Their man in London

Hugh Trevor-Roper

This foreword to the new edition of Michael Bloch 's Ribbentrop is the last essay written for publication by Lord Dacre before his death on 26 January.

W hen Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, his future political programme was fixed in his mind. Once he had made himself dictator he would resume Germany's drive for world power, 'the Thirty Years War' as he called it, which had merely been interrupted, not ended, by the defeat of 1918. But he would resume it with an important difference. In particular he would avoid the blunder of the Kaiser's ministers who, by their naval and colonial ambitions, had brought Britain into the war, and thus saved France from defeat, prolonged the struggle on two fronts, and finally nullified Germany's real victory over Russia. To prevent this from happening again, Hitler was determined to secure British support or at least neutrality: France could then be 'annihilated', as in 1870, and Russia reconquered and colonised; for it was there, not in seapower or overseas colonies, that the new German empire would be created which would solve all Germany's problems. The whole programme was to be carried out by him personally while his genius was at its peak, so no time was to be lost: the diplomatic preparation for it must begin at once.

How was this to be done? The first enemy to be overcome was the German diplomatic corps, whose conservative officials had no appetite for another war and believed that the terms of the peace treaties could gradually be revised by negotiation. To circumvent this established freemasonry and push forward his 'dynamic' programme Hitler needed a diplomatic agent entirely his own, a sophisticated outsider able and willing to cut corners on his behalf. But where was such a treasure to be found? Certainly not among the provincial stalwarts of the Party who had accompanied the Ftihrer through the heroic Kampfzeit, the years of street-fighting, rabble-rousing, Jew-baiting, on the way to power. How fortunate, then, that late in 1932 there had leapt on to the now unstoppable Nazi bandwagon the hero (or antihero) of this excellent biography, Joachim von Ribbentrop. He seemed just the man.

Hitherto unpolitical, untainted by vulgar fanaticism, from a respectable military family, Ribbentrop had spent much time abroad, was fluent in French and English and was a declared anglophile. As a wine salesman and then a wine merchant, with a rich wife, be had acquired useful social contacts, could drop important foreign names, and had contrived, by an ingenious device, to add the coveted prefix 'von' to his own. In the manoeuvres which led to Hitler's appointment as Chancellor he had played a useful part, and as his reward had suggested the highest post in the professional hierarchy of the foreign ministry, As he was a complete amateur with minimal education and no diplomatic experience, this astonishing impertinence was vetoed by the Foreign Minister, but it showed where his ambition lay, and anyway he had other more valuable assets. As the British ambassador wrote, 'he has no moral courage and flatters Hitler to the top of his bent'. This was enough for Hitler, who appointed Ribbentrop first as his personal diplomatic agent, then as his ambassador to Britain, finally, for the last seven years of the Third Reich — years of international crisis and world war as his Foreign Minister.

The crucial period was that of his London embassy. Politically and socially that proved a disaster. He got everything wrong. He assured Hitler that King Edward VIII, of whom he had great hopes, would refuse to abdicate but would dismiss Baldwin as prime minister and appoint a pro-German government. When the event proved him wrong, he explained that the King had been deposed by a Jewish conspiracy. He saw Neville Chamberlain's policy of 'appeasement' as another anti-German conspiracy. The British ministers found his inane and arrogant vapourings insufferable, but their Aesopian rebukes fell unheeded from that impervious skin. Socially the memory of Frau von Ribbentrop's lavish entertainment was eclipsed by that of her husband's gaffes. The most famous of these was his Nazi salute on presenting his credentials to the new King. George VI; but there were many others — the scene in Westminster Abbey at the King's coronation is not to be missed. We read this whole chapter in Mr Bloch's book with alternating horror and hilarity. Sometimes

we may even feel sorry for the poor fellow, He suffered from an inferiority complex — social, intellectual, marital: his dominating wife, the Lady Macbeth in the story, was always in the offing, and sometimes in the office. The net result of his experience was that, having arrived in Britain advocating an Anglo-German alliance against Russian communism, he left it, just over a year later, declaring that he had 'written England off for ever'; and in the critical years 1938-9, as foreign minister, he would call for war against Britain and go himself to Moscow to sign the notorious Nazi-Soviet Pact.

War with Britain, alliance with Russia — was not this a complete volte-face, an exact reversal of Hitler's programme? Not necessarily, for Ribbentrop had assured Hitler, on the basis of his own understanding of 'British psychology', that if threatened with war Britain would never fight: it would be terrified into neutrality, and so the purpose of his London mission would be achieved after all. Hitler believed him, welcomed him back from Moscow as 'a genius' and 'a second Bismarck', and invaded Poland, with the consequences which we all know, Wrong again! And this time fatally wrong, for the war against Britain was to prove the central and only continuous cord of the great alliance which would ultimately bring Nazi Germany down. Those Germans who shrank from the war blamed Ribbentrop for it: 'this war,' Goering would say, 'is Ribbentrop's doing', for the Foreign Minister had deliberately blocked all attempts at settlement. Embittered by his failure in Britain, intoxicated by his success in Russia, arrogantly confident in his own weak judgment, he had landed Hitler in precisely the war which Hitler had wished to avoid and had trusted him to avert; and now there was no going back.

Hitler went forward, and nine months later was rewarded with his great victory in France. Thereupon he sought to return to his original programme. He offered peace to Britain and prepared war against Russia. Ribbentrop was brought into the former of these operations; the plot to seduce or kidnap the Duke of Windsor and set him up as a rival king, or rather pawn, in Germany was entrusted to him; but he was not, as yet, initiated into the latter. When he was, he opposed it, Overruled, he surrendered, as he always did; but he still hankered for peace with Russia, and when that war was going badly, would repeatedly, but vainly, suggest settlement on that front. Meanwhile he was at work on another great scheme for the chastisement of Britain. Like so many of his schemes, it would prove 'a diplomatic disaster': for it would end by adding the United States to the enemies of Germany.

How are we to account for this extraordinary folly? In his megalomaniac moods, Ribbentrop liked to conjure with vast and vague — and often self-contradictory — coalitions: anti-Comintern pacts, continen tal blocs, European unions, global systems — all of course to be directed by the German Foreign Ministry, i.e. himself. Among these fantasies a recurrent element was Japan. Hitler had little interest in Japan, and did not even want its help against Russia; but Ribbentrop persisted and by 1940 had spun a 'Tripartite Pact' with Japan and Italy. This pact, which was mainly for show, contained no obligation of military support except in defence against attack. Nobody could say that at Pearl Harbor Japan was the victim of an American attack. But in March 1941 Ribbentrop had blithely given to the Japanese foreign minister, then visiting Berlin, 'an astonishing verbal guarantee' that, if Japan should find itself at war with the United States, it could count on German military support, and it was on this fragile basis that Germany 'frivolously' declared war on America. Since Hitler had broken every treaty signed in his name, this fidelity to a mere verbal assurance is an odd exception. But Ribbentrop had assured Hitler that he need not worry: the Americans would not prove a serious adversary. He knew America, he said, and understood 'the American soul' — just as he had understood 'British psychology' in 1939.

So Hitler's war had burst its original frame, It had been overtaken by Ribbentrop's war against the 'Anglo-Saxons'. All the errors of 1914 had been repeated and, now as then, a long war on two fronts threatened ultimate defeat.

Is it fair to blame Ribbentrop for this? At his trial at Nuremberg he claimed that he was a mere instrument of the charismatic FUhrer by whom he, like everyone else, was mesmerised and who alone bore responsibility: if he dissented, he was overruled. No doubt there is truth in this, but not the whole truth. For who supplied Hitler with his foreign intelligence? Who screened the documents put before him, allowed or blocked access to him of ambassadors? Ribbentrop fought hard for his monopoly of the Fiihrer's ear, clung to his side, saw to it that he heard only good news from abroad. Such indirect evidence is elusive and we cannot easily assess Ribbentrop's responsibility. Events too have their own momentum and long wars are seldom contained within their initial aims.

In the jungle of the court, however, the other beasts knew whom to blame. By 1942 they were plotting the downfall of Ribbentrop. Goering, who held him responsible for the war, and Goebbels, who aspired to supplant him, joined forces against him. But this formidable coalition was fatally split when Goebbels, as Gauleiter of Berlin, in his drive for 'total war', closed Goering's favourite restaurant. On such small wheels does the fate of great nations sometimes turn. Ribbentrop survived all plots, including the plot to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 in which Bormann tried to implicate him. Bormann was firmly silenced: Ribbentrop, Hitler told him, was 'as good as gold'. Only in his last 'political testament', in which he sought to impose a new Nazi government on a defeated Germany, would Hitler quietly shed the shadow which could not survive the substance behind it.

At Nuremberg, the shadow reappeared. What a miserable figure he cut there! He pleaded ignorance of everything, responsibility for nothing. The other defendants despised him. Physically and psychologically he had disintegrated. I saw him as the wet empty residue of a balloon which had once floated proudly in the air, inflated by the hot breath of the Fiihrer. And yet this wretched creature had been, for seven years, the arrogant Foreign Minister of the Reich, the dictator's expert on foreign affairs, the advocate of ever-widening war. He cannot be written out of history. Who can tell what course history might have taken without him? But we lose ourselves in such speculations. Hitler was Europe's fate, and Ribbentrop was his unalterable choice. We must leave it at that.

Mr Bloch's book is a political biography. Its core is a scholarly, well organised, well presented account of the foreign policy which emerged from the long, unequal symbiosis of Hitler and Ribbentrop. But what of the private life of its hero? Alas, the poor fellow did not have much. Always hard at work cultivating the Fuhrer, fighting off his numerous enemies, and wrestling with his own intellectual inadequacy, he had little time for relaxation and enjoyment. As a latecomer to the sweets of office and the banquet of power, he had to work hard to catch up with those already at the table. But he soon did. The purveyor of wine to rich Jew's became a ferocious antiSemite. To be always within reach of the Fuhrer, he requisitioned convenient private castles, in Austria and later in East Prussia, and when the expropriated owner of the romantic lakeside castle of Fuschl ventured to protest, he was despatched to a concentration camp. Nor was that the worst fate with which critics were threatened. The Foreign Minister declared that he would personally shoot, in the office, any of the officials who dissented from him, first about Britain, then about Russia, on both of which he had changed his own mind, and would change it again. He once offered to shoot Stalin, if he could get near enough under pretence of peace negotiations. He was fond of shooting and evidently good at it. In 1939 he requested that the new Russo-German frontier be adjusted so that he could shoot, in a particular Polish forest, the rare 'royal red deer'; and in October 1941 he regaled his Italian counterpart, Count Ciano, with a splendid shoot on his official Bohemian estate of SchOnhof. Ciano was shocked to find 400 Alpine soldiers, commanded by their officers, acting as beaters, a thing inconceivable in wartime Italy. 2,400 pheasant were brought down on that occasion, 410 of them by Ribbentrop. Ciano did even better with 620. But two years later Ribbentrop rectified that little victory: he contrived to have Ciano himself shot.

Mr Bloch has an eye for such details and his narrative is seasoned with many farcical or shocking episodes, all recounted in an imperturbably cool, if sometimes sardonic style which leaves the reader free to savour the farce or — generally — to absorb the shock. Generally, but not always. A lady who was reading Chapter XI to me nearly fainted in sympathy with the unfortunate President Flacha of Czechoslovakia whose ordeal is there described: so bullied by Ribbentrop that he fainted twice and — worse still — was revived each time by an injection administered by Hitler's 'odious physician Dr More11'. Having interrogated Morrell in 1945, I can sympathise too. Other episodes, shocking in themselves, have been softened by time and can be enjoyed as farce: Ribbentrop's reception of Ciano at Fuschl in August 1939, for instance, which caused Ciano to ask himself, 'Could there ever be a more revolting scoundrel than Ribbentrop?' Among my favourite scenes are those of Ambassador Ribbentrop splashing self-indulgently in his bath while British cabinet ministers and London tailors awaited his leisure: and of Ribbentrop, not yet ambassador, pushing into Lady Vansittart's dining-room to seize the place of honour before the resident ambassador, to whom, correctly, it had been assigned, could get there. This last detail nestles in a footnote on page 92. Do not overlook the footnotes.

The reader of this excellent biography will not, I fear, come to love its hero, but he will learn much about the mechanics of Nazi government and the fate from which Europe — perhaps by his incompetence and certainly at great cost — was saved. Perhaps he will end by echoing the comment of the famous Swedish chancellor Axel Oxenstjerna during the original, the 17th-century Thirty Years War: 'You see, my son, by how little wisdom the world is ruled.'

Ribbentrop by Michael Bloch is published next week by Abacus at £12.99.