1944, Germany had diplomatic relations only with Argentina, Ireland, Vichy France, the Italian Social 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 of China.
As his influence declined, Ribbentrop spent his time feuding with other Nazi leaders over control of anti-Semitic policies to curry Hitler's favour. Ribbentrop suffered a major blow when many old Foreign Office diplomats participated in the 20 July 1944 putsch and assassination attempt on Hitler.
Joachim von Ribbentrop (30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis and as a perceived authority on foreign affairs.
From 1941 onwards, Ribbentrop's influence declined. Arrested in June 1945, Ribbentrop was convicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust.
The plan was never concluded. In the final phase, from 1943 to 1945, he had the task of trying to keep Germany's allies from leaving her side.
"You dirty little champagne salesman! Shut your mouth!" Göring shouted, threatening to smack Ribbentrop with his marshal's baton. On 20 April 1945, Ribbentrop attended Hitler's 56th birthday party in Berlin.
He supported the lynching of Allied airmen shot down over Germany, and helped to cover up the 1945 murder of Major-General Gustave Mesny, a French officer being held as a prisoner of war.
Joachim von Ribbentrop (30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945. Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis and as a perceived authority on foreign affairs.
On 16 October 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging. ==Early life== 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. From 1904 to 1908, Ribbentrop took French courses at Lycée Fabert in Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress.
Freiherr von Weizsäcker responded, "Hitler never noticed Ribbentrop's babbling because Hitler always did all the talking." On 16 October 1946, Ribbentrop became the first of those sentenced to death at Nuremberg to be hanged, after Göring committed suicide just before his scheduled execution.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953, pp. 406–436. Hildebrand, Klaus.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959.
published in German in 1963), pp. 265–282.
London: Batsford, 1973.
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978.
The Heart has its Reasons: The Memoirs of the Duchess of Windsor, Bath: Chivers Press. ==Further reading== Fest, Joachim C., and Bullock, Michael (trans.) "Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Degradation of Diplomacy" in The Face of the Third Reich New York: Penguin, 1979 (orig.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981.
London: Macmillan 1985, pp. 267–284.
London: Heinemann, 1989.
I, Clarendon Press: Oxford, United Kingdom, 1990. Michalka, Wolfgang.
New York: Crown Publishing, 1992.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.
The British historian/television producer Laurence Rees noted for his 1997 series A Warning from History that every single person interviewed for the series who knew Ribbentrop expressed a passionate hatred for him.
Pariahs, Partners, Predators: German-Soviet Relations, 1922-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1997). Oursler Jr., Fulton.
"Secret Treason", American Heritage, 42 (8) (1991). Rees, Laurence A Warning from History, New York: New Press, 1997 . Rothwell, Victor.
History, Volume 82, 1997, pp. 44–74. Watt, D.
Leitz, Christian (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, .
London: Frank Cass Inc, 1999.
Fascist Ideology, London: Routledge, 2000 . Lukes, Igor, and Erik Goldstein (eds.).
The Origins of the Second World War, Manchester University Press: Manchester, United Kingdom, 2001 . Shirer, William L.
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