Joachim Von Ribbentrop - Early Nazi Career

Early Nazi 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". Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, with whom Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars in the First World War, arranged the introduction. Ribbentrop and his wife joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on 1 May 1932. His NSDAP card number was 1,199,927. Ribbentrop began his political career that summer by offering to be a secret emissary between Chancellor Franz von Papen, his old wartime friend, and Hitler. His offer was initially refused. Six months later, though, Hitler and von Papen accepted his help.

Their change of heart occurred after General Kurt von Schleicher ousted von Papen in December 1932. This led to a complex set of intrigues that saw von Papen and various friends of President Paul von Hindenburg negotiating with Hitler to oust von Schleicher. On 22 January 1933, Meissner and Hindenburg's son met Hitler, Göring, and Frick at Ribbentrop's home in Berlin's exclusive Dahlem district. Over dinner, von Papen made the fateful concession that if von Schleicher's government were to fall, he would abandon his demand for the Chancellorship and instead use his influence with President von Hindenburg to ensure that Hitler got the Chancellorship.

Hitler met privately with Hindenburg for over an hour. Afterwards, Hindenburg was a changed man. He stood ready to convince his father to accept Hitler's demand for the Chancellorship. The end result was that Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Ribbentrop's assistance in arranging the meeting and lending his home for the purpose endeared him to Hitler.

Ribbentrop, in turn, greatly admired Hitler. He was emotionally dependent on Hitler's favour to the extent that he suffered from psychosomatic illnesses if Hitler was unhappy with him. In 1933, he was given honorary SS officer rank of SS-Standartenführer. His SS membership number was 63,083.

But Ribbentrop was not popular with the Nazi Party's Alte Kämpfer (Old Fighters); they nearly all disliked him. British historian Laurence Rees described Ribbentrop as "...the Nazi almost all the other leading Nazis hated". Joseph Goebbels expressed a common view when he confided to his diary that "Von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office". To compensate for this, Ribbentrop became a fanatical Nazi and vociferous anti-Semite.

During most of the Weimar Republic era, Ribbentrop was apolitical and displayed no anti-Semitic prejudices. 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. Several Berlin Jewish businessmen who did business with Ribbentrop in the 1920s and knew him well later expressed astonishment at the vicious anti-Semitism Ribbentrop later displayed in the Third Reich, saying that they did not see any indications that he had held such views when they knew him. Indeed, as a wealthy partner in his father-in-law's champagne firm, Ribbentrop did business with Jewish bankers, and organised the Impegroma Importing Company ("Import und Export großer Marken") with Jewish financing.

But Ribbentrop emerged as one of the Nazi Party's leading hardliners. He refused even to consider the idea (which some of the other Nazi leaders were open to, though only on pragmatic grounds as a way of encouraging Jewish emigration) that German Jews be allowed to take their personal possessions with them when they left Germany. The French Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, once asked Ribbentrop that very question. The answer was unequivocally no:

The Jews in Germany were without exception pickpockets, murderers and thieves. The property they possessed had been acquired illegally. The German government had therefore decided to assimilate them with the criminal elements of the population. The property which they had acquired illegally would be taken from them. They would be forced to live in districts frequented by the criminal classes. They would be under police observation like other criminals. They would be forced to report to the police as other criminals were obligated to do. The German government could not help it if some of these criminals escaped to other countries that seemed so anxious to have them. It was not, however, willing for them to take the property, which had resulted from their illegal operations with them.