Background
Joachim Ribbentrop was born in Wesel on 30 April 1893, the son of an officer.
Joachim Ribbentrop was born in Wesel on 30 April 1893, the son of an officer.
Educated at Metz and Grenoble, where he studied languages.
After his studies Ribbentrop spent four years in Canada as an independent businessman. He returned to Germany in 1914, volunteering for active service and reaching the rank of Lieutenant.
At the end of the war he was temporarily military attaché in Istanbul. After the war, Ribbentrop went into business in Berlin as the owner of an export firm for wines and spirits, dealing chiefly with England and France.
His Dahlem villa on the Lentze Allee was an ideal location for Hitler’s secret conferences over the forming of his first cabinet of 30 January 1933. Ribbentrop was a late-comer to the Nazi Party- he joined on 1 May 1932 - but within a year he was a member of the Reichstag representing Potsdam, an SS Colonel and Hitler’s adviser on foreign affairs.
Until 1935 von Ribbentrop was primarily concerned with questions of disarmament, but in June of that year he negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and on 2 August 1936 he was appointed Ambassador to London.
His two-year stay in Britain was disastrous and von Ribbentrop, deeply offended by his social rejection in England, became convinced that Anglo-German antagonism wasirreconcilable. Henceforth he portrayed England as‘our most dangerous enemy', while at the same time persuading Hitler that the British would not oppose a policy of violent conquest in Europe by the Third Reich. On 25 November 1936 von Ribbentrop negotiated the anti-Comintern pact with Japan, which was later broadened into the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.
Appointed Reich Foreign Minister on 4 February 1938, von Ribbentrop reached the peak of his political career between the Munich crisis and the sensational Nazi-Soviet pact which he signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939. The pact paved the way for Hitler's attack on Poland, which von Ribbentrop had convinced him would not be opposed by Britain.
The Foreign Minister, who had done everything in his power to frustrate last-minute peace moves, gradually lost influence during the war as diplomatic activity receded in importance. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, most of his time was devoted to futile conflicts with his rivals over his waning area of jurisdiction. The megalomaniac von Ribbentrop tried to compensate by pursuing a more active role in the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, ordering his subordinates ‘to speed up as much as possible the evacuation of the Jews from the various parts of Europe'and pressuring the Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Danish governments to this end.
He survived an attempted putsch by his own State Secretary, Martin Luther, but by 1945 he had lost all influence, even with Hitler, whose political intentions he had in the past always been able to divine and whose favour was the basis of his entire career. Arrested in a Hamburg boarding house by British soldiers on 14 June 1945, von Ribbentrop was tried by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where his spineless performance aroused the contempt and scorn of his co-defendants. Von Ribbentrop showed no remorse or understanding of the indictment against him. All that was left of the once haughty Foreign Minister was a hollow, pathetic dependence on the dead Hitler, whose creature he still was, even in the bankruptcy of defeat. Von Ribbentrop was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and peace.
Sentenced to death on 1 October 1946, he was the first of the defendants to be hanged in Nuremberg prison fifteen days later.
Accepted by the Führer as a man of the world, von Ribbentrop - the noble prefix was fraudulently acquired - owed everything to Hitler, displaying a degree of sycophantic subservience, Byzantine flattery and desire to please, which nauseated even the Nazi Old Guard who regarded him as a parvenu upstart.
The arrogant, vain, touchy and humourless von Ribbentrop aroused almost universal dislike and contempt for his haughty incompetence. The Italian Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, summed up a widely held view when he observed.
Hitler, however, would not hear a word against him, once even remarking that von Ribbentrop was ‘greater than Bismarck’.
Quotes from others about the person
Goering referred to him publicly as that ‘dirty little champagne pedlar’, while his bitter rival Goebbels remarked: ‘He bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.’
The Duce said 'you only have to look at his head to see that he has a small brain.'
His marriage to Anneliese Henckel, daughter of the largest German champagne manufacturer, gave him the entree into high society which the snobbish, class-conscious Ribbentrop always craved.