The man known to history as Joachim von Ribbentrop
was born on the 30th of April, 1893, in the city of Wesel, near the Dutch border in what
was then the province of Rhenish Prussia, in the Rhineland region of western Germany. He was born simply as Joachim Ribbentrop. It was only when he was adopted by a relative
with noble blood in later life, that he became known as Joachim von Ribbentrop. His father was Richard Ulrich Friedrich Joachim
Ribbentrop. Richard was an army officer, a lieutenant
in the Westphalian Field Artillery, and his work ensured that the Ribbentrops travelled
around quite a bit. As we will see, much of Joachim’s ascent
to political office in later life was based on his ability to speak several languages,
and his knowledge of other countries, faculties he developed early in life on account of his
father’s profession. His mother was Johanne Sophie Hertwig, who
went by the name of Sophie. Together she and Richard had three children,
Lothar, the eldest, was born in 1890, their second son Joachim, was born in 1883, with
a daughter, Ingeborg, arriving in 1896. The Ribbentrops moved quite a lot from very
early in Joachim’s life. When he was still a boy they relocated to
Castle Wilehelmshohe near the town of Kassel. In the late nineteenth century it was not
common for one to acquire a position as an officer in the German army unless one was
possessed of a certain level of wealth. Lieutenant Richard Ribbentrop did not possess
such wealth and as such must have been unusually well qualified in order to attain this position. However, the fact that the Ribbentrops lived
ensconced in a world of well-to-do military families, many of whom were members of the
minor Prussian and German nobility, seems to have had a significant impact on Joachim
during his youth, and he would spend much of his later life trying to acquire the trappings
of wealth and nobility. This disposition as a social climber, which
he acquired as a result of this upbringing, would one day go on to account for much of
his desire to first join and then rise within Germany’s Nazi Party in the 1930s. Joachim’s childhood was also dysfunctional
in other ways. His mother, Sophie, suffered from tuberculosis. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, tuberculosis was still a deadly disease, with few known treatments. It was also contagious, a fact which saw Sophie
Ribbentrop often spending much of her time in bed and away from her children, for fear
of passing the disease to them. In the end her efforts in this regard were
unsuccessful. Her eldest child, Lothar, caught the disease
and eventually died from it years later. It is also highly likely that Joachim became
tubercular himself at a young age. Consequently, when he was eighteen years old,
one of his kidneys was removed and it seems likely that this was to prevent the further
spread of the disease through his system. This left Ribbentrop with a droop to one of
his eyelids, which was related to the infected kidney. Beyond these personal health matters, the
death of Lothar years later affected him badly. The pair had been close and relied on each
other in a family dynamic where Lieutenant Ribbentrop was a cold and distant presence. As a result, in his late teenage years Joachim
was increasingly isolated, as the family continued to move from place to place due to his father’s
reassignments to different bases and garrisons. In 1901, Richard Ribbentrop was promoted to
the position of major and the family was once again uprooted from Kassel to go and live
in Metz, a town in eastern France today, but one which had become part of the German Empire
in 1871, following the annexation of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine by Prussia, at the
end of the brief Franco-Prussian War. The Ribbentrops remained here for the next
seven years. In 1902, Sophie Ribbentrop finally succumbed
to her tuberculosis and died, following which, Richard remarried to Olga Margarete von Prittwitz,
an affable woman, but one whom Joachim did not warm to. From 1904, when he was eleven years old, Joachim
was sent to school in the Lycée Fabert in Metz. Here he failed to excel. One teacher noted that he was over confident
in his abilities, and this confidence did not match his actual performance. At the end of one winter term, he came thirty-second
amongst a group of fifty boys, a performance which resulted in a beating from his father. However, despite his poor academic performance,
others who remembered him from this time later related that Joachim did possess a level of
charm, which saw him get away with things that the other boys simply could not. This ability to ingratiate himself with his
superiors, despite the lack of substance in his character, was one which he would utilise
throughout his life. In 1908 a major shift occurred for the Ribbentrops. That year, Richard Ribbentrop resigned from
the German Imperial Army. He had many doubts about the course of German
policy under the rule of the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, and a bout of conscience led to his resignation,
which his commanding officers asked him to reconsider, but which he pressed ahead with
anyway. Thereafter, the family entered a new period
of nomadic wandering throughout Europe, and even further afield. For a time, they lived in Switzerland, at
the town of Arosa, followed by a brief stint in Britain, a country which Joachim developed
an affinity for, before they relocated to Canada in 1910. By now Joachim was entering his adult years
and, in the early 1910s, he took on a number of jobs while in Canada. For a while he worked at the Molson’s Bank
in the city of Montreal, and then for an engineering firm which was engaged in rebuilding the Quebec
Bridge over the St Lawrence River. He also went south of the border and was briefly
employed as a journalist in New York City and Boston. Throughout these years, Joachim was travelling
widely and had also learned to speak English. His abilities with language and familiarity
with a number of other countries in Europe and North America would become one of the
main reasons behind his ascendancy in Germany many years later. The Ribbentrops were travelling around Europe
and North America at a time when there was increasing tensions between some of the countries
they were visiting. Joachim’s own birth country, Germany, had
been formed out of a few dozen smaller German states as recently as 1871. The new nation, which included both modern-day
Germany and much of western Poland, was quickly viewed as a threat by the other European powers,
a rivalry that was compounded by the European powers scrambling for control of Africa and
much of Asia. By the early twentieth century, two major
alliances had developed across the continent as a result of these tensions. One was headed by Germany and included the
Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy, while on the other side Britain, France and Russia
had formed a Triple Entente. By the time the Ribbentrops were living in
Canada, Britain and Germany were involved in a naval arms race, while Russia and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire clashed in the Balkans, where both sought to secure greater influence
during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, by the early 1910s, Europe was a powder
keg and was on the verge of a major war. This tension finally spilled over in the summer
of 1914. On the 28th of June the heir to the Empire
of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist called
Gavrilo Princip while conducting an official visit to the city of Sarajevo. A regional crisis developed between the Austro-Hungarians
and Serbia, but this escalated when the government in Vienna made it clear that they wanted to
intervene in Serbia’s domestic affairs to conduct an investigation. Russia made it clear that it would move to
support the Serb government and, during the course of July 1914, all of the other major
European powers made clear their intention to also become involved, if the situation
escalated into military conflict. This is exactly what happened, and, in early
August 1914, an alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire ended up at war with
Britain, France and Russia. As these events unfolded, Ribbentrop was in
Canada, a member of the British Commonwealth, and a country now at war with Germany. To avoid being detained as a German national,
Ribbentrop crossed the border to the United States, where he quickly sailed from New Jersey
back to Europe. Ribbentrop enlisted in the German Imperial
Army upon his return to Europe. The war which followed between 1914 and 1918
was a strange conflict, much of it fought over a few miles of land in north-eastern
France, with other smaller fronts in the Alps and Eastern Europe. In his memoirs, written many years later,
Ribbentrop described his war service as follows: “Four weeks after my enlistment, the first
draft moved to the front regiment, but I was not considered worthy of inclusion. I thought the war would be over by the time
I had got through my training, but in fact, I fought with this regiment until early in
1918, first on the eastern and then on the western front, except when I was wounded,
and once when I was seriously ill. The last time I was wounded, in the summer
of 1917, I received the Iron Cross, 1st Class.” Another notable aspect of his time in service
during the war was that, towards the end of it, Ribbentrop became friends with a staff
officer called Franz von Papen, an association which would have significant implications
in later years. But for the time being, in 1917, the United
States entered the war on the side of Britain and France. This tipped the conflict in favour of the
Western European powers and with domestic turmoil erupting within Germany, the Kaiser
abdicated on the 9th of November, 1918. Two days later, an armistice was signed, and
Germany accepted defeat in the conflict. The German Empire came to an end and a new
Republic, named after the town of Weimar, was created. Despite the fact that his grandfather and
father had both served as career army officers, Ribbentrop did not seek to remain in the military
of the new Weimar Republic. Instead he began a social ascent based on
his relationship with Anna Elisabeth Henkell, whom he met for the first time in 1919, shortly
after being discharged from the army. The Henkells were a wealthy German family,
with a large stake in the German wine industry. Through his marriage to Anna in the summer
of 1920, Joachim was able to finally acquire the kind of wealth which he had been surrounded
by in the moneyed officer class of the German Imperial Army, during his childhood at Metz,
although the Henkells generally disliked Ribbentrop and disapproved of Anna’s choice of partner. However, in 1925, an aunt, Gertrud von Ribbentrop,
agreed to adopt thirty-two year old Joachim so that he could apply the nobiliary particle,
“von”, to his name. Thus, Joachim Ribbentrop, the son of a middle
class officer who had struggled financially following his resignation from the army in
1908, had moved, within a few short years of the war ending, to become Joachim von Ribbentrop. a pseudo-noble and a wealthy member of a family
of major German wine merchants. Thereafter, he settled into this upper-middle
class existence in the 1920s, living in Berlin and travelling across Europe selling the Henkell
family wine. He and Anna also started a family, which would
eventually result in five children. While Ribbentrop was selling wine around Europe,
a political turmoil was gripping his homeland. In the aftermath of the war, many people in
Germany were extremely disaffected. Hundreds of thousands of German men who had
fought in the war found it egregious that Germany had accepted the humiliating terms
of the Treaty of Versailles, with its stipulations that Germany must disarm and could not maintain
any military presence in the Rhineland. Moreover, many Germans who had been career
soldiers before the war found themselves out of work, due to the reduced size of the German
armed forces. Many of these individuals began gravitating
to radical political parties in the post-war years. One of these, the Nationalist Socialist German
Workers’ Party, gained quite a following in Bavaria and, under its new leader, an Austrian
called Adolf Hitler, even attempted a coup in Munich in November 1923. Although it was quickly suppressed, the Nazis,
as they were known in short, would remain a feature of German politics. On the other end of the political spectrum,
parties such as the Communist Party of Germany also had a large following during the 1920s. Thus, while the Weimar Republic was largely
dominated by centrist parties such as the Social Democratic Party, the country could
easily devolve into more extremist politics, if the economic or political situation changed. In 1928 Ribbentrop became involved in this
shifting political environment for the first time. He was introduced that year to Hitler through
a mutual acquaintance. For the Nazi leader’s part, he wanted to
meet the wine merchant from Berlin who had contacts within high society in the German
capital, and also abroad. Perhaps he could be useful down the line. There is, though, nothing to suggest that
Ribbentrop was any kind of swift convert to the Nazi cause. They met and parted and it would be four years
before Ribbentrop and his wife joined the Nazi Party. Moreover, throughout the late 1920s and early
1930s, Ribbentrop maintained very close relations with many members of the Jewish business community
in Berlin. Certainly, the initial forays into meeting
with the upper brass of the Nazi Party did not bring out any immediate Anti-Semitic feelings
which he might have harboured. Indeed, it is clear that in the early days
of his involvement with the Nazis, in the 1930s, Ribbentrop still believed that the
party’s Anti-Semitic standpoint was a rhetorical device, designed to strengthen German demands
on territory in Eastern Europe. In time he would come to see this belief for
the delusion that it was. At the time of his initial meeting with Hitler
in 1928, neither Ribbentrop, nor anyone else, could have imagined how central to the German
political landscape the Nazi leader would quickly become. In the Reichstag elections of May 1928 the
Nazis had received just over two and a half percent of the national vote, and this had
translated into just 12 seats in the 491 seat Reichstag. But this would all change in the years that
followed. After the years of rampant international economic
growth known as the ‘Roaring Twenties’, the Stock Exchange and Markets on Wall Street
in New York City began to take a hammering as the decade drew to a close in the autumn
of 1929. Within a few weeks the global economy was
descending into a catastrophic economic recession, which became known as the Great Depression. Germany was hit particularly badly, and, as
the banking system teetered on the verge of collapse, Germans lost their jobs in droves,
followed by their life savings. As feelings hardened in regards to the establishment
parties which had run the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, suddenly the Nazis, Communists
and other radical political groups prospered at the polls. When new elections were held in September
1930, the Nazis became the second largest party in the country, taking nearly 20% of
the seats in the Reichstag. During the early 1930s things did not improve
in Germany. Unemployment rose to nearly 30% and many people
were now resorting to barter as the Reichsmark had effectively lost all of its value. Thus, when new elections were held yet again
in July 1932, these resulted in an even more polarised Reichstag. Now the Nazis were the largest party in Germany. Their message of resentment and anger had
become increasingly popular, and they managed to secure 37% of the vote nationally, their
best ever election result, and one which translated into 230 seats in an expanded Reichstag of
608 seats. However, this was not enough to secure power,
and the rise of the Communist Party of Germany, to secure third position and 89 seats in the
Reichstag, ensured that the parliament was split between right-wing and left-wing blocks. Clearly, the Nazis had the biggest mandate
in the country, but they had not acquired a majority of the vote, and a great many people
distrusted their motives and goals. In this impasse, the president, Paul von Hindenburg,
elected to appoint a minority government, of largely centrist and centre-right independents. It was headed by Franz von Papen as chancellor,
the former army officer whom Ribbentrop had met and befriended fifteen years earlier,
during the First World War. This old connection would bring Ribbentrop
into the centre of the Nazi Party. Following von Papen’s appointment as chancellor,
he could not simply ignore the Nazis, for whom nearly two out of every five people in
Germany had voted. But relations between the chancellor and the
Nazi leader were tense, and they often needed intermediaries for their negotiations, one
of the key aspects of which, was discussion of how the further rise of the German Communists
could be avoided. Thus, in the early autumn of 1932, Ribbentrop,
who had finally joined the Nazi Party on the 1st of May 1932, was requested to become involved
in negotiations, between the leader of the party he had just joined, and his old acquaintance,
von Papen. Even at this point, Ribbentrop appears to
have been a political moderate, and, it seems clear, that his full conversion to the Nazi
cause occurred during the events of late 1932, which he was a central player in. When he arrived at the Berchtesgaden in Bavaria,
he found Hitler to be very agitated with von Papen’s unwillingness to concede the position
of Chancellor of the Reich to him, but the Nazi leader explained to Ribbentrop that he
was willing to enter into a coalition, if this were allowed. Ribbentrop later claimed in his memoirs, that,
by the end of the meeting, he had become convinced that Hitler was the only individual who could
save Germany from the Communist threat. While the negotiations in the autumn of 1932
had allowed Ribbentrop to move closer to Hitler, they ultimately failed. As a result, new elections were again called
for in November 1932, just four months after the last national vote. In this, the Nazis and the Social Democratic
Party both lost seats, the Nazi vote falling from 37% to 33%. The Communists gained, only marginally, but
enough that Hitler was able, in the winter of 1932, to further stoke fears that the left-wing
parties were gaining at the expense of the right. Thus, when General Kurt von Schleicher became
chancellor in December 1932, negotiations were recommenced between Hitler, von Papen
and a coalition of political centrists and members of the business community, to find
an arrangement which could shore up the political system against the Communists. Ribbentrop was central to these negotiations
and one of the key meetings was held at his home in Berlin on the 22nd of January 1933. Here, von Papen first conceded that he would
support Hitler’s candidacy to become Chancellor of Germany, under certain conditions. The meeting at Ribbentrop’s Berlin residence
was the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic, which had governed Germany since
1919. A week later, with von Papen and many others
now urging him to do so, President Hindenburg finally appointed Hitler as Chancellor of
Germany, on the 30th of January. Within weeks, the Nazis moved to secure complete
control of the state. New elections were called for on the 5th of
March. With their paramilitary wing, the SA, terrorising
voters across Germany, the Nazis managed to win 44% of the vote, up 11% on the previous
November. Moreover, days earlier a fire had broken out
in the Reichstag, and Hitler had blamed the event on Communist subversives. He now used this incident in late March to
pass an Enabling Act, which effectively allowed Hitler and the Nazi Party to rule by decree. Thus, the Weimar Republic was dead within
weeks of Hitler being appointed as chancellor. And Ribbentrop would soon be rewarded for
his role in bringing about Hitler’s ascent. He now became a close confidante of the Chancellor,
one who was well liked by Hitler, on account of his willingness to consistently agree with
Hitler’s ideas and, also, because of the Nazi leader’s belief that Ribbentrop’s
travels in his younger years made him well qualified to comment on foreign policy matters. This quick ascent into Hitler’s good graces
in 1932 and early 1933 saw Ribbentrop gaining official appointments as a diplomat for the
new Nazi regime. In the early years of the regime, much of
Ribbentrop’s focus was on the issue of German re-armament. Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles,
which had brought the First World War to an end, Germany was required to drastically scale
back its army and virtually dismantle its air force and much of its navy. The Nazis were committed to overturning this
situation as soon as they entered government and, in 1934, Ribbentrop was appointed as
a special commissioner by Hitler, in relation to the disarmament issue. By the autumn of 1934 he was running his own
bureau, known as Dienststelle Ribbentrop, or the Ribbentrop Bureau, parallel to the
German Foreign Office, overseen by the Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath, a legacy
foreign minister who had been appointed in 1932, before Hitler assumed power. In the mid-1930s, Ribbentrop was responsible
for conducting diplomacy with France, Britain and other European nations, to convince them
that Germany wanted peace, even as the country was rapidly rebuilding its military, navy
and air-force. Ribbentrop gained a further promotion in 1935
when he was appointed as the Reich Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large, a position within the German diplomatic
Corp that was only subordinate to the Foreign Minister. In this capacity, Ribbentrop oversaw the negotiations
surrounding two diplomatic agreements, which Nazi Germany entered into in 1935 and 1936. The first of these was the Anglo-German Naval
Agreement, which was arrived at in June 1935. Through this Germany agreed, in theory, to
keep the tonnage of its navy, the Kriegsmarine, at 35% of that of the British Royal Navy. This agreement was drawn up at a time when
Hitler strongly believed that an alliance with Britain was still possible and was also
entered into as a supposed gesture of goodwill by the Nazis, to convince Britain and France
to agree to dispense with other aspects of the Treaty of Versailles. As part of these negotiations, Ribbentrop
used the ploy, that Germany wanted restoration of the colonies it had possessed in East Africa,
prior to the First World War, as a bargaining tool, to bring about the Agreement. In the long run, the Agreement was perhaps
most significant in terms of the limited British reaction, nine months later, in March of 1936,
when Germany remilitarised the Rhineland region of western Germany, which it had been prohibited
from doing under the terms of Versailles. The second international agreement, which
Ribbentrop orchestrated at this time, was the Anti-Comintern Pact. This was finalised in November 1936, between
Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. The full title of the treaty was the Agreement
against the Communist International, and it was effectively a coalition of right-wing
governments against the Soviet Union. Benito Mussolini’s Italy joined in 1937,
followed by General Franco’s new fascist regime in Spain in 1939, as well as Hungary. The agreement was politically important for
subsequent events, as it moved Germany and Japan, and later Italy, closer together, in
ways which would have major consequences, once the coming war began in 1939. It also signalled the full ascent of Von Ribbentrop
as Germany’s senior diplomat. Von Neurath remained as Foreign Minister,
but he had favoured a pro-China stance in terms of the conflict in the Far East, which
had been underway between China and Japan since the early 1930s. Thus, Ribbentrop’s negotiation of the Anti-Comintern
Pact highlighted that Von Neurath was now a lame-duck minister, and Ribbentrop was the
real power in terms of the oversight of Foreign Affairs within the Nazi regime. In August 1936, just as the Anti-Comintern
Pact was being concluded, Ribbentrop was appointed as Germany’s ambassador to Britain. Hitler had commanded him to try to forge good
relations in London, with a view to carving out an alliance between Britain and Germany. This seems, in retrospect, like a strange
hope for the German chancellor to have had in the mid-1930s, but it is in keeping with
Hitler’s racial views. He viewed the British people as being a fellow
Aryan people, who were nearly as racially advanced as the German people. From this perspective, they were a natural
ally for Germany and Hitler considered it to simply be rational that the British would
eventually seek to ally with Germany, against the communist Slavs of Eastern Europe, and
other groups that the Nazi’s viewed as racially inferior. These assumptions were to have a long life
in Germany, and, in part, also explains Hitler’s decision years later to turn eastwards against
Russia in 1941, without first conquering Britain. He simply believed that, eventually, Britain
would end its recalcitrance, and ally with Germany against the Soviet Union. Thus, Ribbentrop’s mission, in 1936, was
to sound out an alliance, while also explaining away increasing German aggression in Central
Europe. Armed with these lofty goals, Ribbentrop headed
for London and arrived there in October 1936. His tenure as German ambassador to Britain
would last a year and a half and would consist of one diplomatic incident after another. For instance, while visiting Durham Cathedral
in November 1936, he mistook some organ music for the German national anthem and gave a
Nazi salute, a gesture he repeated when he met King George VI in February 1937. More worryingly Ribbentrop chose to focus
his diplomatic attentions on convincing Britain to either join the Anti-Comintern Pact, or
return Germany’s former colonies in East Africa, the latter being an issue Hitler had
no interest in, and which had simply been used as a bargaining chip in the negotiations
leading up to the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. All of these initiatives were dead ends and,
by mid-1937, Ribbentrop was generally seen as unintelligent by senior British officials
or was thoroughly disliked for his personality. The feeling was mutual and, a year after his
appointment as Ambassador, Ribbentrop had grown to despise his British hosts. Moreover, he was now beginning to see the
alliance with Japan and Italy as something which should be directed against Britain and,
that if needs be, an alliance with the Soviet Union should be sought instead of one with
London. By 1937, Ribbentrop was considered such a
liability by his own staff and members of the British Foreign Office, that many people
were actively trying to keep him away from London as much as possible in order to avoid
any further diplomatic gaffes. One method of doing so was to send him to
the English West Country, areas such as Cornwall and Devon. This particular development was to have a
bizarre after-story. Ribbentrop visited here on several occasions
during his time in England and stayed on occasion there with Colonel Edward Bolitho, the Lord
Lieutenant of Cornwall. There Ribbentrop developed a deep affection
for the region around St Michael’s Mount and St Ives. Such was the appeal of this part of England,
the sunny south-west of the country, that he apparently began petitioning Hitler that
at some future date when Britain had been conquered, or forced into a junior position
within an alliance, that Ribbentrop would be given some of the castles and manor houses
he had seen around the West Country, and that he would also be granted Cornwall as a sort
of private fiefdom. Hitler had apparently agreed and Ribbentrop
actually began telling people in Cornwall in 1937 that he would one day be the lord
of their shire. Interestingly, this would also seem to account
for why Cornwall was generally avoided during German bombing missions over Britain during
the Blitz of 1940 and 1941. Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Ribbentrop’s
desire to become lord of Cornwall was that it indicates that he may have hated being
in London so much at this point that he viewed the West Country as an idyllic sanctuary. By late 1937 he wanted out of his position
as ambassador, and the opportunity to leave finally arose early in 1938, when a series
of scandals within the German military were used by Hitler as the pretext for removing
officials who had been in office prior to 1933. Among them was the Foreign Minister, von Neurath. When von Neurath was removed on the 4th of
February 1938, Ribbentrop was appointed as his successor. He came into office just as Nazi Germany’s
stance in Europe was becoming more and more hostile. Following rearmament, and the remilitarisation
of the Rhineland between 1933 and 1937, the next goal was to achieve superiority in Central
Europe. The first step towards this was achieved in
March 1938, when Hitler applied military and political pressure on Austria to ensure that
the Anschluss, the unification of Germany and Austria into a greater Germany, was achieved. Ribbentrop, who had just succeeded as Foreign
Minister, did not play a key part in this, but he would in subsequent diplomatic negotiations,
prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The first of these initiatives concerned German
claims on the Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia with a very large ethnically German population. No sooner had Nazi flags begun flying in Vienna
than Hitler and his associates began pressing their claims on the Sudetenland to Britain
and France. As diplomatic tensions over the region escalated
in the summer and early autumn of 1938, a diplomatic conference was arranged at Munich
in September 1938. Germany’s Foreign Minister made an effort
at this time to limit Ribbentrop’s involvement, as he was deemed too inclined to go to war
with Britain, a country he had grown to despise following his ambassadorial tenure there. Thus, Ribbentrop played a limited role in
the Munich Conference, one which resulted in Britain and France acquiescing to Hitler’s
demands for the Sudetenland, if he agreed not to seek any further territorial gains
in Europe. Ribbentrop did become involved directly afterwards
however, when Hitler and the Foreign Minister quickly rubbished the agreement, and used
a mixture of military threats and diplomatic pressure to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia,
in March of 1939. Ribbentrop was nearing the height of his powers
at this time, as Hitler had finally realised that an alliance with Britain was impossible,
and war with them, which Ribbentrop was eager for, was inevitable, if Germany was to continue
to expand. Ribbentrop was central to several other diplomatic
moves in late 1938 and early 1939. For instance, in mid-March 1939, just as Czechoslovakia
was being annexed, Ribbentrop was responsible for contacting the Lithuanian government and
demanding that it relinquish control of the city of Memel and the surrounding area, which
had formed part of Germany prior to the First World War. If they refused, Ribbentrop stated, the city
of Kaunas, the second largest in Lithuania, would be bombed to the ground. Thus, with a phone call, Ribbentrop acquired
this territory for the growing Third Reich. However, in other areas, his blunt approach
was far less successful, notably regarding Turkey. Germany was seeking an agreement with the
regime there in 1939, to provide it with an ally in the Eastern Mediterranean for the
coming war, but Ribbentrop’s approach was so heavy-handed that he managed to drive the
government there into agreeing a deal with Britain and effectively remaining neutral
in the Second World War, that would soon break out. However, his failure here was tempered by
the finalisation of the Pact of Steel in May 1939 whereby Germany and Italy further solidified
their political and military alliance. Ribbentrop’s foremost political and diplomatic
success came a few months later. Ever since his disastrous spell as German
ambassador to Britain, Ribbentrop had been convinced that the British were Germany’s
foremost enemy, and that if necessary, an alliance should be sought with the reviled
Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union, against London. Now, during the course of 1939, he had been
engaged in discussions with his counterpart in Moscow, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav
Molotov, to that effect. Despite fascist Germany and communist Russia
being ideological enemies, a deal offered considerable benefits to both sides. For Germany it would neutralise the threat
of war with Russia for some time, so that Hitler could concentrate on defeating Britain
and France in Western Europe once war broke out, as it almost certainly would once Germany
moved against Poland. Similarly, the experience of its unofficial
conflicts with Japan since the mid-1930s, around Mongolia and Manchuria in the Far East,
had demonstrated to the Russian leader, Joseph Stalin, just how unprepared for a major war
the Soviet Union was. Moreover, an agreement would allow the two
nations to effectively carve up Poland between them, while Russia could move into Finland
and Germany into several other regions. The exact course of the negotiations are not
precisely clear as they were necessarily conducted in secret early on, but by the early summer
of 1939, they were well advanced. It was clear that the negotiations were conducted
on the understanding that Germany would soon be at war with Poland. In fact, the agreement between Berlin and
Moscow was only formally concluded less than two weeks before Germany invaded Poland, and
clearly Hitler had been waiting for an agreement to be reached before moving against Germany’s
eastern neighbour. Thus, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement, named
after the Foreign Ministers who negotiated it, was concluded on the 23rd of August 1939. Its main terms, as advertised to the international
community, were that it was a guarantee of peace between Germany and the Soviet Union,
but equally significant was the secret protocol kept private between the two nations. This involved a division of the countries
lying between Germany and Russia between the two powers once the war began. Poland would be divided up, with Germany taking
its western half and the Soviets the east, while Germany would also control Lithuania,
leaving Estonia and Latvia for the Soviets. Another clause allowed for the Soviets to
invade and occupy Finland on the understanding that Germany would soon be occupying territories
in Western Europe. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement sent shockwaves
throughout the international community. After all, fascism and communism were ideological
opposites, and much of Nazi rhetoric over the years had been about the coming clash
with the Bolsheviks of Russia. Britain and France were taken especially by
surprise, as, in their preparations for war with Germany, they had assumed that following
a German invasion of Poland, Hitler would be faced with the the difficulty of having
the Soviet Union on his eastern border. This risk was now diminished and Britain and
France’s position was weakened considerably as a result. All of this was in the context of continued
German demands on Polish territory, which were intended solely to provoke war. In response, Britain hastily put together
a defence pact with Poland and announced it on the 25th of August, two days after the
announcement of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement. However, this did nothing to deter Hitler. On the 1st of September, after a false flag
event designed to provide some surface justification for the enterprise, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared
war on Germany in response. Two weeks after that, the Soviet Union invaded
eastern Poland, in order to occupy the area agreed to with Germany in the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Agreement. The success of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement
and the invasion and occupation of Poland, which occurred in the weeks that followed,
saw Ribbentrop rise to a position of considerable power within the Nazi regime. His star would remain in the ascendant for
the next two years. His diplomatic coup with the Soviets was the
background against which Germany launched the Second World War, and, in its early stages,
that war went extremely well for Germany. Following the conquest of Poland in late 1939,
the Nazis turned north and west, conquering Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 and
then roaring westwards into the Low Countries and France in the early summer. By the autumn of 1940 the Blitz of Britain
from the air and efforts to strangle the country through a naval blockade of the North Atlantic
were underway, and Nazi flags were flying everywhere from western France to Warsaw in
Poland. Ribbentrop’s agreement with the Russians
had provided a window for the Nazis to quickly conquer much of mainland Europe. Consequently the German Foreign Minister reached
the peak of his powers between 1939 and 1941, with Hitler holding him in extremely high
regard throughout this time. The early 1940s saw Ribbentrop largely handling
affairs with Germany’s allies in the war. With the conflict now fully underway, the
time for negotiations with countries like Britain and France was over. A more pressing issue was getting Italy to
honour the Pact of Steel and join the war, which it eventually did in June of 1940. Once this occurred, Ribbentrop was involved
in efforts to occupy the various nations of the Balkans through diplomatic pressure. This attempt failed, however, and the region
was jointly invaded by Germany and Italy. There were also concerns about the situation
in the Pacific, where Germany’s ally Japan was becoming ever more jingoistic, in its
approach to the United States. From 1940 onwards Ribbentrop was working towards
the failure of negotiations between the two Pacific powers, and for Japan to attack America. In contrast to his shrewd analysis in 1939
that an accord with the Soviets was advisable, this latter view on America showed very poor
judgement on Ribbentrop’s part, and when Japan eventually attacked America in December
1941, it brought the United States into the war in ways that would tip the balance of
the war in favour of the Allies. Ultimately, it was not the entry of the United
States into the war which saw Ribbentrop’s influence in the Nazi regime begin to decline. Rather, the decision six months earlier by
Hitler to tear up the Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement and invade the Soviet Union in the summer
of 1941 had seen Ribbentrop’s influence within the regime decline dramatically. This decision by Hitler to leave Britain undefeated
in the west and instead invade Russia in the east went against everything Ribbentrop had
worked for since early 1939. To prevent it, the Foreign Minister had even
suggested that Germany should have tried to bring the Soviet Union into the war against
Britain on its side. However, Hitler had started to act according
to his own ideological desire to destroy the Soviet Union in 1941, where previously in
1939 he had behaved strategically. The result in this change of tactics was disastrous
for the Nazi war effort. After several months of initial successes
which brought massive German armies to the outskirts of Moscow and Leningrad, the onslaught
stalled in the winter of 1941 and, after a calamitous loss at the Battle of Stalingrad
the following autumn and winter, the Russians began to push the Germans back towards Poland,
early in 1943. By that time it was clear that Germany would
eventually lose the war. The events of 1941 and 1942 saw Ribbentrop
falling increasingly out of favour with Hitler and losing much of his influence within the
Third Reich. His ascendancy since 1939 had been based on
the accord with the Soviet Union and his efforts to preserve the agreement in 1940 and 1941
placed him at odds with Hitler for the first time, a figure that he had ingratiated himself
with over the years by always agreeing with his ideas. Moreover, beyond the damage this had caused
to his personal relationship with the Fuhrer, the simple fact was that as the war went on,
Ribbentrop simply found himself with fewer and fewer opportunities to make an impression
on the international stage. As Foreign Minister, his job was to engage
in diplomacy, but by 1942, Germany had severed diplomatic relations with a vast number of
countries around the world. Beyond its own allies of Italy, Japan and
the Central European states such as Hungary, it only maintained diplomatic ties with countries
such as Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden in Europe which had all remained neutral. As a result there wasn’t an initiative Ribbentrop
could engage in to try to rebuild his influence. Moreover, Hitler was said to have found him
increasingly tiresome to be around and deliberately tried to avoid meetings with the Foreign Minister,
whom he had once found so affable. Ribbentrop’s role in the Holocaust of Europe’s
Jewish population, which was occurring from 1941 onwards, and indeed his wider attitude
towards the Jewish people, has been a matter of some debate. As we have seen, in his earlier life as a
wine merchant Ribbentrop knew and worked with many Jewish businesspeople in Berlin and indeed
in the early days of the Nazi regime in 1933 he had even organised a lunch for some Jewish
colleagues to tell them that the expressed Anti-Jewish sentiments of the Nazi Party was
largely just rhetoric. Yet he soon learned that, that was decidedly
not the case. As he came to this realisation, he started
making public expressions of Anti-Semitism himself. And, during the war, Ribbentrop was responsible
for applying diplomatic pressure through the Foreign Office on places such as Vichy France,
to identify and apprehend any Jewish people living there, and send them to the death camps
such as Auschwitz and Treblinka across Central and Eastern Europe where the Nazi regime was
engaging in mass murder. Because of the contrast between his earlier
relations with the Jewish business community in Germany and his later actions, it is generally
believed by historians that Ribbentrop’s Anti-Semitism was largely feigned in order
to ingratiate himself with Hitler, but this matters little when appraising him today. The reality is that, whatever his own personal
views, Ribbentrop contributed substantially to the Holocaust through his actions. Von Ribbentrop found himself dispatched to
the political wilderness as the war was heading into its final stages. In June 1944 the western Allies, led by the
United States, Britain and Canada, finally opened the long-awaited Western Front with
the D-Day landings in northern France. After some resistance, the German hold on
France quickly collapsed in August 1944 and, by the end of that month, Paris had been liberated,
with a separate invasion in the south of the country resulting in the Germans being pushed
out of the entire region. The stage was now set for a push into eastern
France in the autumn and then western Germany in the winter. Meanwhile, on the Eastern Front, the Russians
continued to push the Germans back through Ukraine, the Baltic States and then Poland. By January 1945 they were amassing their armies
in western Poland for the final push towards Berlin in the early spring of 1945. The New Year brought a push by both sides
to break into Germany as quickly as possible. Yet Hitler would not sanction any talk of
surrender such as might have involved Ribbentrop as the Foreign Minister. It was simply a race to see if the Russians
or the Americans and the British could seize Berlin first. Ribbentrop’s final months as German Foreign
Minister led to whatever remaining influence he had completely evaporating. By now, with no diplomatic victories left
to be won, he found himself trying to secure Hitler’s favour by devoting himself energetically
to the Third Reich’s genocidal policies, even as it collapsed. This did not have the desired effect and his
star waned even further in the summer of 1944, when many staff of the Foreign Office were
implicated in a conspiracy launched by members of the German army to try to kill Hitler and
negotiate a surrender to the Allies in July 1944. Ribbentrop was certainly not personally involved,
but it reflected poorly on him that individuals with whom he had worked, were complicit in
the attempted coup. By the closing months of 1944 he was openly
derided by some of his colleagues within the government, most of whom had always despised
Ribbentrop, but had tolerated him as one of Hitler’s favoured officials. Yet he lost even that in the end. Although Ribbentrop was invited to attend
the Chancellor’s 56th birthday party in Berlin, on the 20th of April 1945, when he
requested a personal audience with Hitler a few days later he was refused and told that
Hitler had matters of actual consequence to attend to. By that time in April 1945 Berlin was surrounded
by the Russians, and the Americans and British were rapidly progressing through central Germany,
trying to make it to the capital themselves before the war ended. With civilians including boys and elderly
men having been armed by the Nazi regime in an attempt to defend central Berlin, Hitler
decided not to fight himself and instead committed suicide in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery
on the 30th of April 1945. His appointed successor, the Propaganda Minister,
Joseph Goebbels, killed himself a day later, along with his wife and children. With the war effectively over, the heads of
the German government fled Berlin to the north of Germany, to the town of Flensburg on the
Danish border, where Allied troops had not yet penetrated. There the new President of Germany, Admiral
Karl Donitz, organised the country’s surrender to the Allies and on the 8th of May 1945 the
war in Europe came to an end. Ribbentrop, who had fled north towards Flensburg
himself, had offered his services to Donitz, but was rejected. He now found himself a fugitive and, as a
leading minister of the Nazi regime, was one of the top targets for apprehension. Consequently, it did not take long to find
him, and on the 14th of June 1945 he was arrested in the northern port city of Hamburg. Ribbentrop would now face prosecution as one
of the senior members of the regime. The decision had been taken by the Allies,
prior to the final push towards Berlin, that only certain groups within Germany would suffer
reprisals for the country’s actions during the war. These were largely restricted to senior members
of the Nazi Party and regime and also the SS, the paramilitary organisation which had
run the concentration camp system across Europe, resulting in the murder of millions of Jews,
Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and many others. As the German Foreign Minister from 1938 to
1945, Ribbentrop was scheduled to be tried amongst a group of the leading surviving Nazis. These included Hermann Goering, the head of
the Luftwaffe; Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister; Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the
Wehrmacht and the de-facto Minister for Defence for the entire period of the war; and Hans
Frank, the head of the General Government of Poland, the Nazi-occupation government
established in 1939. These were each accused of having contributed
to the outbreak of the Second World War and of committing war crimes and crimes against
humanity, by managing the war and being complicit in the running of the concentration camp system. These individuals went on trial in the German
city of Nuremburg late in 1945, so chosen because it was here that the Nazis had held
their massive annual rallies during the 1930s. The trial lasted for eleven months. Ribbentrop’s counsel attempted to depict
him as being a stooge of sorts, a powerless Foreign Minister whose department was effectively
run by Hitler. They also tried to suggest that Ribbentrop
himself had been deceived by the claims Hitler made between 1933 and 1939, that he wanted
peace in Europe, while allowing Germany to re-establish its dignity. The tribunal rejected these arguments out
of hand, claiming it was not plausible that someone as central to the Nazi regime could
have been unaware of the aggressive nature of Hitler’s plans for Europe. Moreover, they highlighted Ribbentrop’s
centrality to both the Anschluss of Austria and the events leading to the virtual annexation
of Czechoslovakia in late 1938 and early 1939, as well as his absolutely critical role in
the events leading up to the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the war in the autumn
of 1939. Thus, when the decisions finally came at Nuremburg
in October 1946 Ribbentrop was found guilty on all four counts of crimes against peace,
planning a war of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Like several others such as Goering, Frank
and Keitel he was sentenced to death by hanging. The sentences on those who were condemned
to death at the first trial at Nuremburg were to be carried out in a bloc of executions
on the 16th of October 1946, just days after the trial concluded. The hangings were to be carried out at the
gymnasium of Nuremburg Prison using the standard drop method. Many of those who had stood trial with Ribbentrop
such as Speer and Ribbentrop’s predecessor as Foreign Minister, Konstantin von Neurath,
had been given custodial sentences and avoided death. Ribbentrop was among a group of eleven, which
included Frank, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the most senior surviving member of the SS, and Wilhelm
Keitel,who were due to be hanged that day, but the number was reduced to ten when Hermann
Goering, the most senior surviving member of the Nazi regime, committed suicide by taking
a potassium cyanide capsule on the night of the 15th. As a result Ribbentrop was the first of the
group of ten to be executed. In a bizarre last act, which in no way reflected
his personal actions over the previous twelve years, his last words called for the reunification
of Germany and declared that quote “I wish peace to the world.” Afterwards Ribbentrop’s body and those of
the other nine and Goering were taken to the crematorium at Ostfriedhof in Munich and cremated,
before their ashes were scattered in the River Isar in southern Bavaria, to prevent any graves
or monuments to them becoming Nazi shrines. Joachim von Ribbentrop was one of the most
peculiar senior members of the Nazi regime. His background was not that of an individual
who had encountered professional and personal failures during his youth and as a result
had become bitter towards society, as was largely the case with Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Rather Ribbentrop was a late convert to Nazism,
only embracing the party in 1932 on the eve of its ascent to power. Prior to this he had simply been a dilettante
with pretensions to nobility, albeit an individual whose entry into high society was obtained
almost entirely through family and marital connections, rather than his own work or talent. Moreover, he displayed no particular ideological
bent after 1933. Rather, his senior role within the party was
obtained almost entirely through his personal relationship with Hitler. As a sycophant and a ‘yes man’, Hitler
liked having Ribbentrop around because he simply agreed with whatever he proposed nearly
all of the time. It was this relationship which allowed Ribbentrop
to rise with great speed within the Nazi hierarchy, first being appointed as ambassador to Britain
and then succeeding as the Foreign Minister in early 1938. What is most striking about Ribbentrop is
that having been appointed as Foreign Minister he managed to score a number of notable successes
in his first years in that position, despite his general lack of ability and unpleasant
character. He could, for instance, lay claim to some
extent to Germany’s virtual conquest of Central Europe during the course of 1938 and
early 1939, largely through diplomatic agreements such as that reached with Britain at Munich
in the autumn of 1938. But surely his greatest success was in negotiating
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with his Russian counterpart. This provided the means for Germany to conquer
much of Europe in the twelve months that followed, and had Hitler not decided to scrap the agreement
in 1941 and invade Russia, there is a possibility that Germany could have emerged from the war
largely victorious. Instead, he did invade Russia and this, combined
with the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941, doomed Germany to military
defeat. As diplomatic negotiations became pointless
and as Hitler’s view of Ribbentrop declined precipitously, the Foreign Minister became
a peripheral figure in the Nazi regime. Despite all of this there is no doubting Ribbentrop’s
complicity in the crimes of the Nazi regime, both in fomenting the war and in committing
numerous atrocities, while it is also clear that he knew perfectly well what was occurring
at the death camps throughout Europe, and facilitated the Holocaust. It was, in the end, entirely fitting that,
despite his tepid ideological adherence to Nazism, he was amongst the first leaders of
the regime to be prosecuted and found guilty at Nuremburg. What do you think of Joachim von Ribbentrop? Was he an individual who did great harm in
fomenting much of the Second World War or was he simply a sycophant of Hitler’s who
found himself rising to a position of major power as a result? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
