title: Music genre

text: Soul music became a musical genre that came to include a wide variety of R&B-based music styles from the pop R&B acts at Motown Records in Detroit, such as The Temptations, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Marvin Gaye and Four Tops, to "deep soul" singers such as Percy Sledge and James Carr.


title: Music genre

text: The polka is originally a Czech dance and genre of dance music familiar throughout Europe and the Americas.


title: Music genre

text: Religious music (also sacred music) is music performed or composed for religious use or through religious influence. Gospel, spiritual, and Christian music are examples of religious music.


title: Music genre

text: Traditional and folk music are very similar categories. Although the traditional music is a very broad category and can include several genres, it is widely accepted that traditional music encompasses folk music. According to the ICTM (International Council for Traditional Music), traditional music are songs and tunes that have been performed over a long period of time (usually several generations).


title: Music genre

text: The folk music genre is classified as the music that is orally passed from one generation to another. Usually the artist is unknown, and there are several versions of the same song. The genre is transmitted by singing, listening and dancing to popular songs. This type of communication allows culture to transmit the styles (pitches and cadences) as well as the context it was developed.


title: Music genre

text: Culturally transmitting folk songs maintain rich evidence about the period of history when they were created and the social class in which they developed. Some examples of the Folk Genre can be seen in the folk music of England and Turkish folk music. English folk music has developed since the medieval period and has been transmitted from that time until today. Similarly, Turkish folk music relates to all the civilizations that once passed thorough Turkey, thereby being a world reference since the east–west tensions during the Early Modern Period.


title: Music genre

text: Traditional folk music usually refers to songs composed in the twentieth century, which tend to be written as universal truths and big issues of the time they were composed. Artists including Bob Dylan; Peter, Paul and Mary; James Taylor; and Leonard Cohen transformed folk music to what it is known today. Newer composers such as Ed Sheeran (pop folk) and The Lumineers (American folk) are examples of contemporary folk music, which has been recorded and adapted to the new way of listening to music (online)—unlike the traditional way of orally transmitting music.


title: Music genre

text: Each country in the world, in some cases each region, district and community, has its own folk music style. The sub-divisions of folk genre are developed by each place, cultural identity and history. Because the music is developed in different places, many of the instruments are characteristic to location and population—but some are used everywhere: button or piano accordion, different types of flutes or trumpets, banjo, and ukulele. Both French and Scottish folk music use related instruments such as the fiddle, the harp and variations of bagpipes.


title: Music genre

text: Since music has become more easily accessible (Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), more people have begun listening to a broader and wider range of music styles. In addition, social identity also plays a large role in music preference. Personality is a key contributor for music selection. Those who consider themselves to be "rebels" will tend to choose heavier music styles like heavy metal or hard rock, while those who consider themselves to be more "relaxed" or "laid back" will tend to choose lighter music styles like jazz or classical music. According to one model, there are five main factors that exist that underlie music preferences that are genre-free, and reflect emotional/affective responses. These five factors are:


title: Music genre

text: Studies have shown that while women prefer more treble oriented music, men prefer to listen to bass-heavy music. A preference for bass-heavy music is sometimes paired with borderline and antisocial personalities.


title: Music genre

text: Age is another strong factor that contributes to musical preference. Evidence is available that shows that music preference can change as one gets older. A Canadian study showed that adolescents show greater interest in pop music artists while adults and the elderly population prefer classic genres such as rock, opera, and jazz.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The Real Housewives of New York City (abbreviated RHONY) is an American reality television series that premiered on Bravo on March 4, 2008. Developed as the second installment of "The Real Housewives" franchise, it has aired thirteen seasons and focuses on the personal and professional lives of several women residing in New York City.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The success of the show has resulted in two spin-offs; "Bethenny Ever After" and "Bethenny & Fredrik."


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: While in pre-production, the show was initially titled "Manhattan Moms". It was later rebranded to become the second installment of the then-new "Real Housewives" franchise. The first season premiered on March 4, 2008, and starred Bethenny Frankel, Luann de Lesseps, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer, and Jill Zarin.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: Kelly Killoren Bensimon was added to the cast for the second season, which premiered on February 17, 2009. The third season premiered March 4, 2010 and saw the addition of Sonja Morgan as a main cast member, along with Jennifer Gilbert in a recurring capacity. In August 2010, Frankel left the show in order to expand her Skinnygirl product line.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: Cindy Barshop replaced Frankel for the show's fourth season, which premiered on April 7, 2011. After the fourth season, McCord, Zarin, Killoren Bensimon, and Barshop were effectively let go from the show.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: In April 2012, Bravo announced a revamp to the cast for its fifth season, integrating Aviva Drescher, Carole Radziwill, and Heather Thomson into the main cast. The season premiered on June 4, 2012. Production for the sixth season was set to begin on May 8, 2013, but the cast instead chose to go into salary negotiations with Bravo, effectively delaying shooting. Drescher, Morgan, Radziwill, Singer, and Thomson renewed their contract in May 2013, while de Lesseps was demoted to a recurring role. The sixth season premiered on March 11, 2014, a year later than planned with Kristen Taekman as the latest housewife. Drescher was dismissed after the sixth season.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The seventh season premiered on April 7, 2015, featuring the return of Frankel and addition of Dorinda Medley, while de Lesseps returned in a full-time role. Taekman and Thomson exited the series after the season ended. For the eighth season, which premiered on April 6, 2016, Jules Wainstein was added to the cast, while Thomson returned in a guest appearance, Taekman did not return. Wainstein left the show in September 2016 for personal reasons.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The ninth season premiered on April 5, 2017. Tinsley Mortimer joined the cast, while former housewives Thomson and Zarin appeared as guests. The tenth season premiered on April 4, 2018, with the cast of the ninth season returning. Drescher, Killoren Bensimon, Thomson and Zarin all appeared as guests. It served as Radziwill's final appearance on the show.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The eleventh season premiered on March 6, 2019. Barbara Kavovit joined as a friend of the housewives, and Zarin appeared as a guest. Frankel departed the series after the season for a second time. The twelfth season featured Leah McSweeney joining the cast, which premiered on April 2, 2020. Zarin and Thomson appeared as guests in the twelfth season. Mortimer and Medley announced their departure from the series in June 2020 and August 2020 respectively. Mortimer coincided her announcement with her relocation to Chicago, to pursue her romantic relationship with Scott Kluth, while Medley later stated she was fired from the show.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The thirteenth season premiered on May 4, 2021, with Eboni K. Williams joining the series, in addition to Heather Thomson and Bershan Shaw appearing as friends of the housewives. In September 2021, it was confirmed by Bravo that the thirteenth season reunion was officially cancelled.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: On March 23, 2022, it was announced that following the thirteenth season's negative reception, the showrunners had made the decision to 'most likely' recast the show from scratch for the fourteenth season, and create a second version of the show following some of the show's original housewives, referred to as "RHONY: Legacy" or "RHONY: Throwback". Beyond the two series, veteran housewives Luann de Lesseps and Sonja Morgan will star in a spin-off series, "Luann and Sonja: Welcome to Crappie Lake", modelled after "The Simple Life", which is set to premiere in 2023. Filming began mid-July 2022 in rural Southern Illinois.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: On October 16, 2022, Andy Cohen revealed the new cast for the show's fourteenth season at Bravocon, announcing that Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Dana Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Lizzy Savetsky, Jessel Taank and Brynn Whitfield would be leading the rebooted series. On November 16, 2022, Savetsky confirmed to Page Six that she was departing the series midway into filming the season after being met with anti-semitism hate across her social media accounts. 5 days later, Page Six reported that Savetsky was instead mutually released from the rebooted series due to behind-the-scenes controversy involving co-star Whitfield. The show is set to air sometime during 2023.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: The cast of the first season consisted of Bethenny Frankel, Luann de Lesseps, Alex McCord, Ramona Singer, and Jill Zarin. As per "Real Housewives" tradition, the series often saw cast changes, which occurred typically every season. Other notable cast members include Kelly Killoren Bensimon, Sonja Morgan, Heather Thomson, Carole Radziwill, Dorinda Medley, and Tinsley Mortimer, all of whom served in a regular capacity for at least three seasons or more.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: In September 2021, it was confirmed by Bravo that the thirteenth season reunion was officially cancelled. In March 2022, it was announced that following the thirteenth season's negative reception, the series would see its primary cast retooled, with members of its original cast relegated to a separate show. Although the series has partially shifted its cast before, this marked the first time that the network had decided to completely replace the cast. As a result, the series fourteenth season is being billed as a series reboot, with little to no connections to the original cast of the series.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: In October 2022, the new cast was announced with Sai De Silva, Ubah Hassan, Erin Dana Lichy, Jenna Lyons, Lizzy Savetsky, Jessel Taank and Brynn Whitfield leading the rebooted series. In November 2022, Savetsky and Cohen confirmed to Page Six that she was departing the series midway into filming the season. It is unclear if Savetsky will still appear in the series.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: "The Real Housewives of New York City" has received criticism for the lack of diversity in its cast. Then-current cast member Frankel stated in 2017 that she would like to see the series "represent New York more." Writing for "The New York Times" in October 2019, author Tracie Egan Morrissey posed the question, "If less than half of the city is white, why is 100 percent of the cast of "The Real Housewives of New York City" white?" Former cast member Heather Thomson also stated that during her time on the series she had pitched several women of color to the show's producers to diversify its cast members due to her concerns about the issue.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: "The Real Housewives of New York City" airs regularly on Bravo in the United States; most episodes are approximately forty-two minutes in length, and are broadcast in standard definition and high definition. Since its premiere, the series has alternated airing on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings and has been frequently shifted between the 8:00, 9:00, and 10:00 PM timeslots.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: In July 2012, Bravo released a social networking video game version of "The Real Housewives of New York City" titled as "Real Housewives: The Game". Following weekly new episodes, a new game was available based on the story.


title: The Real Housewives of New York City

text: In 2016, "On Location Tours" hosted an official "The Real Housewives of New York"-themed tour in New York City. The tour is centered around giving passengers an almost four-hour trip to visit numerous places where current and former housewives "have dined, shopped, dated or had a fight or two," and is described as the "ultimate, one-of-a-kind "Real Housewives" experience."


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Faraday's law of induction (briefly, Faraday's law) is a basic law of electromagnetism predicting how a magnetic field will interact with an electric circuit to produce an electromotive force (emf)—a phenomenon known as electromagnetic induction. It is the fundamental operating principle of transformers, inductors, and many types of electrical motors, generators and solenoids.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The Maxwell–Faraday equation (listed as one of Maxwell's equations) describes the fact that a spatially varying (and also possibly time-varying, depending on how a magnetic field varies in time) electric field always accompanies a time-varying magnetic field, while Faraday's law states that there is emf (electromotive force, defined as electromagnetic work done on a unit charge when it has traveled one round of a conductive loop) on the conductive loop when the magnetic flux through the surface enclosed by the loop varies in time.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Faraday's law had been discovered and one aspect of it (transformer emf) was formulated as the Maxwell–Faraday equation later. The equation of Faraday's law can be derived by the Maxwell–Faraday equation (describing transformer emf) and the Lorentz force (describing motional emf). The integral form of the Maxwell–Faraday equation describes only the transformer emf, while the equation of Faraday's law describes both the transformer emf and the motional emf.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Electromagnetic induction was discovered independently by Michael Faraday in 1831 and Joseph Henry in 1832. Faraday was the first to publish the results of his experiments. In Faraday's first experimental demonstration of electromagnetic induction (August 29, 1831), he wrapped two wires around opposite sides of an iron ring (torus) (an arrangement similar to a modern toroidal transformer). Based on his assessment of recently discovered properties of electromagnets, he expected that when current started to flow in one wire, a sort of wave would travel through the ring and cause some electrical effect on the opposite side. He plugged one wire into a galvanometer, and watched it as he connected the other wire to a battery. Indeed, he saw a transient current (which he called a "wave of electricity") when he connected the wire to the battery, and another when he disconnected it. This induction was due to the change in magnetic flux that occurred when the battery was connected and disconnected. Within two months, Faraday had found several other manifestations of electromagnetic induction. For example, he saw transient currents when he quickly slid a bar magnet in and out of a coil of wires, and he generated a steady (DC) current by rotating a copper disk near the bar magnet with a sliding electrical lead ("Faraday's disk").


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Michael Faraday explained electromagnetic induction using a concept he called lines of force. However, scientists at the time widely rejected his theoretical ideas, mainly because they were not formulated mathematically. An exception was James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1861–62 used Faraday's ideas as the basis of his quantitative electromagnetic theory. In Maxwell's papers, the time-varying aspect of electromagnetic induction is expressed as a differential equation which Oliver Heaviside referred to as Faraday's law even though it is different from the original version of Faraday's law, and does not describe motional emf. Heaviside's version (see Maxwell–Faraday equation below) is the form recognized today in the group of equations known as Maxwell's equations.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Lenz's law, formulated by Emil Lenz in 1834, describes "flux through the circuit", and gives the direction of the induced emf and current resulting from electromagnetic induction (elaborated upon in the examples below).


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: For a loop of wire in a magnetic field, the magnetic flux is defined for any surface whose boundary is the given loop. Since the wire loop may be moving, we write for the surface. The magnetic flux is the surface integral:


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: where is an element of surface area of the moving surface , is the magnetic field, and is a vector dot product representing the element of flux through . In more visual terms, the magnetic flux through the wire loop is proportional to the number of magnetic field lines that pass through the loop.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: When the flux changes—because changes, or because the wire loop is moved or deformed, or both—Faraday's law of induction says that the wire loop acquires an emf, defined as the energy available from a unit charge that has traveled once around the wire loop. (Although some sources state the definition differently, this expression was chosen for compatibility with the equations of special relativity.) Equivalently, it is the voltage that would be measured by cutting the wire to create an open circuit, and attaching a voltmeter to the leads.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The laws of induction of electric currents in mathematical form was established by Franz Ernst Neumann in 1845.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Faraday's law contains the information about the relationships between both the magnitudes and the directions of its variables. However, the relationships between the directions are not explicit; they are hidden in the mathematical formula.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: It is possible to find out the direction of the electromotive force (emf) directly from Faraday’s law, without invoking Lenz's law. A left hand rule helps doing that, as follows:


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: For a tightly wound coil of wire, composed of identical turns, each with the same , Faraday's law of induction states that


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The Maxwell–Faraday equation states that a time-varying magnetic field always accompanies a spatially varying (also possibly time-varying), non-conservative electric field, and vice versa. The Maxwell–Faraday equation is


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: (in SI units) where is the curl operator and again is the electric field and is the magnetic field. These fields can generally be functions of position and time .


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The Maxwell–Faraday equation is one of the four Maxwell's equations, and therefore plays a fundamental role in the theory of classical electromagnetism. It can also be written in an integral form by the Kelvin–Stokes theorem, thereby reproducing Faraday's law:


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: where, as indicated in the figure, is a surface bounded by the closed contour , is an infinitesimal vector element of the contour , and is an infinitesimal vector element of surface . Its direction is orthogonal to that surface patch, the magnitude is the area of an infinitesimal patch of surface.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Both and have a sign ambiguity; to get the correct sign, the right-hand rule is used, as explained in the article Kelvin–Stokes theorem. For a planar surface , a positive path element of curve is defined by the right-hand rule as one that points with the fingers of the right hand when the thumb points in the direction of the normal to the surface .


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The line integral around is called circulation. A nonzero circulation of is different from the behavior of the electric field generated by static charges. A charge-generated -field can be expressed as the gradient of a scalar field that is a solution to Poisson's equation, and has a zero path integral. See gradient theorem.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The integral equation is true for "any" path through space, and any surface for which that path is a boundary.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The surface integral at the right-hand side is the explicit expression for the magnetic flux through .


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: The electric vector field induced by a changing magnetic flux, the solenoidal component of the overall electric field, can be approximated in the non-relativistic limit by the volume integral equation


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: In the case of a conductive loop, emf (Electromotive Force) is the electromagnetic work done on a unit charge when it has traveled around the loop once, and this work is done by the Lorentz force. Therefore, emf is expressed as


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: In a macroscopic view, for charges on a segment of the loop, consists of two components in average; one is the velocity of the charge along the segment , and the other is the velocity of the segment (the loop is deformed or moved). does not contribute to the work done on the charge since the direction of is same to the direction of formula_9. Mathematically,


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: since formula_11 is perpendicular to formula_9 as formula_13 and formula_9 are along the same direction. Now we can see that, for the conductive loop, emf is same to the time-derivative of the magnetic flux through the loop except for the sign on it. Therefore, we now reach the equation of Faraday's law (for the conductive loop) as


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: where formula_16. With breaking this integral, formula_17 is for the transformer emf (due to a time-varying magnetic field) and formula_18 is for the motional emf (due to the magnetic Lorentz force on charges by the motion or deformation of the loop in the magnetic field).


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: It is tempting to generalize Faraday's law to state: "If ' is any arbitrary closed loop in space whatsoever, then the total time derivative of magnetic flux through ' equals the emf around ""." This statement, however, is not always true and the reason is not just from the obvious reason that emf is undefined in empty space when no conductor is present. As noted in the previous section, Faraday's law is not guaranteed to work unless the velocity of the abstract curve matches the actual velocity of the material conducting the electricity. The two examples illustrated below show that one often obtains incorrect results when the motion of is divorced from the motion of the material.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: One can analyze examples like these by taking care that the path moves with the same velocity as the material. Alternatively, one can always correctly calculate the emf by combining Lorentz force law with the Maxwell–Faraday equation:


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: where "it is very important to notice that (1) is the velocity of the conductor ... not the velocity of the path element and (2) in general, the partial derivative with respect to time cannot be moved outside the integral since the area is a function of time."


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Faraday's law is a single equation describing two different phenomena: the "motional emf" generated by a magnetic force on a moving wire (see the Lorentz force), and the "transformer emf" generated by an electric force due to a changing magnetic field (described by the Maxwell–Faraday equation).


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: James Clerk Maxwell drew attention to this fact in his 1861 paper "On Physical Lines of Force". In the latter half of Part II of that paper, Maxwell gives a separate physical explanation for each of the two phenomena.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: A reference to these two aspects of electromagnetic induction is made in some modern textbooks. As Richard Feynman states:


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: In the general case, explanation of the "motional emf" appearance by action of the magnetic force on the charges in the moving wire or in the circuit changing its area is unsatisfactory. As a matter of fact, the charges in the wire or in the circuit could be completely absent, will then the electromagnetic induction effect disappear in this case? This situation is analyzed in the article, in which, when writing the integral equations of the electromagnetic field in a four-dimensional covariant form, in the Faraday’s law the total time derivative of the magnetic flux through the circuit appears instead of the partial time derivative. Thus, electromagnetic induction appears either when the magnetic field changes over time or when the area of the circuit changes. From the physical point of view, it is better to speak not about the induction emf, but about the induced electric field strength formula_20, that occurs in the circuit when the magnetic flux changes. In this case, the contribution to formula_21 from the change in the magnetic field is made through the term formula_22 , where formula_23 is the vector potential. If the circuit area is changing in case of the constant magnetic field, then some part of the circuit is inevitably moving, and the electric field formula_21 emerges in this part of the circuit in the comoving reference frame K’ as a result of the Lorentz transformation of the magnetic field formula_25, present in the stationary reference frame K, which passes through the circuit. The presence of the field formula_21 in K’ is considered as a result of the induction effect in the moving circuit, regardless of whether the charges are present in the circuit or not. In the conducting circuit, the field formula_21 causes motion of the charges. In the reference frame K, it looks like appearance of emf of the induction formula_28, the gradient of which in the form of formula_29, taken along the circuit, seems to generate the field formula_21.


title: Faraday's law of induction

text: Reflection on this apparent dichotomy was one of the principal paths that led Albert Einstein to develop special relativity:


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (; 30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician and diplomat who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis and as a perceived authority on foreign affairs. He offered his house Schloss Fuschl for the secret meetings in January 1933 that resulted in Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany. He became a close confidant of Hitler, to the disgust of some party members, who thought him superficial and lacking in talent. He was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James's, the royal court of the United Kingdom, in 1936 and then Foreign Minister of Germany in February 1938.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Before World War II, he played a key role in brokering the Pact of Steel (an alliance with Fascist Italy) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact). He favoured retaining good relations with the Soviets, and opposed the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late 1941, due to American aid to Britain and the increasingly frequent "incidents" in the North Atlantic between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to Britain, Ribbentrop worked for the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and for Japan to attack the United States. He did his utmost to support a declaration of war on the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. From 1941 onwards, Ribbentrop's influence declined.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Arrested in June 1945, Ribbentrop was convicted and sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials for his role in starting World War II in Europe and enabling the Holocaust. On 16 October 1946, he became the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be executed by hanging.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Joachim von Ribbentrop was born in Wesel, Rhenish Prussia, to Richard Ulrich Friedrich Joachim Ribbentrop, a career army officer, and his wife Johanne Sophie Hertwig.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: From 1904 to 1908, Ribbentrop took French courses at Lycée Fabert in Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress. A former teacher later recalled Ribbentrop "was the most stupid in his class, full of vanity and very pushy". His father was cashiered from the Prussian Army in 1908 for repeatedly disparaging Kaiser Wilhelm II for his alleged homosexuality, and the Ribbentrop family was often short of money.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: For the next 18 months, the family moved to Arosa, Switzerland, where the children continued to be taught by French and English private tutors, and Ribbentrop spent his free time skiing and mountaineering.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Following the stay in Arosa, Ribbentrop was sent to Britain for a year to improve his knowledge of English.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Fluent in both French and English, young Ribbentrop lived at various times in Grenoble, France and London, before travelling to Canada in 1910.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: He worked for the Molsons Bank on Stanley Street in Montreal, and then for the engineering firm M. P. and J. T. Davis on the Quebec Bridge reconstruction. He was also employed by the National Transcontinental Railway, which constructed a line from Moncton to Winnipeg. He worked as a journalist in New York City and Boston but returned to Germany to recover from tuberculosis. He returned to Canada and set up a small business in Ottawa importing German wine and champagne. In 1914, he competed for Ottawa's famous Minto ice-skating team and participated in the Ellis Memorial Trophy tournament in Boston in February.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: When the First World War began later in 1914, Ribbentrop left Canada, which as part of the British Empire was at war with Germany, and found temporary sanctuary in neutral United States. On 15 August 1914, he sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey, on the Holland-America ship "The Potsdam", bound for Rotterdam, and on his return to Germany enlisted in the Prussian 12th Hussar Regiment.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop served first on the Eastern Front, then was transferred to the Western Front. He earned a commission and was awarded the Iron Cross. In 1918, 1st Lieutenant Ribbentrop was stationed in Istanbul as a staff officer. During his time in Turkey, he became a friend of another staff officer, Franz von Papen.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In 1919, Ribbentrop met Anna Elisabeth Henkell ("Annelies" to her friends), the daughter of a wealthy Wiesbaden wine producer. They were married on 5 July 1920, and Ribbentrop began to travel throughout Europe as a wine salesman. He and Annelies had five children together. In 1925, his aunt, Gertrud von Ribbentrop, adopted him, which allowed him to add the nobiliary particle "von" to his name.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: 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". Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff, with whom Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars in the First World War, arranged the introduction. Ribbentrop and his wife joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1932. Ribbentrop began his political career by offering to be a secret emissary between Chancellor of Germany Franz von Papen, his old wartime friend, and Hitler. His offer was initially refused. Six months later, however, Hitler and Papen accepted his help.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

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


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: 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". Ribbentrop was among the few who could meet with Hitler at any time without an appointment, however, unlike Goebbels or Göring.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: During most of the Weimar Republic era, Ribbentrop was apolitical and displayed no antisemitic 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 antisemitism he later displayed in the Nazi era, saying that they did not see any indications he had held such views. As a 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.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop became Hitler's favourite foreign-policy adviser, partly by dint of his familiarity with the world outside Germany but also by flattery and sycophancy. One German diplomat later recalled, "Ribbentrop didn't understand anything about foreign policy. His sole wish was to please Hitler". In particular, Ribbentrop acquired the habit of listening carefully to what Hitler was saying, memorizing his pet ideas and then later presenting Hitler's ideas as his own, a practice that much impressed Hitler as proving Ribbentrop was an ideal Nazi diplomat. Ribbentrop quickly learned that Hitler always favoured the most radical solution to any problem and accordingly tendered his advice in that direction as a Ribbentrop aide recalled:


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: When Hitler said "Grey", Ribbentrop said "Black, black, black". He always said it three times more, and he was always more radical. I listened to what Hitler said one day when Ribbentrop wasn't present: "With Ribbentrop it is so easy, he is always so radical. Meanwhile, all the other people I have, they come here, they have problems, they are afraid, they think we should take care and then I have to blow them up, to get strong. And Ribbentrop was blowing up the whole day and I had to do nothing. I had to break – much better!"


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Another factor that aided Ribbentrop's rise was Hitler's distrust of and disdain for Germany's professional diplomats. He suspected that they did not entirely support his revolution. However, the Foreign Office diplomats loyally served the government and rarely gave Hitler grounds for criticism. The Foreign Office diplomats were ultranationalist, authoritarian and antisemitic. As a result, there was enough overlap in values between both groups to allow most of them to work comfortably for the Nazis. Nonetheless, Hitler never quite trusted the Foreign Office and was on the lookout for someone to carry out his foreign policy goals.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: The Nazis and Germany's professional diplomats shared a goal in destroying the Treaty of Versailles and restoring Germany as a great power. In October 1933, German Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath presented a note at the World Disarmament Conference announcing that it was unfair that Germany should remain disarmed by Part V of the Versailles treaty and demanded for the other powers to disarm to Germany's level or to rescind Part V and allow Germany "Gleichberechtigung" ("equality of armaments"). When France rejected Neurath's note, Germany stormed out of the League of Nations and the World Disarmament Conference. It all but announced its intention of unilaterally violating Part V. Consequently, there were several calls in France for a preventive war to put an end to the Nazi regime while Germany was still more-or-less disarmed.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: However, in November, Ribbentrop arranged a meeting between Hitler and the French journalist Fernand de Brinon, who wrote for the newspaper "Le Matin". During the meeting, Hitler stressed what he claimed to be his love of peace and his friendship towards France. Hitler's meeting with Brinon had a huge effect on French public opinion and helped to put an end to the calls for a preventive war. It convinced many in France that Hitler was a man of peace, who wanted to do away only with Part V of the Versailles Treaty.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In 1934, Hitler named Ribbentrop Special Commissioner for Disarmament. In his early years, Hitler's goal in foreign affairs was to persuade the world that he wished to reduce the defence budget by making idealistic but very vague disarmament offers (in the 1930s, disarmament described arms limitation agreements). At the same time, the Germans always resisted making concrete arms-limitations proposals, and they went ahead with increased military spending on grounds that other powers would not take up German arms-limitation offers. Ribbentrop was tasked with ensuring that the world remained convinced that Germany sincerely wanted an arms-limitation treaty, but he ensured that no such treaty was ever developed.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: On 17 April 1934, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou issued the so-called "Barthou note", which led to concerns on the part of Hitler that the French would ask for sanctions against Germany for violating Part V of the Versailles treaty. Ribbentrop volunteered to stop the rumoured sanctions and visited London and Rome. During his visits, Ribbentrop met with British Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and asked them to postpone the next meeting of the Bureau of Disarmament in exchange for which Ribbentrop offered nothing in return other than promising better relations with Berlin. The meeting of the Bureau of Disarmament went ahead as scheduled, but because no sanctions were sought against Germany, Ribbentrop could claim a success.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In August 1934, Ribbentrop founded an organization linked to the Nazi Party called the "Büro Ribbentrop" (later renamed the "Dienststelle Ribbentrop"). It functioned as an alternative foreign ministry. The "Dienststelle Ribbentrop", which had its offices directly across from the Foreign Office's building on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, had in its membership a collection of "Hitlerjugend" alumni, dissatisfied businessmen, former reporters, and ambitious Nazi Party members, all of whom tried to conduct a foreign policy independent of and often contrary to the official Foreign Office. The Dienststelle served as an informal tool for the implementation of the foreign policy of Hitler, consciously bypassing the traditional foreign policy institutions and diplomatic channels of the German Foreign Office. However, the Dienststelle also competed with other Nazi party units active in the area of foreign policy, such as the foreign organization of the Nazis (NSDAP/AO) led by Ernst Bohle and Nazi Party office of foreign affairs (APA) led by Alfred Rosenberg. With the appointment of Ribbentrop to the Minister of Foreign Affairs in February 1938, the Dienststelle itself lost its importance, and about a third of the staff of the office followed Ribbentrop to the Foreign Office.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop engaged in diplomacy on his own, such as when he visited France and met Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. During their meeting, Ribbentrop suggested for Barthou to meet Hitler at once to sign a Franco-German non-aggression pact. Ribbentrop wanted to buy time to complete German rearmament by removing preventive war as a French policy option. The Barthou-Ribbentrop meeting infuriated Konstantin von Neurath, since the Foreign Office had not been informed.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Although the "Dienststelle Ribbentrop" was concerned with German relations in every part of the world, it emphasised Anglo-German relations, as Ribbentrop knew that Hitler favoured an alliance with Britain. As such, Ribbentrop greatly worked during his early diplomatic career to realize Hitler's dream of an anti-Soviet Anglo-German alliance. Ribbentrop made frequent trips to Britain, and upon his return he always reported to Hitler that most British people longed for an alliance with Germany. In November 1934, Ribbentrop met with George Bernard Shaw, Sir Austen Chamberlain, Lord Cecil and Lord Lothian. On the basis of Lord Lothian's praise for the natural friendship between Germany and Britain, Ribbentrop informed Hitler that all elements of British society wished for closer ties with Germany. His report delighted Hitler, causing him to remark that Ribbentrop was the only person who told him "the truth about the world abroad". Because the Foreign Office's diplomats were not so sunny in their appraisal of the prospects for an alliance, Ribbentrop's influence with Hitler increased. Ribbentrop's personality, with his disdain for diplomatic niceties, meshed with what Hitler felt should be the relentless dynamism of a revolutionary regime.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Hitler rewarded Ribbentrop by appointing him "Reich" Minister Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large. In that capacity, Ribbentrop negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement (AGNA) in 1935 and the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Neurath did not think it possible to achieve the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. To discredit his rival, he appointed Ribbentrop head of the delegation sent to London to negotiate it. Once the talks began, Ribbentrop issued an ultimatum to Sir John Simon, informing him that if Germany's terms were not accepted in their entirety, the German delegation would go home. Simon was angry with that demand, and walked out of the talks. However, to everyone's surprise, the next day the British accepted Ribbentrop's demands, and the AGNA was signed in London on 18 June 1935 by Ribbentrop and Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British Foreign Secretary. The diplomatic success did much to increase Ribbentrop's prestige with Hitler, who called the day the AGNA was signed "the happiest day in my life". He believed it marked the beginning of an Anglo-German alliance, and ordered celebrations throughout Germany to mark the event.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Immediately after the AGNA was signed, Ribbentrop followed up with the next step that was intended to create the Anglo-German alliance, the "Gleichschaltung" (co-ordination) of all societies demanding the restoration of Germany's former colonies in Africa. On 3 July 1935, it was announced that Ribbentrop would head the efforts to recover Germany's former African colonies. Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that demanding colonial restoration would pressure the British into making an alliance with the "Reich" on German terms. However, there was a difference between Ribbentrop and Hitler: Ribbentrop sincerely wished to recover the former German colonies, but for Hitler, colonial demands were just a negotiating tactic. Germany would renounce its demands in exchange for a British alliance.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: The Anti-Comintern Pact in November 1936 marked an important change in German foreign policy. The Foreign Office had traditionally favoured a policy of friendship with the Republic of China, and an informal Sino-German alliance had emerged by the late 1920s. Neurath very much believed in maintaining Germany's good relations with China and mistrusted the Empire of Japan. Ribbentrop was opposed to the Foreign Office's pro-China orientation and instead favoured an alliance with Japan. To that end, Ribbentrop often worked closely with General Hiroshi Ōshima, who served first as the Japanese military attaché and then as ambassador in Berlin, to strengthen German-Japanese ties, despite furious opposition from the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office, which preferred closer Sino-German ties.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: The origins of the Anti-Comintern Pact went back to mid-1935, when in an effort to square the circle between seeking a "rapprochement" with Japan and Germany's traditional alliance with China, Ribbentrop and Ōshima devised the idea of an anticommunist alliance as a way to bind China, Japan and Germany together. However, when the Chinese made it clear that they had no interest in such an alliance (especially given that the Japanese regarded Chinese adhesion to the proposed pact as way of subordinating China to Japan), both Neurath and War Minister Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg persuaded Hitler to shelve the proposed treaty to avoid damaging Germany's good relations with China. Ribbentrop, who valued Japanese friendship far more than that of the Chinese, argued that Germany and Japan should sign the pact without Chinese participation. By November 1936, a revival of interest in a German-Japanese pact in both Tokyo and Berlin led to the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact in Berlin. When the Pact was signed, invitations were sent to Italy, China, Britain and Poland to join. However, of the invited powers, only the Italians would ultimately sign. The Anti-Comintern Pact marked the beginning of the shift on Germany's part from China's ally to Japan's ally.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In 1935, Ribbentrop arranged for a series of much-publicised visits of First World War veterans to Britain, France and Germany. Ribbentrop persuaded the Royal British Legion and many French veterans' groups to send delegations to Germany to meet German veterans as the best way to promote peace. At the same time, Ribbentrop arranged for members of the "Frontkämpferbund", the official German World War I veterans' group, to visit Britain and France to meet veterans there. The veterans' visits and attendant promises of "never again" did much to improve the "New Germany's" image in Britain and France. In July 1935, Brigadier Sir Francis Featherstone-Godley led the British Legion's delegation to Germany. The Prince of Wales, the Legion's patron, made a much-publicized speech at the Legion's annual conference in June 1935 that stated that he could think of no better group of men than those of the Legion to visit and carry the message of peace to Germany and that he hoped that Britain and Germany would never fight again. As for the contradiction between German rearmament and his message of peace, Ribbentrop argued to whoever would listen that the German people had been "humiliated" by the Versailles Treaty, Germany wanted peace above all and German violations of Versailles were part of an effort to restore Germany's "self-respect". By the 1930s, much of British opinion had been convinced that the treaty was monstrously unfair and unjust to Germany, so as a result, many in Britain, such as Thomas Jones, Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet, were very open to Ribbentrop's message that European peace would be restored if only the Treaty of Versailles could be done away with.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In August 1936, Hitler appointed Ribbentrop ambassador to the United Kingdom with orders to negotiate an Anglo-German alliance. Ribbentrop arrived to take up his position in October 1936. Ribbentrop's time in London was marked by an endless series of social gaffes and blunders that worsened his already-poor relations with the British Foreign Office.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Invited to stay as a house guest of the 7th Marquess of Londonderry at Wynyard Hall in County Durham, in November 1936, he was taken to a service in Durham Cathedral, and the hymn "Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken" was announced. As the organ played the opening bars, identical to the German national anthem, Ribbentrop gave the Nazi salute and had to be restrained by his host.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: At his wife's suggestion, Ribbentrop hired the Berlin interior decorator Martin Luther to assist with his move to London and help realise the design of the new German embassy that Ribbentrop had built there (he felt that the existing embassy was insufficiently grand). Luther proved to be a master intriguer and became Ribbentrop's favourite hatchet man.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop did not understand the limited role in government exercised by 20th-century British monarchs. He thought that King Edward VIII, Emperor of India, could dictate British foreign policy if he wanted. He convinced Hitler that he had Edward's support, but that was as much a delusion as his belief that he had impressed British society. In fact, Ribbentrop often displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of British politics and society. During the abdication crisis in December 1936, Ribbentrop reported to Berlin that it had been precipitated by an anti-German Jewish-Masonic-reactionary conspiracy to depose Edward, whom Ribbentrop represented as a staunch friend of Germany, and that civil war would soon break out in Britain between supporters of Edward and those of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Ribbentrop's civil war predictions were greeted with incredulity by the British people who heard them. Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg had told the Federal Bureau of Investigation that Wallis Simpson, Edward's lover and a suspected Nazi sympathizer, had slept with Ribbentrop in London in 1936; had remained in constant contact with him; and had continued to leak secrets.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop had a habit of summoning tailors from the best British firms, making them wait for hours and then sending them away without seeing him but with instructions to return the next day, only to repeat the process. That did immense damage to his reputation in British high society, as London's tailors retaliated by telling all their well-off clients that Ribbentrop was impossible to deal with. In an interview, his secretary Reinhard Spitzy stated, "He [Ribbentrop] behaved very stupidly and very pompously and the British don't like pompous people". In the same interview, Spitzy called Ribbentrop "pompous, conceited and not too intelligent" and stated he was an utterly insufferable man to work for.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In addition, Ribbentrop chose to spend as little time as possible in London to stay close to Hitler, which irritated the British Foreign Office immensely, as Ribbentrop's frequent absences prevented the handling of many routine diplomatic matters. ("Punch" referred to him as the ""Wandering Aryan"" for his frequent trips home.) As Ribbentrop alienated more and more people in Britain, "Reichsmarschall" Hermann Göring warned Hitler that Ribbentrop was a "stupid ass". Hitler dismissed Göring's concerns: "But after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England." That remark led Göring to reply ""Mein Führer", that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know "him"".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In February 1937, Ribbentrop committed a notable social gaffe by unexpectedly greeting George VI with the "German greeting", a stiff-armed Nazi salute: the gesture nearly knocked over the King, who was walking forward to shake Ribbentrop's hand at the time. Ribbentrop further compounded the damage to his image and caused a minor crisis in Anglo-German relations by insisting that henceforward all German diplomats were to greet heads of state by giving and receiving the stiff-arm fascist salute. The crisis was resolved when Neurath pointed out to Hitler that under Ribbentrop's rule, if the Soviet ambassador were to give the Communist clenched-fist salute, Hitler would be obliged to return it. On Neurath's advice, Hitler disavowed Ribbentrop's demand that King George receive and give the "German greeting".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Most of Ribbentrop's time was spent demanding that Britain either sign the Anti-Comintern Pact or return the former German colonies in Africa. However, he also devoted considerable time to courting what he called the "men of influence" as the best way to achieve an Anglo-German alliance. He believed that the British aristocracy comprised some sort of secret society that ruled from behind the scenes, and that if he could befriend enough members of Britain's "secret government" he could bring about the alliance. Almost all of the initially-favourable reports Ribbentrop provided to Berlin about the alliance's prospects were based on friendly remarks about the "New Germany" that came from British aristocrats such as Lord Londonderry and Lord Lothian. The rather cool reception that Ribbentrop received from British Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats did not make much of an impression on him at first. This British governmental view, summarised by Robert, Viscount Cranborne, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was that Ribbentrop always was a second-rate man.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In 1935, Sir Eric Phipps, the British Ambassador to Germany, complained to London about Ribbentrop's British associates in the Anglo-German Fellowship. He felt that they created "false German hopes as in regards to British friendship and caused a reaction against it in England, where public opinion is very naturally hostile to the Nazi regime and its methods". In September 1937, the British Consul in Munich, writing about the group that Ribbentrop had brought to the Nuremberg Rally, reported that there were some "serious persons of standing among them" but that an equal number of Ribbentrop's British contingent were "eccentrics and few, if any, could be called representatives of serious English thought, either political or social, while they most certainly lacked any political or social influence in England". In June 1937, when Lord Mount Temple, the Chairman of the Anglo-German Fellowship, asked to see Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after meeting Hitler in a visit arranged by Ribbentrop, Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Permanent Under-Secretary of State, wrote a memo stating that:


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: The P.M. [Prime Minister] should certainly not see Lord Mount Temple – nor should the S[ecretary] of S[tate]. We really must put a stop to this eternal butting in of amateurs – and Lord Mount Temple is a particularly silly one. These activities – which are practically confined to Germany – render impossible the task of diplomacy.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: After Vansittart's memo, members of the Anglo-German Fellowship ceased to see Cabinet ministers after they went on Ribbentrop-arranged trips to Germany.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In February 1937, before a meeting with the Lord Privy Seal, Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop suggested to Hitler for Germany, Italy and Japan to begin a worldwide propaganda campaign with the aim of forcing Britain to return the former German colonies in Africa. Hitler turned down the idea, but nonetheless during his meeting with Lord Halifax, Ribbentrop spent much of the meeting demanding for Britain to sign an alliance with Germany and to return the former German colonies. The German historian Klaus Hildebrand noted that as early as the Ribbentrop–Halifax meeting the differing foreign policy views of Hitler and Ribbentrop were starting to emerge, with Ribbentrop more interested in restoring the pre-1914 German "Imperium" in Africa than the conquest of Eastern Europe. Following the lead of Andreas Hillgruber, who argued that Hitler had a "Stufenplan" (stage by stage plan) for world conquest, Hildebrand argued that Ribbentrop may not have fully understood what Hitler's "Stufenplan" was or that in pressing so hard for colonial restoration, he was trying to score a personal success that might improve his standing with Hitler. In March 1937, Ribbentrop attracted much adverse comment in the British press when he gave a speech at the Leipzig Trade Fair in Leipzig in which he declared that German economic prosperity would be satisfied "through the restoration of the former German colonial possessions, or by means of the German people's own strength." The implied threat that if colonial restoration did not occur, the Germans would take back their former colonies by force attracted a great deal of hostile commentary on the inappropriateness of an ambassador threatening his host country in such a manner.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop's negotiating style, a mix of bullying bluster and icy coldness coupled with lengthy monologues praising Hitler, alienated many. The American historian Gordon A. Craig once observed that of all the voluminous memoir literature of the diplomatic scene of 1930s Europe, there are only two positive references to Ribbentrop. Of the two references, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, the German military attaché in London, commented that Ribbentrop had been a brave soldier in World War I, and the wife of the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Elisabetta Cerruti, called Ribbentrop "one of the most diverting of the Nazis". In both cases, the praise was limited, with Cerruti going on to write that only in Nazi Germany was it possible for someone as superficial as Ribbentrop to rise to be a minister of foreign affairs, and Geyr von Schweppenburg called Ribbentrop an absolute disaster as ambassador in London. The British historian/television producer Laurence Rees noted for his 1997 series "" that every single person interviewed for the series who knew Ribbentrop expressed a passionate hatred for him. One German diplomat, Herbert Richter, called Ribbentrop "lazy and worthless", while another, Manfred von Schröder, was quoted as saying Ribbentrop was "vain and ambitious". Rees concluded, "No other Nazi was so hated by his colleagues".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In November 1937, Ribbentrop was placed in a highly-embarrassing situation since his forceful advocacy of the return of the former German colonies led British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and French Foreign Minister Yvon Delbos to offer to open talks on returning the former German colonies in return for which the Germans would make binding commitments to respect their borders in Central and Eastern Europe. Since Hitler was not interested in obtaining the former colonies, especially if the price was a brake on expansion into Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop was forced to turn down the Anglo-French offer that he had largely brought about. Immediately after turning down the Anglo-French offer on colonial restoration, Ribbentrop, for reasons of pure malice, ordered the "Reichskolonialbund" to increase the agitation for the former German colonies, a move that exasperated both the Foreign Office and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: As the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary in late 1937, Ribbentrop had come to hate Britain with all the "fury of a woman scorned". Ribbentrop and Hitler, for that matter, never understood that British foreign policy aimed at the appeasement of Germany, not an alliance with it.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: When Ribbentrop traveled to Rome in November 1937 to oversee Italy's adhesion to the Anti-Comintern Pact, he made clear to his hosts that the pact was really directed against Britain. As Ciano noted in his diary, the Anti-Comintern Pact was "anti-Communist in theory, but in fact unmistakably anti-British". Believing himself to be in a state of disgrace with Hitler over his failure to achieve the British alliance, Ribbentrop spent December 1937 in a state of depression and, together with his wife, wrote two lengthy documents for Hitler that denounced Britain. In the first report to Hitler, which was presented on 2 January 1938, Ribbentrop stated that "England is our most dangerous enemy". In the same report, Ribbentrop advised Hitler to abandon the idea of a British alliance and instead embrace the idea of an alliance of Germany, Japan and Italy to destroy the British Empire.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop wrote in his "Memorandum for the "Führer"" that "a change in the status quo in the East to Germany's advantage can only be accomplished by force" and that the best way to achieve it was to build a global anti-British alliance system. Besides converting the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British military alliance, Ribbentrop argued that German foreign policy should work to "winning over all states whose interests conform directly or indirectly to ours." By the last statement, Ribbentrop clearly implied that the Soviet Union should be included in the anti-British alliance system he had proposed.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In early 1938, Hitler asserted his control of the military-foreign policy apparatus, in part by sacking Neurath. On 4 February 1938, Ribbentrop succeeded Neurath as Foreign Minister. Ribbentrop's appointment has generally been seen as an indication that German foreign policy was moving in a more radical direction. In contrast to Neurath's cautious and less bellicose nature, Ribbentrop unequivocally supported war in 1938 and 1939.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop's time as Foreign Minister can be divided into three periods. In the first, from 1938 to 1939, he tried to persuade other states to align themselves with Germany for the coming war. In the second, from 1939 to 1943, Ribbentrop attempted to persuade other states to enter the war on Germany's side or at least to maintain pro-German neutrality. He was also involved in Operation Willi, an attempt to convince the former King Edward VIII to lobby his brother, now the king, on behalf of Germany. Many historians have suggested that Hitler was prepared to reinstate the Duke of Windsor as king in the hope of establishing a fascist Britain. If Edward would agree to work openly with Nazi Germany, he would be given financial assistance and would hopefully come to be a "compliant" king. Reportedly, 50 million Swiss francs were set aside for that purpose. The plan was never realised.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In the final phase, from 1943 to 1945, he had the task of trying to keep Germany's allies from leaving her side. During the course of all three periods, Ribbentrop met frequently with leaders and diplomats from Italy, Japan, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, and Hungary. During all of that time, Ribbentrop feuded with various other Nazi leaders. As time went by, Ribbentrop started to oust the Foreign Office's old diplomats from their senior positions and replace them with men from the "Dienststelle". As early as 1938, 32% of the offices in the Foreign Ministry were held by men who previously served in the "Dienststelle".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: One of Ribbentrop's first acts as Foreign Minister was to achieve a total volte-face in Germany's Far Eastern policies. Ribbentrop was instrumental in February 1938 in persuading Hitler to recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo and to renounce German claims upon its former colonies in the Pacific, which were now held by Japan. By April 1938, Ribbentrop had ended all German arms shipments to China and had all of the German Army officers serving with the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek recalled, with the threat that the families of the officers in China would be sent to concentration camps if the officers did not return to Germany immediately. In return, the Germans received little thanks from the Japanese, who refused to allow any new German businesses to be set up in the part of China they had occupied and continued with their policy of attempting to exclude all existing German and all other Western businesses from Japanese-occupied China. At the same time, the end of the informal Sino-German alliance led Chiang to terminate all concessions and contracts held by German companies in Kuomintang China.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary from 1938 to 1943, opposed the general trend in German foreign policy towards attacking the First Czechoslovak Republic and feared that it might cause a general war that Germany would lose. Weizsäcker had no moral objections to the idea of destroying Czechoslovakia but opposed only the timing of the attack. He favoured the idea of a "chemical" destruction of Czechoslovakia in which Germany, Hungary and Poland would close their frontiers to destabilise Czechoslovakia economically. He strongly disliked Ribbentrop's idea of a "mechanical" destruction of Czechoslovakia by war, which he saw as too risky. However, despite all of their reservations and fears about Ribbentrop, whom they saw as recklessly seeking to plunge Germany into a general war before the "Reich" was ready, neither Weizsäcker nor any of the other professional diplomats were prepared to confront their chief.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Before the Anglo-German summit at Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938, the British Ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, and Weizsäcker worked out a private arrangement for Hitler and Chamberlain to meet with no advisers present as a way of excluding the ultrahawkish Ribbentrop from attending the talks. Hitler's interpreter, Paul Schmidt, later recalled that it was "felt that our Foreign Minister would prove a disturbing element" at the Berchtesgaden summit. In a moment of pique at his exclusion from the Chamberlain-Hitler meeting, Ribbentrop refused to hand over Schmidt's notes of the summit to Chamberlain, a move that caused much annoyance on the British side. Ribbentrop spent the last weeks of September 1938 looking forward very much to the German-Czechoslovak war that he expected to break out on 1 October 1938. Ribbentrop regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat for Germany, as it deprived Germany of the opportunity to wage the war to destroy Czechoslovakia that Ribbentrop wanted to see. The Sudetenland issue, which was the ostensible subject of the German-Czechoslovak dispute, had been a pretext for German aggression. During the Munich Conference, Ribbentrop spent much of his time brooding unhappily in the corners. Ribbentrop told the head of Hitler's Press Office, Fritz Hesse, that the Munich Agreement was "first-class stupidity... All it means is that we have to fight the English in a year, when they will be better armed... It would have been much better if war had come now". Like Hitler, Ribbentrop was determined that in the next crisis, Germany would not have its professed demands met in another Munich-type summit and that the next crisis to be caused by Germany would result in the war that Chamberlain had "cheated" the Germans out of at Munich.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In the aftermath of Munich, Hitler was in a violently anti-British mood caused in part by his rage over being "cheated" out of the war to "annihilate" Czechoslovakia that he very much wanted to have in 1938 and in part by his realisation that Britain would neither ally itself nor stand aside in regard to Germany's ambition to dominate Europe. As a consequence, Britain was considered after Munich to be the main enemy of the "Reich", and as a result, the influence of ardently Anglophobic Ribbentrop correspondingly rose with Hitler.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Partly for economic reasons, and partly out of fury over being "cheated" out of war in 1938, Hitler decided to destroy the rump state of Czecho-Slovakia, as Czechoslovakia had been renamed in October 1938, early in 1939. Ribbentrop played an important role in setting in motion the crisis that was to result in the end of Czecho-Slovakia by ordering German diplomats in Bratislava to contact Father Jozef Tiso, the premier of the Slovak regional government, and pressure him to declare independence from Prague. When Tiso proved reluctant to do so on the grounds that the autonomy that had existed since October 1938 was sufficient for him and that to completely sever links with the Czechs would leave Slovakia open to being annexed by Hungary, Ribbentrop had the German embassy in Budapest contact the regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy. Horthy was advised that the Germans might be open to having more of Hungary restored to its former borders and that the Hungarians should best start concentrating troops on their northern border at once if they were serious about changing their frontiers. Upon hearing of the Hungarian mobilization, Tiso was presented with the choice of either declaring independence, with the understanding that the new state would be in the German sphere of influence, or seeing all of Slovakia absorbed into Hungary. As a result, Tiso had the Slovak regional government issue a declaration of independence on 14 March 1939; the ensuing crisis in Czech-Slovak relations was used as a pretext to summon Czecho-Slovak President Emil Hácha to Berlin over his "failure" to keep order in his country. On the night of 14–15 March 1939, Ribbentrop played a key role in the German annexation of the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia by bullying Hácha into transforming his country into a German protectorate at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. On 15 March 1939, German troops occupied the Czech areas of Czecho-Slovakia, which then became the "Reich" Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: On 20 March 1939, Ribbentrop summoned Lithuanian Foreign Minister Juozas Urbšys to Berlin and informed him that if a Lithuanian plenipotentiary did not arrive at once to negotiate to turn over the Memelland to Germany the Luftwaffe would raze Kaunas to the ground. As a result of Ribbentrop's ultimatum on 23 March, the Lithuanians agreed to return Memel (modern Klaipėda, Lithuania) to Germany.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In March 1939, Ribbentrop assigned the largely ethnically Ukrainian Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czecho-Slovakia, which had just proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, to Hungary, which then proceeded to annex it after a short war. This was significant as there had been many fears in the Soviet Union in the 1930s that the Germans would use Ukrainian nationalism as a tool to break up the Soviet Union. The establishment of an autonomous Ukrainian region in Czecho-Slovakia in October 1938 had prompted a major Soviet media campaign against its existence on the grounds that this was part of a Western plot to support separatism in Soviet Ukraine. By allowing the Hungarians to destroy Europe's only Ukrainian state, Ribbentrop had signified that Germany was not interested, at least for now, in sponsoring Ukrainian nationalism. That, in turn, helped to improve German-Soviet relations by demonstrating that German foreign policy was now primarily anti-Western rather than anti-Soviet.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In December 1938, during the visit of the German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Paris to sign the largely-meaningless French-German Non-Aggression pact, Ribbentrop had conversations with French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet, which Ribbentrop later claimed included a promise that France would recognize all of Eastern Europe as Germany's exclusive sphere of influence.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Initially, Germany hoped to transform Poland into a satellite state, with von Ribbentrop and Japanese military attache Hiroshi Ōshima trying to convince Poland to join the Anti-Comintern Pact. By March 1939, German demands had been rejected by the Poles three times, which led Hitler to decide, with enthusiastic support from Ribbentrop, upon the destruction of Poland as the main German foreign policy goal of 1939. On 21 March 1939, Hitler first went public with his demand that Danzig rejoin the "Reich" and for "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor. That marked a significant escalation of the German pressure on Poland, which had been confined to private meetings between German and Polish diplomats. The same day, on 21 March 1939, Ribbentrop presented a set of demands to the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski about Poland allowing the Free City of Danzig to return to Germany in such violent and extreme language that it led to the Poles to fear their country was on the verge of an immediate German attack. Ribbentrop had used such extreme language, particularly his remark that if Germany had a different policy towards the Soviet Union then Poland would cease to exist, that it led to the Poles ordering partial mobilisation and placing their armed forces on the highest state of alert on 23 March 1939. In a protest note at Ribbentrop's behaviour, Poland's Foreign Minister Józef Beck reminded him that Poland was an independent country and not some sort of German protectorate that Ribbentrop could bully at will. Ribbentrop, in turn, sent out instructions to the German Ambassador in Warsaw, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, that if Poland agreed to the German demands, Germany would ensure that Poland could partition Slovakia with Hungary and be ensured of German support for annexing Ukraine. If the Poles rejected his offer, Poland would be considered an enemy of the "Reich". On 26 March, in an extremely-stormy meeting with the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski, Ribbentrop accused the Poles of attempting to bully Germany by their partial mobilisation and violently attacked them for offering consideration only of the German demand about the "extra-territorial" roads. The meeting ended with Ribbentrop screaming that if Poland invaded the Free City of Danzig, Germany would go to war to destroy Poland. When the news of Ribbentrop's remarks was leaked to the Polish press, despite Beck's order to the censors on 27 March, it caused anti-German riots in Poland with the local Nazi Party headquarters in the mixed town of Lininco destroyed by a mob. On 28 March, Beck told Moltke that any attempt to change the status of Danzig unilaterally would be regarded by Poland as a "casus belli". Though the Germans were not planning an attack on Poland in March 1939, Ribbentrop's bullying behaviour towards the Poles destroyed any faint chance Poland allowing Danzig to return to Germany.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: The German occupation of the Czech areas of Czecho-Slovakia on 15 March, in total contravention of the Munich Agreement, which had been signed less than six months before, infuriated British and French public opinion and lost Germany any sympathy. Such was the state of public fury that it appeared possible for several days afterwards that the Chamberlain government might fall because of a backbench rebellion. Even Ribbentrop's standard line that Germany was only reacting to an unjust Versailles treaty and wanted peace with everyone, which had worked so well in the past, failed to carry weight. Reflecting the changed mood, Conservative MP Duff Cooper wrote in a letter to "The Times":


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Some of us are getting rather tired of the sanctimonious attitude which seeks to take upon our shoulders the blame for every crime committed in Europe. If Germany had been left stronger in 1919 she would sooner have been in a position to do what she is doing today.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Moreover, the British government had genuinely believed in the German claim that it was only the Sudetenland that concerned it and that Germany was not seeking to dominate Europe. By occupying the Czech parts of Czecho-Slovakia, Germany lost all credibility for its claim to be only righting the alleged wrongs of Versailles.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Shortly afterwards, false reports spread in mid-March 1939 by the Romanian minister in London, Virgil Tilea, that his country was on the verge of an immediate German attack, led to a dramatic U-turn in the British policy of resisting commitments in Eastern Europe. Ribbentrop truthfully denied that Germany was going to invade Romania. But his denials were expressed in almost identical language to the denials that he had issued in early March, when he had denied that anything was being planned against the Czechs; thus they actually increased the "Romanian war scare" of March 1939. From the British point of view, it was regarded as highly desirable to keep Romania and its oil out of German hands. Since Germany itself had hardly any sources of oil, the ability of the Royal Navy to impose a blockade represented a British trump card to deter and, if necessary, win a war. If Germany were to occupy oil-rich Romania, that would undercut all of the British strategic assumptions on Germany's need to import oil from the Americas. Since Poland was regarded as the East European state with the most powerful army, Poland had to be tied to Britain as the best way of ensuring Polish support for Romania; it was the obvious "quid pro quo" that Britain would have to do something for Polish security if the Poles were to be induced to do something for Romanian security.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: On 31 March 1939, Chamberlain announced before the House of Commons the British "guarantee" of Poland, which committed Britain to go to war to defend Polish independence, though pointedly the "guarantee" excluded Polish frontiers. As a result of the "guarantee" of Poland, Hitler began to speak with increasing frequency of a British "encirclement" policy, which he used as the excuse for denouncing, in a speech before the "Reichstag" on 28 April 1939, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement and the Non-Aggression Pact with Poland.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In late March, Ribbentrop had the German "chargé d'affaires" in Turkey, Hans Kroll, start pressuring Turkey into an alliance with Germany. The Turks assured Kroll that they had no objection to Germany making the Balkans its economic sphere of influence but would regard any move to make the Balkans into a sphere of German political influence as most unwelcome.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In April 1939, when Ribbentrop announced at a secret meeting of the senior staff of the Foreign Office that Germany was ending talks with Poland and was instead going to destroy it in an operation late that year, the news was greeted joyfully by those present. Anti-Polish feelings had long been rampant in the agency and so, in marked contrast to their cool attitude about attacking Czechoslovakia in 1938, diplomats such as Weizsäcker were highly enthusiastic about the prospect of war with Poland in 1939. Professional diplomats such as Weizsäcker who had never accepted the legitimacy of Poland, which they saw as an "abomination" created by the Versailles Treaty, were wholehearted in their support of a war to wipe Poland off the map. The degree of unity within the German government with both the diplomats and the military united in their support of Hitler's anti-Polish policy, which stood in contrast to their views the previous year about destroying Czechoslovakia, very much encouraged Hitler and Ribbentrop with their chosen course of action.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In April 1939, Ribbentrop received intelligence that Britain and Turkey were negotiating an alliance intended to keep Germany out of the Balkans. On 23 April 1939, Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu told the British ambassador of Turkish fears of Italian claims of the Mediterranean as "Mare Nostrum" and German control of the Balkans, and he suggested an Anglo-Soviet-Turkish alliance as the best way of countering the Axis. As the Germans had broken the Turkish diplomatic codes, Ribbentrop was well aware as he warned in a circular to German embassies that Anglo-Turkish talks had gone much further "than what the Turks would care to tell us". Ribbentrop appointed Franz von Papen Germany's ambassador in Turkey with instructions to win it to an alliance with Germany. Ribbentrop had been attempting to appoint Papen as an ambassador to Turkey since April 1938. His first attempt ended in failure when Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who remembered Papen well with considerable distaste from World War I, refused to accept him as ambassador and complained in private the nomination of Papen must have been meant as some sort of sick German joke. The German embassy in Ankara had been vacant ever since the retirement of the previous ambassador Friedrich von Keller in November 1938, and Ribbentrop was able to get the Turks to accept Papen as ambassador only when Saracoğlu complained to Kroll in April 1939 about when the Germans were ever going to send a new ambassador. Papen's attempt to address Turkish fears of Italian expansionism by getting Ribbentrop to have Count Galeazzo Ciano promise the Turks that they had nothing to fear from Italy backfired when the Turks found the Italo-German effort to have been patronising and insulting.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Instead of focusing on talking to the Turks, Ribbentrop and Papen became entangled in a feud over Papen's demand to bypass Ribbentrop and to send his dispatches straight to Hitler. As a former chancellor, Papen had been granted the privilege of bypassing the Foreign Minister while he was ambassador to Austria. Ribbentrop's friendship with Papen, which went back to 1918, ended over that issue. At the same time, Ribbentrop took to shouting at the Turkish Ambassador in Berlin, Mehemet Hamdi Arpag, as part of the effort to win Turkey over as a German ally. Ribbentrop believed that Turks were so stupid that one had to shout at them to make them understand. One of the consequences of Ribbentrop's heavyhanded behaviour was the signing of the Anglo-Turkish alliance on 12 May 1939.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: From early 1939 onwards, Ribbentrop had become the leading advocate within the German government of reaching an understanding with the Soviet Union as the best way of pursuing both the short-term anti-Polish and long-term anti-British foreign policy goals. Ribbentrop first seems to have considered the idea of a pact with the Soviet Union after an unsuccessful visit to Warsaw in January 1939, when the Poles again refused Ribbentrop's demands about Danzig, the "extra-territorial" roads across the Polish Corridor and the Anti-Comintern Pact. During the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact negotiations, Ribbentrop was overjoyed by a report from his ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, of a speech by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin before the 18th Party Congress in March 1939 that was strongly anti-Western, which Schulenburg reported meant that the Soviet Union might be seeking an accord with Germany. Ribbentrop followed up Schulenburg's report by sending Dr. Julius Schnurre of the Foreign Office's trade department to negotiate a German-Soviet economic agreement. At the same time, Ribbentrop's efforts to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British alliance met with considerable hostility from the Japanese in late 1938 and early 1939, but with the Italians, Ribbentrop enjoyed some apparent success. Because of Japanese opposition to participation in an anti-British alliance, Ribbentrop decided to settle for a bilateral German-Italian anti-British treaty. Ribbentrop's efforts were crowned with success with the signing of the Pact of Steel in May 1939, but it was accomplished only by falsely assuring Mussolini that there would be no war for the next three years.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop played a key role in the conclusion of a Soviet-German non-aggression pact, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, in 1939 and in the diplomatic action surrounding the attack on Poland. In public, Ribbentrop expressed great fury at the Polish refusal to allow for Danzig's return to the "Reich" or to grant Polish permission for the "extra-territorial" highways, but since the matters were intended after March 1939 to be only a pretext for German aggression, Ribbentrop always refused privately to allow for any talks between German and Polish diplomats about those matters. Ribbentrop feared that if German–Polish talks took place, there was the danger that the Poles might back down and agree to the German demands, as the Czechoslovaks had done in 1938 under Anglo-French pressure, depriving the Germans of their excuse for aggression. To block German–Polish diplomatic talks further, Ribbentrop had the German Ambassador to Poland, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, recalled, and he refused to see the Polish ambassador, Józef Lipski. On 25 May 1939, Ribbentrop sent a secret message to Moscow to tell the Soviet Foreign Commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, that if Germany attacked Poland "Russia's special interests would be taken into consideration".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Throughout 1939, Hitler always privately referred to Britain as his main opponent but portrayed the coming destruction of Poland as a necessary prelude to any war with Britain. Ribbentrop informed Hitler that any war with Poland would last for only 24 hours and that the British would be so stunned with this display of German power that they would not honour their commitments. Along the same lines, Ribbentrop told Ciano on 5 May 1939, "It is certain that within a few months not one Frenchman nor a single Englishman will go to war for Poland".


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Ribbentrop supported his analysis of the situation by showing Hitler only the diplomatic dispatches that supported his view that neither Britain nor France would honour their commitments to Poland. In that, Ribbentrop was particularly supported by the German Ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, who reported that Chamberlain knew "the social structure of Britain, even the conception of the British Empire, would not survive the chaos of even a victorious war" and so would back down over Poland. Furthermore, Ribbentrop had the German embassy in London provide translations from pro-appeasement newspapers such as the "Daily Mail" and the "Daily Express" for Hitler's benefit, which had the effect of making it seem that British public opinion was more strongly against going to war for Poland than it actually was. The British historian Victor Rothwell wrote that the newspapers used by Ribbentrop to provide his press summaries for Hitler were out of touch not only with British public opinion but also with British government policy in regard to Poland. The press summaries Ribbentrop provided were particularly important, as Ribbentrop had managed to convince Hitler that the British government secretly controlled the British press, and just as in Germany, nothing appeared in the British press that the British government did not want to appear. Furthermore, the Germans had broken the British diplomatic codes and were reading the messages between the Foreign Office in London to and from the Embassy in Warsaw. The decrypts showed that there was much tension in Anglo-Polish relations, with the British pressuring the Poles to allow Danzig to rejoin the "Reich" and the Poles staunchly resisting all efforts to pressure them into concessions to Germany. On the basis of such decrypts, Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that the British were bluffing with their warnings that they would go to war to defend Polish independence. In mid-1939, Ribbentrop sabotaged all efforts at a peaceful solution to the Danzig dispute, leading the American historian Gerhard Weinberg to comment that "perhaps Chamberlain's haggard appearance did him more credit than Ribbentrop's beaming smile", as the countdown to a war that would kill tens of millions inexorably gathered pace.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: Neville Chamberlain's European Policy in 1939 was based upon creating a "peace front" of alliances linking Western and Eastern European states to serve as a "tripwire" meant to deter any act of German aggression. The new "containment" strategy adopted in March 1939 was to give firm warnings to Berlin, increase the pace of British re-armament and attempt to form an interlocking network of alliances that would block German aggression anywhere in Europe by creating such a formidable deterrence to aggression that Hitler could not rationally choose that option. Underlying the basis of the "containment" of Germany were the so-called "X documents", provided by Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, in 1938–1939. They suggested that the German economy, under the strain of massive military spending, was on the verge of collapse and led British policy-makers to the conclusion that if Hitler could be deterred from war and that if his regime was "contained" long enough, the German economy would collapse, and, with it, presumably the Nazi regime. At the same time, British policymakers were afraid that if Hitler were "contained" and faced with a collapsing economy, he would commit a desperate "mad dog act" of aggression as a way of lashing out. Hence, emphasis was put on pressuring the Poles to allow the return of Danzig to Germany as a way of resolving the crisis peacefully by allowing Hitler to back down without him losing face. As part of a dual strategy to avoid war via deterrence and appeasement of Germany, British leaders warned that they would go to war if Germany attacked Poland, but at the same time, they tried to avoid war by holding unofficial talks with would-be peacemakers such as the British newspaper proprietor Lord Kemsley, the Swedish businessman Axel Wenner-Gren and another Swedish businessmen Birger Dahlerus, who attempted to work out the basis for a peaceful return of Danzig.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In May 1939, as part of his efforts to bully Turkey into joining the Axis, Ribbentrop had arranged for the cancellation of the delivery of 60 heavy howitzers from the Škoda Works, which the Turks had paid for in advance. The German refusal either to deliver the artillery pieces or refund the 125 million "Reichsmarks" that the Turks had paid for them was to be a major strain on German-Turkish relations in 1939 and had the effect of causing Turkey's politically powerful army to resist Ribbentrop's entreaties to join the Axis. As part of the fierce diplomatic competition in Ankara in the first half of 1939 between von Papen and French Ambassador René Massigli with British Ambassador, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen to win the allegiance of Turkey to either the Axis or the Allies, Ribbentrop suffered a major reversal in July 1939 when Massigli was able to arrange for major French arms shipments to Turkey on credit to replace the weapons that the Germans had refused to deliver to the Turks.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: In June 1939, Franco-German relations were strained when the head of the French section of the "Dienststelle Ribbentrop", Otto Abetz, was expelled from France following allegations that he had bribed two French newspaper editors to print pro-German articles. Ribbentrop was enraged by Abetz's expulsion and attacked Count Johannes von Welczeck, the German Ambassador in Paris, over his failure to have the French readmit him. In July 1939, Ribbentrop's claims about an alleged statement of December 1938 made by French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet were to lead to a lengthy war of words via a series of letters to the French newspapers between Ribbentrop and Bonnet over precisely what Bonnet had said to Ribbentrop.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: On 11 August 1939, Ribbentrop met the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, and the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Count Bernardo Attolico, in Salzburg. During that meeting, both Ciano and Attolico were horrified to learn from Ribbentrop that Germany planned to attack Poland and that the Danzig issue was just a pretext for aggression. When Ciano asked if there was anything Italy could do to broker a Polish-German settlement that would avert a war, he was told by Ribbentrop, "We want war!" Ribbentrop expressed his firmly held belief that neither Britain nor France would go to war for Poland, but if that occurred, he fully expected the Italians to honour the terms of the Pact of Steel, which was both an offensive and defensive treaty, and to declare war not only on Poland but on the Western powers if necessary. Ribbentrop told his Italian guests that "the localisation of the conflict is certain" and "the probability of victory is infinite". Ribbentrop brushed away Ciano's fears of a general war. He claimed, "France and England cannot intervene because they are insufficiently prepared militarily and because they have no means of injuring Germany". Ciano complained furiously that Ribbentrop had violated his promise given earlier that year, when Italy signed the Pact of Steel, that there would be no war for the next three years. Ciano said that it was absurd to believe that the "Reich" could attack Poland without triggering a wider war and that now the Italians were left with the choice of going to war when they needed three more years to rearm or being forced into the humiliation of having to violate the terms of the Pact of Steel by declaring neutrality, which would make the Italians appear cowardly. Ciano complained in his diary that his arguments "had no effect" on Ribbentrop, who simply refused to believe any information that did not fit in with his preconceived notions. Despite Ciano's efforts to persuade Ribbentrop to put off the attack on Poland until 1942 to allow the Italians time to get ready for war, Ribbentrop was adamant that Germany had no interest in a diplomatic solution of the Danzig question but wanted a war to wipe Poland off the map. The Salzburg meeting marked the moment when Ciano's dislike of Ribbentrop was transformed into outright hatred and of the beginning of his disillusionment with the pro-German foreign policy that he had championed.


title: Joachim von Ribbentrop

text: On 21 August 1939, Hitler received a message from Stalin: "The Soviet Government has instructed me to say they agree to Herr von Ribbentrop's arrival on 23 August". The same day, Hitler ordered German mobilisation. The extent that Hitler was influenced by Ribbentrop's advice can be seen in Hitler's orders for a limited mobilisation against Poland alone. Weizsäcker recorded in his diary throughout the first half of 1939 repeated statements from Hitler that any German–Polish war would be a localized conflict and that there was no danger of a general war if the Soviet Union could be persuaded to stay neutral. Hitler believed that British policy was based upon securing Soviet support for Poland, which led him to perform a diplomatic U-turn and support Ribbentrop's policy of rapprochement with the Soviet Union as the best way of ensuring a local war. That was especially the case as decrypts showed the British military attaché to Poland arguing that Britain could not save Poland in the event of a German attack and that only Soviet support offered the prospect of Poland holding out.