Hitler spent the last weeks of the war convinced that his enemies would tear each other apart. The Americans and the Soviets, he believed, were on a collision course, and if the alliance against him cracked, a rump Nazi state might still survive. In mid-April 1945, he was handed a captured copy of the Allied plan for the post-war division of Germany. Over the following days he noted the movements carefully: the United States had pushed beyond the Elbe demarcation line, crossing deep into what was meant to be the Soviet zone, and American units had also moved into parts of Czechoslovakia.
To Hitler, a clash between Washington and Moscow was inevitable. German military intelligence fed his hopes. Intercepted Soviet communications showed that the Red Army was nervous about the American advances and preparing military contingencies in case Washington refused to pull back once peace was declared. German intelligence also reported that the British were preparing to fight the Soviets.
These rumors kept Hitler going in his bunker. He believed that the remnants of his army, fighting hard against the onrushing Bolshevik horde, could hold out long enough with Western help to turn the tide. The sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 12th of April 1945 genuinely lifted the mood among the Nazi leadership.
Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, convinced himself the American president’s passing was an omen that would shatter the Allied coalition. It was not. For the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the war had been a personal disaster. Diplomacy had been sidelined, and with it, he had been sidelined too.
Hitler had grown tired of him and actively avoided meeting him as the war dragged on. Ribbentrop’s star had fallen even further after the failed assassination attempt on Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair on the 20th of July 1944, when it was revealed that many diplomats from his own Foreign Office had been involved in the plot. Hours after that bomb, Ribbentrop had joined a shaken Hitler for tea with Mussolini, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, and Hermann Göring. Dönitz had begun to rail against the failures of the Luftwaffe, and a humiliated Göring turned the conversation onto Ribbentrop and the failures of German foreign policy, particularly the treacherous diplomats found in his department.
When Ribbentrop tried to defend himself, Göring screamed at him, “Ribbentrop, you dirty little champagne salesman, shut your mouth,” and threatened to strike him with his marshal’s baton. Outraged, Ribbentrop argued back, “I am still the Foreign Minister and my name is von Ribbentrop. ”
The truth was that Ribbentrop was being phased out of the inner circle. By early April 1945 he was desperate to be relevant again and, most importantly, back in the Führer’s favor.
With the final showdown against the Soviets rapidly approaching, morale among the troops mattered. Hitler had not gone near the front since around 1940, so it fell to his acolytes to visit the soldiers. Goebbels had made a highly publicized trip to Lauban in March 1945, decorating troops and watching German artillery pound Soviet positions. Ribbentrop decided to do the same.
On the 3rd of April 1945 he visited the Oder front, one of the very last visits by a senior German leader. A former World War I cavalry officer who had earned the Iron Cross first class in the trenches, he was photographed studying Soviet positions through field glasses from a trench. Ribbentrop still believed he could change the course of the war with a masterpiece of diplomacy. Unbeknownst to Hitler, since Roosevelt’s death Ribbentrop had been circulating a fourteen-page memorandum through German diplomatic channels, designed to fall into Allied hands.
It was based on a fairly accurate account of what Stalin was planning for Europe after the war. The memorandum asked whether Britain could allow the Soviets to menace her traditional routes to her empire in the Middle East and India, particularly once the United States withdrew most of its forces from Western Europe, which Ribbentrop believed they inevitably would. On the 16th of April 1945, the Soviet offensive against Berlin opened. For three bloody days, the Red Army fought its way through the last German defense line east of the capital, the Seelow Heights.
The Germans inflicted heavy damage before falling back, but the end was approaching. Massive Soviet spearheads closed in on Berlin, planning to encircle the city and take it street by street, house by house. On the 20th of April, Hitler emerged from his bunker to attend a formal reception in the battered Reich Chancellery for his fifty-sixth birthday. Ribbentrop was in attendance with most of the other senior Nazi leaders.
Later that day, Berlin came under direct Soviet artillery fire for the first time. Ribbentrop returned to his headquarters in the city. Since the 13th of April he had ordered almost all of his staff evacuated south, primarily to his enormous country estate, Schloss Fuschl, over the border in Austria near Hitler’s residence at Obersalzberg. But Ribbentrop and a skeleton staff remained in the Foreign Ministry bunkers in Berlin, unwilling to surrender his close physical proximity to the Führer.
On the 22nd of April, Hitler, his latest military idea for the relief of Berlin frustrated, flew into a terrible rage at his staff and generals and announced that he would die in Berlin. Soon afterward, he received a message from Ribbentrop suggesting a diplomatic breakthrough was imminent in the West. The mood in the bunker changed immediately. Inquiries were made and the Luftwaffe reported that American air attacks had seemingly been suspended.
It all turned out to be an illusion. There was no breakthrough. The war was lost. On the evening of the 23rd of April, Ribbentrop arrived at the Führerbunker hoping to see Hitler.
But Hitler was in a meeting with Albert Speer, his armaments minister, and when he was reminded that Ribbentrop was waiting, he was not happy, and made it clear he did not want to meet him at all. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary, persisted, telling Hitler, “Ribbentrop says he won’t move from the threshold, and he’ll wait like a faithful dog until you call him. ” Hitler eventually relented. What is known of Ribbentrop’s last meeting with Hitler comes entirely from Ribbentrop’s own account, given later to Allied interrogators and members of his staff.
He is the only source for what happened. According to Ribbentrop, Hitler told him that the war was lost. But Hitler still had a job for him, which, considering Hitler had resisted meeting him at all, sounds somewhat doubtful. The Führer ordered Ribbentrop to leave Berlin at once, go to northwestern Germany, and make contact with the British.
He was to tell them that Hitler had always desired close relations with Britain and propose an Anglo-German bloc to confront the Soviets. Ribbentrop was also to compose a letter to this effect to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and deliver it into British hands. For Hitler, Ribbentrop was apparently the right man for the job. He had been the German ambassador to London before the war and spoke fluent English.
Some historians suggest that if this exchange genuinely happened, it was simply a ruse by Hitler to get Ribbentrop away from Berlin and stop him bothering the Führer. Others think it could have been a ruse by Ribbentrop to save himself from the impending catastrophe in Berlin. Perhaps Ribbentrop imagined the plaudits if he succeeded in splitting the enemy alliance through a stroke of diplomacy. Later that night, Ribbentrop reported all of this to his top aide, State Secretary Gustav Steengracht von Moyland.
The two men argued about the mission before Ribbentrop insisted, “I must write this letter to Churchill. At my conference with the Führer, he was quite lucid. He said he had never had anything against England. His goal had always been a great reconciliation with the Germanic English.
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This was familiar territory. Ribbentrop had been intimately involved in Hitler’s multiple peace offers to Britain in 1939 and 1940. But Winston Churchill, once he became Prime Minister in May 1940, had refused every entreaty. Soon afterward, von Moyland departed for the south, though he would later appear in Schleswig-Holstein, where Dönitz’s rump government had been created in northern Germany following Hitler’s death.
Grand Admiral Dönitz had already set up his military headquarters at Plön on the 22nd of April, assuming command of all German forces in Schleswig-Holstein, the western Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway under Hitler’s order. Ribbentrop prepared to depart north to Plön as well, leaving Walter Hewel, another State Secretary at the Foreign Office, as his personal representative at Führer headquarters. Hewel would not survive the Battle for Berlin. At some point on the 24th of April, Ribbentrop managed to leave Berlin by car just before the Soviets closed the ring around the city.
His party consisted of Ribbentrop, a driver, a bodyguard, a secretary, a doctor, his adjutant, his valet, and his dog. The distance from Berlin to Plön was less than two hundred miles, yet it took Ribbentrop an entire week to arrive. He found it very difficult to give up his close proximity to the Führer. At one point he tried to go back to Berlin and was halted at Nauen, some miles west of the capital.
From there he telegraphed Walter Hewel, telling him that he and his party wished to share the Führer’s fate and asking for an aircraft to come and pick them up. Hewel relayed Hitler’s response: “The Führer appreciates your intentions, but has turned you down. ”
Had Ribbentrop realized he had been sent on a fool’s errand by his beloved Führer? Perhaps.
Did he not fancy surrendering himself to the British to deliver his letter? Again, perhaps. A little while later, Ribbentrop’s party turned up at the headquarters of General Lieutenant Rudolf Holste, commanding the 56th Panzer Corps on the lower Elbe, at Friesack, forty miles northwest of Nauen. Ribbentrop wanted information on the local military situation.
At some point he managed to get his hands on an aircraft, and he and his party were flown to Wittstock airfield near Kiel, arriving on the night of the 30th of April, some hours after Hitler had died in the bunker. Martin Bormann had telegraphed Dönitz at Plön, informing him that he was now Reich President, though he did not tell him Hitler was dead until the 1st of May. Dönitz was determined to continue the war for the time being for his own reasons. He could appoint his own cabinet, and he wanted Konstantin von Neurath, the career diplomat and former foreign minister until 1938, to take the post again.
But von Neurath could not be found. Ribbentrop arrived at Plön soon afterward and established a small headquarters nearby. Dönitz’s adjutant actually phoned Ribbentrop’s adjutant to ask if anyone knew where von Neurath was. Ribbentrop was shocked.
He was the foreign minister and should serve under Dönitz as well. He demanded an interview with the new Reich President. The meeting took place late on the 1st of May. Ribbentrop argued that he had the legal right to remain foreign minister, and that he knew the British and they had always been pleased to deal with him.
Schleswig-Holstein was located in the portion of Germany that would fall under British occupation after the war. But Dönitz stuck to his guns. He would not appoint Ribbentrop foreign minister, though he would be happy to hear any suggestions Ribbentrop might have for the post. When Ribbentrop phoned back on the 2nd of May, his only suggestion was himself.
He also drafted a memorandum for Dönitz arguing that his government must obtain Allied recognition and serve as the nucleus for a new Nazi government of Germany. Dönitz would eventually appoint Count Schwerin von Krosigk as foreign minister. On the 2nd of May, owing to the advance of British forces, Dönitz moved his seat of government to the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Mürwik on the Danish border. Ribbentrop did not go with him.
Instead, for reasons that remain unclear, he headed south to Hamburg, the last major German city on the Western Front still unoccupied but an active battle zone. It would fall to the British on the 3rd of May, 1945. If Ribbentrop’s intention was to contact the British as Hitler had allegedly instructed, he did the opposite. He went into hiding soon after arriving in the city.
He visited the home of a vintner he had known from his pre-war days as a champagne salesman. The vintner did not want him at his own house, so he arranged for Ribbentrop to stay in the apartment of an attractive brunette in the suburbs. Ribbentrop remained there for the next six weeks, working on his letter to Churchill while the British searched for him. The Dönitz government was dissolved on the 23rd of May 1945 by order of the British, and its members were hauled off to prison.
From the Allied headquarters aboard the Patria at Flensburg, orders went out for the arrest of the last top Nazis. Ribbentrop, living under the false name of Herr Reiser, was not found. He worked on his letter, all five thousand words of it, but the war in Europe was over, and the letter was superfluous to a Nazi cause that had ceased to exist. The manhunt for Ribbentrop intensified.
His photograph was circulated widely, and his relatives were brought in for questioning. He was only located accidentally. The vintner who had sheltered him was overheard by a woman remarking that he knew Ribbentrop was in Hamburg. She tried to blackmail him with the information.
Instead, the vintner’s son went to the British Field Security Headquarters in Hamburg and told them everything. Late on the evening of the 14th of June, 1945, the British sprang into action. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Jimmy Adam, gathered three NCOs, one of them a Frenchman serving in the Belgian SAS, and drove to Ribbentrop’s hideout. Adam knocked on the door, which was opened by the attractive brunette in a dressing gown.
The British soldiers marched inside and began searching. In the fifth room, they found Ribbentrop asleep in bed, dressed in pajamas. He was woken up, looked exhausted and disheveled, but spoke English to his captors. At the British Field Security Headquarters at Osterufer in Hamburg, Ribbentrop was examined by a doctor.
They found a small cyanide capsule in a case taped to one of his legs. The next morning, the 15th of June, he was interviewed by Major Morris Hockliff and Captain Harold Harris. Ribbentrop was chatty and jovial, discussing his efforts to make peace with Britain and outlining his secret peace mission given to him by Hitler. He produced the long letter he had written as evidence.
Hockliffe sent the letter up the chain of command to Field Marshal Montgomery, who forwarded it to Winston Churchill, who sent it on to Stalin for his information. Hockliffe also asked Ribbentrop why he had not contacted the British authorities instead of hiding for six weeks. Ribbentrop explained that he had been alarmed by the hatred and bitterness of the British toward the Germans, judging by what he was seeing in occupied Hamburg, and had decided to lie low for a while to allow passions to cool. Whether this man was even Ribbentrop was brought into question by Hockliffe’s superior, Colonel Neil McDermott, who had been told by the Americans that they had just captured Ribbentrop in Bremen.
A proper identification was required. The British obtained Ribbentrop’s sister, Ingeborg Jenke, and she confirmed that the prisoner was indeed her brother. Following this, Ribbentrop was flown to Luxembourg, to Bad Mondorf, to a converted hotel known as Camp Ashcan, where he was housed with other war crime suspects until the Nuremberg trials opened later in 1945. Whether Ribbentrop’s peace mission ever existed is debatable.
Perhaps he invented it entirely to give his position some meaning at the end of the war, or perhaps it was simply an opportunistic tactic he lost interest in carrying through once he knew Hitler was dead. Joachim von Ribbentrop was found guilty of crimes against peace, deliberately planning a war of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was the first of the defendants to be executed, hanged on the 16th of October, 1946, in a botched execution.
He took fourteen minutes to die.