Joachim von Ribbentrop

• 1. Introduction

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  Joachim von Ribbentrop was born on the 30th of April 1893 and hanged on the 16th of October 1946, and in the years between those two dates he rose from selling champagne across Europe to signing the documents that helped ignite the Second World War. He was the man who negotiated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Soviet Union, who brokered the Pact of Steel with Fascist Italy, and who worked to maneuver Japan into attacking the United States. He became, in the judgment of virtually every colleague who knew him, one of the most despised figures in the entire Nazi hierarchy. At the Nuremberg trials he was the first of all the defendants to be led to the gallows.

  How did a wine salesman with no formal diplomatic training become the Foreign Minister of the Third Reich? What did it reveal about the Nazi system that a man his own colleagues called stupid, lazy, vain, and worthless could hold so much power for so long? And what was the role of flattery, cunning, and sheer ruthlessness in making Ribbentrop indispensable to Adolf Hitler even as everyone around him saw through the facade? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Wine, War, and Reinvention

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  Ribbentrop was born in Wesel, in the Rhine Province of the Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a career army officer named Richard Ulrich Friedrich Joachim Ribbentrop. His father was cashiered from the Prussian Army in 1908 for repeatedly insulting Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the family was left chronically short of money. Between 1904 and 1908, Ribbentrop studied French at Lycee Fabert in Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress, and became fluent in both French and English. A former teacher later recalled that Ribbentrop had been "the most stupid in his class, full of vanity and very pushy".

  After time in Arosa, Switzerland and a year in Britain, young Ribbentrop travelled to Canada in 1910. He worked for the Molsons Bank on Stanley Street in Montreal, then for the engineering firm M. P. and J. T. Davis on the Quebec Bridge reconstruction, and also for the National Transcontinental Railway, which was constructing a line from Moncton to Winnipeg. He worked briefly as a journalist in New York City and Boston, returned to Germany to recover from tuberculosis, and then went back to Canada to set up a small business in Ottawa importing German wine and champagne. In February 1914, he competed in the Ellis Memorial Trophy tournament in Boston as part of Ottawa's Minto ice-skating team.

  When the First World War broke out later that year, Ribbentrop left Canada and on the 15th of August 1914 sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey aboard the Holland-America ship Potsdam, bound for Rotterdam. Back in Germany, he enlisted in the Prussian 12th Hussar Regiment, served on the Eastern and then the Western Front, earned a commission, and was awarded the Iron Cross after being wounded. By 1918, 1st Lieutenant Ribbentrop was stationed in Istanbul as a staff officer, where he befriended another staff officer named Franz von Papen, a friendship that would later have major consequences for German history.

  In 1919, Ribbentrop met Anna Elisabeth Henkell, daughter of a wealthy Wiesbaden wine producer. They married on the 5th of July 1920 and had five children. He began travelling across Europe as a wine salesman. In 1925 came a crucial act of social climbing: his "aunt" Gertrud von Ribbentrop adopted him, allowing him to add the aristocratic particle von to his name. He had not been born with it.

• 3. The Art of Pleasing Hitler

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  In 1928, Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, with whom Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars, introduced him to Adolf Hitler as a businessman who "gets the same price for German champagne as others get for French champagne". Ribbentrop and his wife joined the Nazi Party on the 1st of May 1932. His entry into the inner circle of Nazi politics came through a very specific skill: he learned, faster than almost anyone else around Hitler, the art of total agreement.

  One German diplomat later recalled that "Ribbentrop didn't understand anything about foreign policy. His sole wish was to please Hitler." He developed the habit of listening carefully to what Hitler said, memorizing his pet ideas, and then presenting those same ideas back to Hitler as his own, which impressed Hitler greatly. A Ribbentrop aide later described the dynamic directly: when Hitler said "Grey", Ribbentrop said "Black, black, black". He always said it three times more, and he was always more radical. Hitler himself acknowledged this, saying that with Ribbentrop he never had to work to build enthusiasm, as he did with more cautious advisers.

  Ribbentrop used his wartime friendship with Franz von Papen to position himself as an intermediary between the Nazi movement and the German establishment. His offer to serve as a secret emissary between Chancellor Papen and Hitler was initially refused, but after General Kurt von Schleicher ousted Papen in December 1932, both men changed their minds. On the 22nd of January 1933, State Secretary Otto Meissner and Hindenburg's son Oskar met Hitler, Hermann Goring, and Wilhelm Frick at Ribbentrop's home in Berlin's exclusive Dahlem district. Over dinner, Papen made the concession that if Schleicher's government fell, he would use his influence with President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor. Ribbentrop had provided the setting for the meeting that ended the Weimar Republic.

  Joseph Goebbels captured the general feeling among senior Nazis in his diary, writing that "Von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married his money and he swindled his way into office." British historian Laurence Rees, after interviewing every surviving person for his 1997 series The Nazis: A Warning from History who had known Ribbentrop, concluded that "No other Nazi was so hated by his colleagues." Yet the hatred changed nothing, because what mattered was that Hitler trusted him.

• 4. The London Disaster

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  Hitler appointed Ribbentrop ambassador to the United Kingdom in August 1936, with explicit orders to negotiate an Anglo-German alliance. Ribbentrop arrived to take up his post in October 1936, formally presenting his credentials to King Edward VIII on the 30th of October. What followed was a sustained exercise in diplomatic self-destruction.

  In November 1936, invited to stay as a house guest of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry at Wynyard Hall in County Durham, Ribbentrop was taken to a service in Durham Cathedral. When the organ played the opening bars of the hymn Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, which share a melody with the German national anthem, Ribbentrop gave the Nazi salute and had to be physically restrained by his host. In February 1937, he greeted King George VI with a stiff-armed Nazi salute. The gesture nearly knocked the King off his feet as he was walking forward to shake Ribbentrop's hand. Ribbentrop then compounded the incident by insisting that all German diplomats henceforth greet heads of state in the same way. The crisis was only resolved when Foreign Minister Neurath pointed out to Hitler that under Ribbentrop's ruling, Hitler would be obliged to return the Communist clenched-fist salute if the Soviet ambassador ever used it.

  Ribbentrop hired the Berlin interior decorator Martin Luther to help design the new German embassy in London, feeling the existing one was insufficiently grand. He became a member of the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair, believing the British aristocracy formed a secret society that ruled from behind the scenes. He reported to Hitler, based largely on flattering remarks from Lord Londonderry and Lord Lothian, that all of British society longed for closer ties with Germany. He never grasped that these were social pleasantries, not policy commitments. The cool reception he received from British Cabinet ministers simply did not register.

  His secretary Reinhard Spitzy later stated in an interview that Ribbentrop "behaved very stupidly and very pompously and the British don't like pompous people," describing him as "pompous, conceited and not too intelligent." Reichsmarschall Goring warned Hitler directly that Ribbentrop was a "stupid ass". Hitler's reply was telling: "But after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England." Goring shot back: "Mein Fuhrer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him." Punch magazine nicknamed Ribbentrop the "Wandering Aryan" for the frequency with which he abandoned his post in London to stay near Hitler in Berlin, a habit that infuriated the British Foreign Office. American historian Gordon A. Craig later noted that in all the voluminous memoir literature of 1930s European diplomacy, there are only two positive references to Ribbentrop in the entire body of writing.

• 5. Treaties and Betrayals

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  Before his time in London ended entirely in failure, Ribbentrop had already scored a pair of diplomatic successes that dramatically raised his standing with Hitler. In 1935, Hitler tasked him with negotiating the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. Neurath, the professional Foreign Minister, did not believe such an agreement was achievable and appointed Ribbentrop to lead the talks partly to discredit him if they failed. Ribbentrop responded by issuing an ultimatum to British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon: accept Germany's terms in their entirety or the delegation would go home. Simon was furious and walked out. The next day, to almost everyone's surprise, the British accepted. The AGNA was signed in London on the 18th of June 1935 by Ribbentrop and the new British Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare. Hitler called that day "the happiest day of my life," believing it marked the beginning of the Anglo-German alliance he craved.

  In November 1936, Ribbentrop negotiated the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, an arrangement that the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano later noted in his diary was "anti-Communist in theory, but in fact unmistakably anti-British." Reaching this agreement required Ribbentrop to outmaneuver both the Foreign Office and the Wehrmacht, which strongly preferred Germany's existing ties with China. Ribbentrop had been working closely with General Hiroshi Oshima, who served first as Japanese military attache and then as ambassador in Berlin, to strengthen German-Japanese ties over years of bureaucratic resistance.

  By 1937, Ribbentrop had begun converting his hatred of Britain into explicit policy. On the 2nd of January 1938, he delivered to Hitler a memorandum stating that "England is our most dangerous enemy" and advising Hitler to abandon any hope of a British alliance and instead build a global coalition of Germany, Japan, and Italy directed against the British Empire. In this same document, he wrote that "a change in the status quo in the East to Germany's advantage can only be accomplished by force," and he implied that the Soviet Union should be brought into the anti-British system. That document would shape the next phase of his career.

• 6. The Pact That Shocked the World

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  From early 1939, Ribbentrop had become the most vocal advocate within the German government for a deal with the Soviet Union. His thinking was brutally transactional: a German-Soviet non-aggression pact would neutralize the eastern flank, leaving Germany free to destroy Poland and eventually confront Britain without a two-front war. He first seems to have turned toward the idea after an unsuccessful visit to Warsaw in January 1939, when the Poles again refused German demands about Danzig and the "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor.

  His opening came through Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, who reported a speech by Joseph Stalin before the 18th Party Congress in March 1939 that was strongly anti-Western. Ribbentrop sent Dr. Karl Schnurre of the Foreign Office's trade department to Moscow to begin exploratory economic talks. Throughout the summer, he pushed the negotiations forward with an urgency that reflected his awareness that time was short. His message to Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov on the 25th of May 1939 was direct: if Germany attacked Poland, Russia's "special interests would be taken into consideration".

  Ribbentrop simultaneously worked to assemble the other half of his strategic vision. To win Mussolini to a formal military alliance, he falsely assured him that there would be no war for the next three years. On that false foundation, the Pact of Steel was signed in May 1939. Ribbentrop told Italian Foreign Minister Ciano on the 5th of May 1939 that "It is certain that within a few months not one Frenchman nor a single Englishman will go to war for Poland." He also supplied Hitler with press summaries drawn largely from pro-appeasement British newspapers like the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, making British public opinion appear far more pacifist than it actually was, and he ensured that diplomatic decrypts showing Anglo-Polish tensions were placed before Hitler as proof that Britain was bluffing.

  American historian Gerhard Weinberg later wrote that in mid-1939 "perhaps Chamberlain's haggard appearance did him more credit than Ribbentrop's beaming smile," as the countdown to a war that would kill tens of millions gathered pace. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939. Within days, Germany invaded Poland, and the Second World War had begun.

• 7. War Criminal and Last Days

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  From 1941 onward, Ribbentrop's practical influence over German foreign policy shrank steadily, though his title remained. He had opposed the invasion of the Soviet Union, favouring the preservation of the German-Soviet relationship he had built. When that invasion went ahead anyway, he lost one of his central policy positions.

  He found a new cause in pushing Germany into open conflict with the United States. In late 1941, as American aid to Britain increased and incidents between U-boats and American warships in the North Atlantic multiplied, Ribbentrop worked to sabotage the Japanese-American talks in Washington and to encourage Japan to attack the United States instead. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, he worked with all his energy to ensure that Germany declared war on the United States.

  He was also involved in Operation Willi, an attempt to persuade the former King Edward VIII to lobby his brother, now King George VI, on Germany's behalf. Many historians have noted that Hitler was prepared to reinstall Edward as king in a fascist Britain, and that reportedly 50 million Swiss francs were set aside for the purpose. The plan was never carried out.

  Ribbentrop was arrested in June 1945, tried at Nuremberg for his role in starting the war in Europe and in enabling the Holocaust, and sentenced to death. On the 16th of October 1946, he was the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging. At the gallows, he said his last words were a wish for peace between East and West. It was a final, characteristic act of self-presentation from the man his secretary had called utterly insufferable, and it persuaded nobody.