Joachim Von Ribbentrop - Relations With Wartime Allies

Relations With Wartime Allies

Ribbentrop, a Francophile, argued that Germany should allow Vichy France a limited degree of independence within a binding Franco-German partnership. To this end, Ribbentrop appointed a colleague, Otto Abetz, from the Dienststelle Ambassador to France with instructions to promote the political career of Pierre Laval, who Ribbentrop had decided was the French politician most favourable to Germany. The Foreign Office's influence in France varied, as there were many other agencies competing for power there. But in general, from late 1943 to mid-1944, the Foreign Office was second only to the SS in terms of power in France.

From the latter half of 1937, Ribbentrop had championed the idea of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan that would partition the British Empire between them. After signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, Ribbentrop expanded on this idea for an Axis alliance to include the Soviet Union to form a Eurasian bloc that would destroy maritime states such as Britain. The German historian Klaus Hildebrand argued that besides Hitler's foreign policy programme, there were three other factions within the Nazi Party who had alternative foreign policy programmes, whom Hildebrand dubbed the agrarians, the revolutionary socialists, and the Wilhelmine Imperialists. Another German diplomatic historian, Wolfgang Michalka argued that there was a fourth alternative Nazi foreign policy programme, and that was Ribbentrop's concept of a Euro-Asiatic bloc comprising the four totalitarian states of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan. Unlike the other factions, Ribbentrop's foreign policy programme was the only one that Hitler allowed to be executed during the years 1939–41, though it was more due to the temporary bankruptcy of Hitler's own foreign policy programme that he had laid down in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch following the failure to achieve an alliance with Britain, than to a genuine change of mind. Ribbentrop's foreign policy conceptions differed from Hitler's in that Ribbentrop's concept of international relations owed more to the traditional Wilhelmine Machtpolitik than to Hitler's racist and Social Darwinist vision of different "races" locked in a merciless and endless struggle over Lebensraum. The different foreign-policy conceptions held by Hitler and Ribbentrop were illustrated in their reaction to the Fall of Singapore in 1942: Ribbentrop wanted this great British defeat to be a day of celebration in Germany, whereas Hitler forbade any celebrations on the grounds that Singapore represented a sad day for the principles of white supremacy. Another area of difference was that Ribbentrop had an obsessive hatred for Britain – which he saw as the main enemy – and the Soviet Union as important ally in the anti-British struggle; whereas Hitler saw the alliance with the Soviet Union as only tactical, and was nowhere as anti-British as his Foreign Minister.

In August 1940, Ribbentrop oversaw the Second Vienna Award, which saw about 40% of Transylvania region of Romania returned to Hungary. The decision to award so much of Romania to the Hungarians was Hitler's, as Ribbentrop himself spent most of the Vienna conference loudly attacking the Hungarian delegation for their coolness towards attacking Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then demanding more than their fair share of the spoils. When Ribbentrop finally got around to announcing his decision, the Hungarian delegation who had expected Ribbentrop to rule in favour of Romania broke out in cheers while the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu fainted. Without perhaps realizing it, Ribbentrop by placing Romania within the German sphere of influence undermined the main rationale for co-operation with the Soviet Union, since control of Romanian oil meant that Germany was no longer dependent upon Soviet oil.

In the fall of 1940, Ribbentrop made a sustained but unsuccessful effort to have Spain enter the war on the Axis side. During his talks with the Spanish foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Súñer, Ribbentrop affronted Súñer with his tactless behaviour, especially his suggestion that Spain cede the Canary Islands to Germany. An angry Súñer replied that he would rather see the Canaries sink into the Atlantic then cede an inch of Spanish territory. An area where Ribbentrop enjoyed more success arose in September 1940, when he had the Far Eastern agent of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, Dr. Heinrich Georg Stahmer, start negotiations with the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, for an anti-American alliance (the German Ambassador to Japan, General Eugen Ott, was excluded from the talks on Ribbentrop's orders). The end result of these talks was the signing in Berlin on 27 September 1940 of the Tripartite Pact by Ribbentrop, Count Ciano, and Japanese Ambassador Saburo Kurusu. Ribbentrop hoped that the prospect of facing the Tripartite Pact would deter the United States from supporting Britain, but since the Pact was more or less openly directed against the United States (the Pact made a point of stressing that the unnamed great power it was directed against was not the Soviet Union), it had the opposite effect on American public opinion than the one intended.

In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner oversaw the almost total expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France not only from the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed that summer to the Reich, but also from their Gaues as while. Ribbentrop treated the ensuring complaints by the Vichy French government over the expulsions in a "most dilatory fashion".

In November 1940, during the visit of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin, Ribbentrop tried hard to get the Soviet Union to sign the Tripartite Pact. Ribbentrop argued that the Soviets and Germans shared a common enemy in the form of the British Empire, and as such, it was in the best interests of the Kremlin to enter the war on the Axis side. Ribbentrop presented a proposal to Molotov where after the defeat of Britain, the Soviet Union would have India and the Middle East, Italy the Mediterranean area, Japan the British possessions in the Far East (presuming of course that Japan would enter the war), and Germany would take Central Africa and Britain itself. Molotov was open to the idea of the Soviet Union entering the war on the Axis side, but demanded as the price of Soviet entry into the war that Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Yugoslavia be recognised as in the exclusive Soviet sphere of influence. Ribbentrop's efforts to persuade Molotov to abandon his demands about Europe as the price of Soviet entry into the war as a German ally were entirely unsuccessful. After Molotov left Berlin, the Soviet Union indicated that it wished to sign the Tripartite Pact and enter the war on the Axis side. Though Ribbentrop was all for taking Stalin's offer, Hitler by this point had decided that he wanted to attack the Soviet Union. The German–Soviet Axis talks led nowhere.

As World War II went on, Ribbentrop's once-friendly relations with the SS became increasingly strained. In January 1941, the nadir of SS-Auswärtiges Amt relations was reached when the Iron Guard attempted a coup in Romania, with Ribbentrop supporting Marshal Ion Antonescu's government and Himmler supporting the Iron Guard. In the aftermath of the failed coup in Bucharest, the Foreign Office assembled evidence that the SD had backed the coup, which led to Ribbentrop sharply restricting the powers of the SD police attachés, who since October 1939 had operated largely independently of the German embassies at which they had been stationed. In the spring of 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to German embassies in Eastern Europe, with Manfred von Killinger going to Romania, Siegfried Kasche to Croatia, Adolf Beckerle to Bulgaria, Dietrich von Jagow to Hungary, and Hans Ludin to Slovakia. The major qualifications of all these men, none of whom had previously held a diplomatic position before, were that they were close friends of Luther, and as a way of splitting the SS (the traditional rivalry between the SS and SA was still running strong).

In March 1941, Japan's Germanophile foreign minister Yōsuke Matsuoka visited Berlin. On 29 March 1941, during a conversation with Matsuoka, Ribbentrop as instructed by Hitler told the Japanese nothing about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler believed that he could defeat the Soviet Union on his own and preferred that the Japanese attack Britain instead. Hitler did not wish for any information that might lead the Japanese into attacking the Soviet Union to reach their ears. Ribbentrop tried to convince Matsuoka to urge the government in Tokyo to attack the great British naval base at Singapore, claiming the Royal Navy was too weak to retaliate due to its involvement in the Battle of the Atlantic. Matsuoka responded to this by stating preparations to occupy Singapore were under way.

In the winter of 1940–41, Ribbentrop strongly pressured Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, despite advice from the German Legation in Belgrade that such a move would probably lead to the overthrow of Crown Prince Paul, the Yugoslav Regent. Ribbentrop's intention with pressuring Yugoslavia into signing the Tripartite Pact was to gain transit rights through that country, which would allow the Germans to invade Greece. On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia reluctantly signed the Tripartite Pact, which led to the overthrow of Prince Paul the next day in a bloodless coup by the Yugoslav military. When Hitler ordered Yugoslavia's invasion, Ribbentrop was opposed, though only because the Foreign Office was likely to be excluded from ruling the occupied Yugoslavia. As Hitler was displeased with Ribbentrop over his opposition to attacking Yugoslavia, he then broke down and took to his bed for the next couple of days. When Ribbentrop recovered, he sought a chance for increasing the agency's influence by giving Croatia independence. Ribbentrop chose the Ustaša to rule Croatia, and had Edmund Veesenmayer successfully conclude talks in April 1941 with General Slavko Kvaternik of the Ustaša on having his party rule Croatia after the German invasion. Reflecting his displeasure with the German Legation in Belgrade, which had advised against pressuring Yugoslavia into signing the Tripartite Pact, when the Bombing of Belgrade took place on 6 April 1941, Ribbentrop refused to have the staff of the German Legation withdrawn in advance, who were thus left to survive the fire-bombing of Belgrade as best they could.

Ribbentrop liked and admired Stalin, and was against the attack on the USSR in 1941. He passed a word to a Soviet diplomat: "Please tell Stalin I was against this war, and that I know it will bring great misfortune to Germany." In the spring of 1941, upon hearing of the coup in Baghdad that brought Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power, Ribbentrop dispatched Dr. Fritz Grobba on a secret mission to Iraq to make contact with the new government. When Grobba reported that the Iraqis as Arab nationalists saw the British and the Jews as their enemies and wished to ally themselves with Germany against their common foes, Ribbentrop was delighted and become obsessed with the idea of an Iraqi-German alliance. In pursuit of his Iraq project, Ribbentrop strongly pushed for German aid to the Rashid Ali al-Gaylani government in Iraq, where he saw a great opportunity for striking a blow at British influence in the Middle East. It was Ribbentrop's hope that a striking German success in Iraq might lead to Hitler abandoning his plans for Operation Barbarossa, and focusing instead on the struggle with Britain. The abject failure of Ribbentrop's Iraq scheme in May 1941 had a totally opposite effect to the one intended. When it came to time for Ribbentrop to present the German declaration of war on 22 June 1941 to the Soviet Ambassador, General Vladimir Dekanozov, Paul Schmidt described the scene:

"It is just before four on the morning of Sunday, 22 June 1941 in the office of the Foreign Minister. He is expecting the Soviet Ambassador, Dekanozov, who had been phoning the Minister since early Saturday. Dekanozov had an urgent message from Moscow. He had called every two hours, but was told the Minister was away from the city. At two on Sunday morning, von Ribbentrop finally responded to the calls. Dekanozov was told that von Ribbentrop wished to meet with him at once. An appointment was made for 4 am

Von Ribbentrop is nervous, walking up and down from one end of his large office to the other, like a caged animal, while saying over and over, "The Führer is absolutely right. We must attack Russia, or they will surely attack us!" Is he reassuring himself? Is he justifying the ruination of his crowning diplomatic achievement? Now he has to destroy it "because that is the Führer's wish".

When Dekanozov finally appeared, Ribbentrop read out a short statement saying that the Reich had been forced into "military countermeasures" because of an alleged Soviet plan to attack Germany in July 1941. Ribbentrop did not actually present a declaration of war to General Dekanozov, instead confining himself to reading out the statement about Germany being forced to take "military countermeasures".

Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference for focusing the war effort against Britain, on 28 June 1941, Ribbentrop began a sustained effort to have Japan attack the Soviet Union without bothering to inform Hitler first. But Ribbentrop's motives in seeking to have Japan enter the war were more anti-British then anti-Soviet. On 10 July 1941 Ribbentrop ordered General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador to Japan to:

"Go on with your efforts to bring about the earliest possible participation of Japan in the war against Russia...The natural goal must be, as before, to bring about the meeting of Germany and Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railroad before winter sets in. With the collapse of Russia, the position of the Tripartite Powers in the world will be so gigantic that the question of the collapse of England, that is, the absolute annihilation of the British Isles, will only be a question of time. An America completely isolated from the rest of the world would then be faced with the seizure of those of the remaining positions of the British Empire important to the Tripartite Powers".

As part of his efforts to bring Japan into Barbarossa, on 1 July 1941, Ribbentrop had Germany break off diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek and instead recognized the Japanese-puppet government of Wang Jingwei as China's legitimate government. In addition, Ribbentrop hoped that recognizing Wang would be seen as a coup which might add to the prestige of the pro-German Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who was opposed to opening American-Japanese talks. Despite Ribbentrop's best efforts, Matsuoka was sacked as Foreign Minister later in July 1941, and the Japanese-American talks began.

Ribbentrop was found to have had culpability in the Holocaust on the grounds that he persuaded the leaders of satellite countries of the Third Reich to deport Jews to the Nazi extermination camps. In August 1941, when the question of whether to deport foreign Jews living in Germany arose, Ribbentrop argued against deportation as a way of maximizing the Foreign Office's influence. In order to deport foreign Jews living in the Reich, Ribbentrop then had Luther negotiate agreements with the governments of Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia to allow Jews holding citizenship of those states to be deported. In September 1941, the Reich Plenipotentiary for Serbia, Felix Benzler, reported to Ribbentrop that the SS had arrested 8,000 Serbian Jews, whom they were planning to execute en masse, and asked for permission to try to stop the massacre. Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who in turn ordered Benzler to co-operate fully in the massacre.

In October 1941, Ribbentrop’s prestige was badly damaged by the discovery of the Soviet spy ring in Tokyo headed by Richard Sorge, who was arrested by the Japanese while in bed with the wife of General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador. Sorge had been a close friend of General Ott, who had given him a free rein at the Tokyo Embassy, and thus allowed him to pass along all sorts of German secrets to Moscow. The resulting scandal was another blow to the Foreign Office, made all the worse in that it was the Japanese who had discovered and broken up the Sorge spy ring without any German assistance.

In the fall of 1941, Ribbentrop worked for both the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and Japan attacking the United States. In October 1941 Ribbentrop ordered General Ott to start applying pressure on the Japanese to attack the Americans as soon as possible. Ribbentrop argued to Hitler that a war between the United States and Germany was inevitable given the extent of American aid to Britain and the increasingly frequent "incidents" in the North Atlantic between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to Britain, and that having such a war begin with a Japanese attack on the United States was the best way to begin it. Ribbentrop told Hitler that because of his four years in Canada and the United States before 1914, he was an expert on all things American, and that the United States in his opinion was not a serious military power. On 4 December 1941, the Japanese Ambassador General Hiroshi Ōshima told Ribbentrop that Japan was on the verge of war with the United States, which led to Ribbentrop promising him on behalf of Hitler that Germany would join the war against the Americans. On 7 December 1941 Ribbentrop was jubilant at the news of Pearl Harbor, and did his utmost to support declaring war on the United States, which he duly delivered to the American Chargé d'Affaires Leland B. Morris on 11 December 1941. In the winter and spring of 1942 following American entry into war, all of the Latin American states except for Argentina and Chile under American pressure declared war on Germany. Ribbentrop who considered taking declarations of war from such small states as Costa Rica and Ecuador to be deeply humiliating refused to see any of the Latin American ambassadors and instead had Weizsäcker take the Latin declarations of war.

In April 1942, as part of a diplomatic counterpart to Case Blue Ribbentrop had assembled in Hotel Adlon in Berlin a collection of anti-Soviet émigrés from the Caucasus with the aim of having them declared leaders of governments in exile. From Ribbentrop's point of view, this had the dual benefit of ensuring popular support for the German Army as it advanced into the Caucasus and of ensuring that it was the Foreign Office that ruled the Caucasus once the Germans occupied the area. Alfred Rosenberg, the German Minister of the East, saw this as an intrusion into his area of authority, and told Hitler that the émigrés at the Hotel Adlon were "a nest of Allied agents". Much to Ribbentrop's intense disappointment, Hitler sided with Rosenberg. For Hitler, the Soviet Union was to be Germany's Lebensraum and he had no interest in even setting up puppet governments in a region he planned to colonize.

Despite the often fierce rivalry with the SS, the Foreign Office played a key role in arranging the deportations of Jews to the death camps from France (1942–44), Hungary (1944–45), Slovakia, Italy (after 1943), and the Balkans. Ribbentrop assigned all of the Holocaust-related work to an old crony from the Dienststelle named Martin Luther, who represented the Foreign Ministry at the Wannsee Conference. In 1942, Ambassador Otto Abetz secured the deportation of 25,000 French Jews, and Ambassador Hans Ludin secured the deportation of 50,000 Slovak Jews to the death camps. Only once, in August 1942, did Ribbentrop attempt to impede the deportations, but only because of jurisdictional disputes with the SS. Ribbentrop halted deportations from Romania and Croatia; in the case of the former, he was insulted because the SS were negotiating with the Romanians directly, and in the case of the latter because the SS and Luther were jointly pressuring the Italians in their zone of occupation in Croatia to deport their Jews without first informing Ribbentrop, who was supposed to be personally kept abreast of all developments in Italo-German relations. In September 1942, after a meeting with Hitler, who was most unhappy with his Foreign Minister's actions, Ribbentrop promptly changed course and ordered that the deportations be resumed immediately.

It should be noted that the professional diplomats, and not just Ribbentrop's cronies from the Dienststelle, were highly involved in the “Final Solution”. Typical among them was the fiercely anti-Semitic Curt Prufer, who joined the Foreign Office in 1907, served as the German Ambassador to Brazil in 1938–1942, and then worked closely with the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni in recruiting Balkan Muslims to kill Jews in 1943. As an Orientalist who spoke fluent Arabic, Prufer was especially concerned with relations with the Arabs. Through Prufer loathed the Nazis and Ribbentrop, whom he viewed as an inept bully who was trashing his beloved agency, Prufer's hatred for the Jews was even greater. But after the war, Prufer rewrote his entire diaries in order to remake himself from an anti-Semitic German ultra-nationalist into a Nazi opponent who was utterly disgusted by Nazi anti-Semitism; his deception was not exposed until the 1980s by American historian Donald McKale.

In November 1942, following Operation Torch, Ribbentrop met with Pierre Laval in Munich. He presented Laval with an ultimatum for Germany's occupation of the French unoccupied zone and Tunisia. Ribbentrop also tried unsuccessfully to arrange for the Vichy French troops in North Africa to be formally placed under German command. In December 1942, during a meeting with the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who brought a message from Mussolini asking for the Germans to go on the defensive in the Soviet Union in order to focus on North Africa, Ribbentrop joined with Hitler in belittling Italy's war effort. During the same meeting in East Prussia with Count Ciano, Pierre Laval arrived and promptly agreed to Hitler's and Ribbentrop's demands that he place French police under the command of more radical anti-Semitics and conscript and send hundreds of thousands of French workers to work in Germany's war industry. Ciano was amazed at the way that Laval fell in with the German demands, and thought it all typical Ribbentrop that he should remind Laval in a very tactless way how this forest had once served as Napoleon's headquarters.

Another low point in Ribbentrop's relations with the SS occurred in February 1943, when the SD backed a Luther-led internal putsch to oust Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister. Luther had become estranged from Ribbentrop because Frau Ribbentrop treated Luther as a household servant. She pressured her husband into ordering an investigation into allegations of corruption on Luther's part. The putsch failed largely because Himmler decided that a Foreign Ministry headed by Luther would be a more dangerous opponent than the Ribbentrop version. At the last minute he withdrew his support from Luther. In putsch's aftermath, Luther was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

In March 1943, Ribbentrop submitted a proposal for an European Confederation of states, and in April established an "Europe commitee" in the Foreign Ministry to gather data and material to be used in the "future settlement of the New European Order". The project was soon rejected by Hitler.

In April 1943, during a summit meeting with Hungary's Admiral Horthy, Ribbentrop strongly and unsuccessfully pressed the Hungarians to deport their Jewish population to the death camps. Ribbentrop's own views about the Holocaust were well summarized when, during their meeting, Ribbentrop declared "the Jews must either be exterminated or taken to the concentration camps. There is no other possibility". Later, when on trial for his life at Nuremberg, Ribbentrop claimed to have always been opposed to the "Final Solution" and to have done everything in his power to stop it.