Joachim Von Ribbentrop - Ambassador To Britain

Ambassador To Britain

In August 1936, Hitler appointed Ribbentrop Ambassador to Britain with orders to negotiate the Anglo-German alliance:

...et Britain to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, that is what I want most of all. I have sent you as the best man I’ve got. Do what you can... But if in future all our efforts are still in vain, fair enough, then I’m ready for war as well. I would regret it very much, but if it has to be, there it is....Do your best. I will follow your efforts with interest.

Ribbentrop arrived to take up his position in October 1936. The two-month delay between his appointment and his arrival owed to the fracas following State Secretary Prince von Bülow's death. Ribbentrop immediately suggested that he should succeed Bülow as State Secretary. But Neurath informed Hitler that he would rather resign than have Ribbentrop in the post. So Neurath appointed his son-in-law, Hans Georg von Mackensen, to the office. Hitler, for his part, had been impressed by Neurath's skilful efforts at defusing the Rhineland remilitarisation crisis earlier that year. And he concluded that Ribbentrop's talents better suited him to serving as Ambassador than as State Secretary. Ribbentrop spent two months trying to get Hitler to reconsider before reluctantly leaving for Britain.

The vain, arrogant, and tactless Ribbentrop was not the man for such a mission, but it is doubtful that even a more skilled diplomat could have fulfilled Hitler's dream. His time in London was marked by an endless series of social gaffes and blunders that worsened his already poor relations with the British Foreign Office.

The trouble began immediately. He created a storm in the British press soon after his arrival by suggesting that the two countries might find common ground opposing communism's spread:

The Führer is convinced that there is only one real danger to Europe and to the British Empire as well, and that is the spreading further of communism, this most terrible of all diseases-terrible because people generally seem to realize its danger only when it is too late. A closer collaboration in this sense between our two countries is not only important but a vital necessity in the common struggle for the upholding of our civilization and our culture.

The Daily Telegraph regretted that Germany's ambassador could offer no better basis for improved Anglo-German relations beyond a mutual hatred for a third country. His arrival at the German Embassy was equally tumultuous. A former aide recalled that Ribbentrop threw the German Embassy into chaos due to his erratic personality:

He rose, muttering bad-temperedly...Dressed in his pyjamas, he received the junior secretaries and press attachés in his bathroom...He scolded, threatened, gesticulated with his razor and shouted at his valet...As he took his bath, he ordered people to be summoned from Berlin, accepted and cancelled, appointed and dismissed, and dictated through the door to a nervous stenographer...He cursed people in their absence, calling them saboteurs and communists...It was my task to put his calls through; his valet stood within splashing distance holding a white telephone...Ribbentrop believed only ministers ranked above him: everyone else, including his ambassadorial colleagues, had to kept waiting on the line. Sometimes they did not share this view and rang off....

At about eleven-thirty he would finally appear at his office. His waiting room would be crammed with impatient messengers, visitors, diplomats, officials... I had to console them with feeble excuses such as that His Excellency was not very well, or engaged in an urgent state call to Berlin...For the rest of the morning he listened to reports from members of the Embassy staff, unless I had to accompany him to the Foreign Office...When Ribbentrop strutted through the corridors like a peacock, his head thrown back, it was a miracle that he did not fall over. His deportment aroused great mirth among the British officials, who often grinned at me with a pitying look....

To help with his move to London, and with the design of the new German Embassy Ribbentrop had built (the existing Embassy was insufficiently grand for him), he, at his wife's suggestion, hired a Berlin interior decorator named Martin Luther. Luther proved to be a master intriguer and became Ribbentrop's favourite hatchet man.

Ribbentrop did not understand the King's limited role in government; he thought King Edward VIII could dictate British foreign policy. He convinced Hitler that he had Edward's support; but this, like his belief that he had impressed British society, was a tragic delusion. Ribbentrop often woefully misunderstood both British politics and society. During the abdication crisis of December 1936, Ribbentrop reported to Berlin that the reason the crisis had occurred was 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 the King's supporters and those of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's. Ribbentrop's civil-war statements were greeted with incredulity by those British people who heard them. This led to a false sense of confidence about British intentions with which he unwittingly deceived his Führer.

Ribbentrop's habit of summoning tailors from the best British firms, making them wait for hours and then sending them away without seeing him with instructions to return the next day, only to repeat the process, did immense damage to his reputation in British high society. London's tailors retaliated for this abuse by telling all their well-off clients that Ribbentrop was impossible to deal with. In an interview, Spitzy stated "He behaved very stupidly and very pompously and the British don't like pompous people". In the same interview, Spitzy called Ribbentrop "pompous, conceited and not too intelligent", and stated he was an utterly insufferable man to work for. In addition, the fact that Ribbentrop chose to spend as little time as possible in London in order to stay close to Hitler irritated the British Foreign Office immensely, as Ribbentrop's frequent absences prevented the handling of many routine diplomatic matters. (Punch referred to him the "Wandering Aryan" for his frequent trips home.) As Ribbentrop alienated more and more people in Britain, Göring warned Hitler that Ribbentrop was a "stupid ass". Hitler dismissed Göring's concerns: "ut after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England", leading 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 King George VI with a stiff-armed Nazi salute: the gesture nearly knocked over the King, who was walking forward to shake Ribbentrop's hand. Ribbentrop further compounded the damage to his image and caused a minor crisis in Anglo-German relations by insisting that henceforward all German diplomats were to greet heads of state with the "German greeting", who were in turn to return the fascist salute. The crisis was resolved when Neurath pointed out to Hitler that under Ribbentrop's rules, if the Soviet Ambassador were to give the communist clenched-fist salute, then Hitler would be obliged to return it. On Neurath's advice, Hitler disavowed Ribbentrop's demand that King George receive and give the "German greeting".

Most of Ribbentrop's time was spent either demanding that Britain sign the Anti-Comintern Pact or that London return the former German colonies in Africa. But he also devoted considerable time to courting what he called the "men of influence" as the best way to achieve an Anglo-German alliance. Ribbentrop believed the British aristocracy comprised some sort of secret society that ruled from behind the scenes, and if he could befriend enough members of Britain's "secret government", he could bring about the alliance. Almost all of the initially favourable reports Ribbentrop provided to Berlin about the alliance's prospects were based on friendly remarks about the "New Germany" from various British aristocrats like Lord Londonderry and Lord Lothian; the rather cool reception that Ribbentrop received from British Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats did not make much of an impression on him at first. In 1935, Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador to Germany, complained to London about Ribbentrop's British associates in the Anglo-German Fellowship, that they created "false German hopes as in regards to British friendship and caused a reaction against it in England, where public opinion is very naturally hostile to the Nazi regime and its methods". In September 1937, the British Consul in Munich, writing about the group Ribbentrop had brought to the Nuremberg Party Rally, reported that there were some "serious persons of standing among them" and that an equal number of Ribbentrop's British contingent were "eccentrics and few, if any, could be called representatives of serious English thought, either political or social, while they most certainly lacked any political or social influence in England". In June 1937, when Lord Mount Temple, the Chairman of the Anglo-German Fellowship, asked to see the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after meeting Hitler in a visit arranged by Ribbentrop, Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Undersecretary wrote a memo stating that:

"The P.M. should certainly not see Lord Mount Temple – nor should the S of S. We really must put a stop to this eternal butting in of amateurs – and Lord Mount Temple is a particularly silly one. These activities – which are practically confined to Germany – render impossible the task of diplomacy.

After Vansittart's memo, members of the Anglo-German Fellowship ceased to see Cabinet ministers after going on Ribbentrop-arranged trips to Germany.

In February 1937, before a meeting with the Lord Privy Seal, Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop suggested to Hitler that Germany, Italy, and Japan begin a worldwide propaganda campaign with the aim of forcing Britain to return the former German colonies in Africa. Hitler turned down this idea of Ribbentrop's, but nonetheless during his meeting with Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop spent much of the meeting demanding that Britain sign an alliance with Germany and return the former German colonies. The German historian Klaus Hildebrand noted that as early as the Ribbentrop–Halifax meeting the differing foreign policy views of Hitler and Ribbentrop were starting to emerge with Ribbentrop more interested in restoring the pre-1914 German Imperium in Africa than conquest of Eastern Europe. Following the lead of Andreas Hillgruber, who argued that Hitler had a Stufenplan (stage by stage plan) for world conquest, Hildebrand argued that Ribbentrop may not have fully understood what Hitler's Stufenplan was, or alternatively in pressing so hard for colonial restoration was trying to score a personal success that might improve his standing with Hitler. In March 1937, Ribbentrop attracted much adverse comment in the British press when he gave a speech at the Leipzig Trade Fair in Leipzig, where he declared that German economic prosperity would be satisfied either "through the restoration of the former German colonial possessions, or by means of the German people's own strength". The implied threat that if colonial restoration did not occur, then the Germans would take back by force their former colonies attracted a large deal of hostile commentary on the inappropriateness of an Ambassador threatening his host country in such a manner.

His aggressive and overbearing manner towards everyone except his wife and Hitler meant that to know him was to dislike him. His negotiating style, a strange mix of bullying bluster and icy coldness coupled with lengthy monologues praising Hitler, alienated many. The American historian Gordon A. Craig once observed that of all the voluminous memoir literature of the diplomatic scene of 1930s Europe, there are only two positive references to Ribbentrop. Of the two references, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, the German military attaché in London, commented that Ribbentrop had been a brave soldier in World War I, while the wife of the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Elisabetta Cerruti, called Ribbentrop "one of the most diverting of the Nazis". In both cases the praise was limited, with Cerruti going on to write that only in the Third Reich was it possible for someone as superficial as Ribbentrop to rise to be a minister of foreign affairs, while Geyr von Schweppenburg called Ribbentrop an absolute disaster as Ambassador in London. The British historian/television producer Laurence Rees noted for his 1997 series The Nazis: A Warning from History that every single person interviewed for the series who knew Ribbentrop expressed a passionate hatred for him. One German diplomat, Herbert Richter, called Ribbentrop "lazy and worthless" while another, Manfred von Schröder, was quoted as saying Ribbentrop was "vain and ambitious". Rees concluded that "No other Nazi was so hated by his colleagues".

In November 1937, Ribbentrop was placed in a highly embarrassing situation when his forceful advocacy of the return of the former German colonies led to the British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and the French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos offering to open talks on returning the former German colonies, in return for which the Germans would make binding commitments to respect their borders in Central and Eastern Europe. Since Hitler was not really interested in obtaining the former colonies, especially if the price was a brake on expansion into Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop was forced to turn down the Anglo-French offer that he had largely brought about. Immediately after turning down the Anglo-French offer on colonial restoration, Ribbentrop for reasons of pure malice ordered the Reichskolonialbund to increase the agitation for the former German colonies, a move which exasperated both the Foreign Office and Quai d'Orsay.

Ribbentrop's inability to achieve the alliance that he had been sent out for frustrated him, as he feared it could cost him Hitler's favour, and it made him a bitter Anglophobe. As the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary in late 1937, 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.

When Ribbentrop travelled to Rome in November 1937 to oversee Italy's adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact, he made clear to his hosts that the pact was really directed against Britain. As Count Ciano noted in his diary, the Anti-Comintern Pact was "anti-Communist in theory, but in fact unmistakably anti-British". Believing himself to be in a state of disgrace with 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 denouncing Britain. In the first of his two reports to Hitler, which was presented on 2 January 1938, Ribbentrop stated that "England is our most dangerous enemy". In the same report, Ribbentrop advised Hitler to abandon the idea of a British alliance, and instead embrace the idea of an alliance of Germany, Japan, and Italy, to destroy the British Empire.

Ribbentrop wrote in his "Memorandum for the Führer" that "a change in the status quo in the East to Germany's advantage can only be accomplished by force", and that the best way to achieve this change was to build a global anti-British alliance system. Besides converting the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British military alliance, Ribbentrop argued that German foreign policy should work to "furthermore, winning over all states whose interests conform directly or indirectly to ours". By the last statement, Ribbentrop clearly implied that the Soviet Union should be included in the anti-British alliance system he had proposed.