Joachim von Ribbentrop

Joachim von Ribbentrop was Reich Foreign Minister from 1938 to 1945. He commanded the diplomacy through which the Holocaust was extended across continental Europe, pressing the German allies and satellite governments to deport their Jewish populations to the killing sites. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty, and hanged on 16 October 1946.

The pressure on the allies

Ribbentrop’s ministry conducted the diplomacy with the German allies on the Jewish question. From 1942 onwards, with Operation Reinhard and Auschwitz operating, Ribbentrop personally pressed Italy, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia and Vichy France to deport their Jewish populations. He met repeatedly with the foreign ministers and senior officials of these countries. He raised the deportation question directly with Mussolini, with Horthy, with Antonescu, with Filov of Bulgaria. The Foreign Ministry’s cables, which survived in the captured Auswärtiges Amt files, document the pressure operation in detail.

The 17 April 1943 conversation with Horthy

The single most-cited Ribbentrop conversation is the meeting at Klessheim Castle near Salzburg on 17 April 1943, when Hitler and Ribbentrop received the Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy. Horthy raised the question of what was being asked of him with respect to the Hungarian Jews. Ribbentrop intervened directly. The minutes, taken by the German interpreter Paul Schmidt and surviving in the Foreign Ministry files, record Ribbentrop telling Horthy that the Jews would have to be either annihilated or sent to concentration camps. The phrasing was brutal even by the standards of the regime. Horthy declined to act on the demand at the time. The Hungarian deportations did not take place until the following year, after the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. But the policy had been communicated explicitly, in the most senior diplomatic forum, by Ribbentrop personally.

The Wannsee invitation list

The Foreign Ministry was represented at the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942 by the Under Secretary Martin Luther. Luther was the head of the ministry’s Department III on Jewish affairs and the principal Foreign Ministry liaison with the SS on the deportation policy. Ribbentrop sent Luther knowing exactly what would be discussed at Wannsee. The Foreign Ministry’s post-meeting paperwork, which Luther produced under Ribbentrop’s authority, set out the diplomatic steps that would be needed to extend the killing to allied countries. Luther was later sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp by Ribbentrop in 1943 after a personal conflict, and survived the war, becoming after 1945 one of the witnesses against his former minister at Nuremberg.

The Mufti

Ribbentrop’s ministry handled the German relationship with the exiled Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who had spent the war in Berlin as a German ally. Ribbentrop met with the Mufti on 28 November 1941 alongside Hitler. The conversation, recorded by the German interpreter, included Hitler’s assurance to the Mufti that the killing of European Jewry would, if German forces reached the Middle East, be extended to the Jewish population of Palestine. The minutes survive in the Foreign Ministry archive. They place Ribbentrop in the room when the geographical scope of the killing programme was extended, in principle, to a region the regime did not yet control.

The Nuremberg trial

Ribbentrop was captured by British forces on 14 June 1945 in Hamburg, where he had been hiding under a false name. He was tried at Nuremberg. His defence was the standard one: he had been an obedient diplomat, had not personally killed anyone, had not had detailed knowledge of the killing programme. The captured Foreign Ministry files made the position untenable. The Klessheim minutes, the Wannsee correspondence, the Mufti meeting transcript, the cables to the satellite governments, all bore his signature or his ministerial authority. He was found guilty on all four counts. He was the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be hanged, going to the gallows just after midnight on 16 October 1946. He was 53.

What he was

Ribbentrop is the case of the diplomat who turned diplomacy into the operational extension of the killing programme to satellite states. The deportation of around 700,000 Jews from German allied countries (Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria via the occupied territories, Croatia, Vichy France, Italy after 1943) was the result of a sustained diplomatic pressure operation that he personally directed. He was not a senior decision-maker on the policy itself; that was Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich. But the geographical reach of the killing across continental Europe was extended through his ministry and bore, throughout, his name and his authority.

See also

Sources

  • Michael Bloch, Ribbentrop, Crown, 1992
  • Christopher Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, Holmes and Meier, 1978
  • Klessheim Conference minutes, 17 April 1943
  • Hitler-Mufti conversation minutes, 28 November 1941
  • Nuremberg trial transcripts, Ribbentrop testimony
  • USHMM: Joachim von Ribbentrop