The Nuremberg Interviews (34 page)

“After the breakdown in 1918 every state made its own policy. Each state had a president who was without influence in the general federation of states. This was a weak point. I felt that this should be corrected along Bismarckian lines. I felt, too, that the prime minister of Prussia should be the chancellor of Germany. At the time, Prussia had a socialist government, and the republic at various periods had mixed governments of bourgeois and socialists. You can see, therefore, of how many different stripes the government consisted.

“I had achieved a laudable aim in that I had made an arrangement with Hindenburg that if Hitler came to power, Hindenburg would appoint me prime minister of Prussia and at the same time vice chancellor.
¹
Then came the election of March 5, 1933, and the Nazis were swept into power overwhelmingly.
²
Each state had its own parliament, and in the Prussian diet the Nazis were also predominant. It was clear that Goering would be elected prime minister. At that time Goering was minister of the interior of Prussia. There was no doubt that the majority of the Prussian parliament would choose Goering as their prime minister and in that event I would have to go. I therefore wrote a letter to Hindenburg and Hitler in which I said that I was glad that Goering was to be prime minister of Prussia since Goering was a close friend of Hitler’s. By this, I meant that there would be agreement in the main points of national policy, which was so essential for Germany. It was in no sense an abdication of my former adopted policy such as the indictment states. It was understood that the federated state of Germany should preserve in its individual states separate finances, politics, et cetera. It must be difficult for an English or American judge who doesn’t know German history to understand these things. The main charge against me is that I was an unscrupulous opportunist and that I changed my ideas as quickly as possible as soon as the Nazis came to power. That is not the case. I will prove to the court that in hundreds of speeches I made after the formation of the Hitler government, my political line differed immensely from the Nazi line not only in main points, but in most points.”

I asked Papen what were the main points of disagreement between himself and the Nazis in 1933–34. “Since the time of Bruening we had tried to dissolve that Nazi Party several times. When I came to power, the Nazis had 230 seats, so I was unable to form a majority in the Reichstag without them. I was chancellor at that time. Now, for a chancellor to be effective in legislation, he must have the majority of the Reichstag. The problem was how to dispose of the Nazis.

“Now, when it finally came to actually building the Nazi government under these forceful circumstances, the main points which cropped up in the minds of all Germans were the 8 million unemployed, the 12.5 million who were not entirely employed, and the strikes which arose out of the class struggle. The main thing preoccupying all Germans was finding a solution for the social problems. Hitler always stressed the point that the solution of this social problem could not be found along the lines of
Marxism or Bolshevism, but rather along capitalistic lines mixed with a certain degree of socialism. This was not meant to be state socialism — but it was socialism insofar as private enterprise should not work for enormous dividends and profits. All profit made in every branch of the economy would be for the community and not strictly for private gain. That seemed to me to be sound.

“One of the slogans of the Nazi government was something to the effect that all profits went first to the community. The difference between the type of socialism espoused by the National Socialists and Communism was that the interests of private persons would not be suppressed as they were in the Communist state.

“As I said, that seemed to me to be a sound principle. The building of the government by the Nazis was not displeasing to the conservative group over which I presided. I came to the conclusion that the solution to Germany’s problems would be based on a closer cooperation between private enterprise, management, and labor.

“I thought, being a Catholic as you know, that these lines were laid down by Pope Leo XIII in his well-known encyclical. Therefore, I stressed the point that basically there should be a general religious renewal. Hitler disagreed with that. I don’t know much about churches, religion, and such things. For instance, I disagreed with him on his racial ideas, anti-Semitism, et cetera.

“In 1933 I made a speech in Gleiwitz in which I said that there was certainly some justice in stressing the good points of a certain race, but that we should never get to the point where a certain race should be fought on account of certain qualities and another race termed better. I said then that this was entirely wrong.

“I made a speech on June 17, 1934, which was a few days before the Roehm purge. That speech contains a great mass of my acknowledgments, of my political creed in opposition to Nazism. The speech was given before the University of Marburg. It aroused the bitter enmity of the Nazis. Goebbels gave orders that the speech should not be reprinted or published in the papers, and that was the reason that in the Roehm purge I was almost shot. Actually I was arrested for three days and on the death roll of Himmler. I was not shot because Goering, as far as I know, checked up on it, mainly because if I were shot there would be too much bad publicity outside Germany.

“I cited these examples to indicate what my real credo was, has been,
is, and always shall be. As far as the Roehm affair — I had no connection whatever with it.
³
When that uproar started, I was summoned to see Goering in his office and he told me to consider myself arrested. Goering was excited but not angry with me. Himmler, however, who was with Goering at that moment, was angry with me and told Goering that I should be liquidated. Himmler has done every possible harm to me throughout my life.

“Himmler hated the church. He and Bormann were the two people who influenced Hitler most. When I spoke to Hitler in the beginning he agreed with me and said that no state could be governed without religion. In
Mein Kampf
he said that a man was a fool if he destroyed the religion of the people. Hitler also made the statement that a political reform should not be a religious reform.

“It was not my fault that Hitler went back on his word in this regard just as he has gone back on his word in so many other things. In the course of Hitler’s evolution he changed his mind about many points. But at the time when he came to power, such was not the case. I really thought that it was his earnest desire to comply in matters of religion. In his speeches to the Reichstag in March 1933, he said that he respected Christian fundamentals and would do everything to uphold them. It was I who had asked Hitler to include this point in his speeches.”

All of the previous reminiscence had been made by Papen in what sounded like a well-rehearsed, studied manner, without much emotional tone or feeling. I asked him whether he felt that anti-Semitism was compatible with religious freedom and tolerance. He replied, “Not at all. But Hitler didn’t strive for the annihilation of the Jews — he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.”

I said then that it would seem that he felt that a discrimination against individual rights on a religious basis was not incorrect. I further remarked that in effect he preached religious freedom and tolerance and practiced a form of anti-Semitism. Papen became somewhat excited and claimed with great charm and much smiling that I must have misunderstood him — that he merely meant that he was for allowing a certain percentage of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants to be present in certain
professions and businesses but that he was not at all for disposing or disenfranchising the Jews. “I thought that a correction of what Hitler called the Jewish question could be done in a normal, smooth way. I don’t think that at the beginning, Hitler had such radical ideas about the solution of the Jewish problem — or at any rate he never revealed it. When Hitler made the first law aimed at doing away with Jewish influence, I limited it so that all Jews who had been in Germany since 1914 could stay there. You see, after 1918, when the war was lost, we had an influx of Jews from the East. This overflow was absolutely abnormal in Germany and the only time it had happened was after the revolution in 1918. There was a considerable amount, that influx. We thought that this should be corrected.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop
1893–1946

Joachim von Ribbentrop was foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. Found guilty at Nuremberg of conspiracy to commit crimes, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, he was hanged on October 16, 1946.

It was Sunday. He was seated at his desk, apparently working on some papers connected with his defense (I assume). He was courteous, seemed pleased to see Gilbert and myself. We sat on his bed, which he cleared of papers, books, and so forth. He sat on the chair opposite, smoked an old pipe.

He is a handsome man who appears to be in his late forties or early fifties. There is an air of superficial depression about him, though he frequently smiles or grins agreeably. He speaks excellent English with a faint British accent, sometimes is stumped on vocabulary, but only when the German word he wishes to use is apparently more apropos for the idea than the English equivalent.

The dominant theme of his recital (it amounted to that — with certain questions asked by myself or Gilbert) was how puzzled and astounded he is by the turn of events. Just what he is puzzled about was unclear, probably is unclear to him. There were two leitmotifs: First, could Hitler have known of the atrocities, and if so, let them go on? No, it hardly seems possible. Hitler was such a good man, so ascetic, never ate meat, called Ribbentrop and his other close associates “eaters of dead flesh.” It
must have been Himmler, who perpetrated many things against the Führer’s orders. Second, how could this whole disaster have happened to me? The latter was not expressed by Ribbentrop in words, but there were frequent exclamations of “It’s amazing — I can’t understand how it could have happened. It gets me.”

His career began, insofar as politics are concerned, he said, in 1932, when Hitler and National Socialism were riding into power. Prior to that he had been a “businessman.” He said that at the outbreak of World War I he had been in Canada, shipped out in a ship carrying coal (“coal bunker”) in order to reach Germany and enlist in the army. Apparently he left the army at the end of the war with the rank of first lieutenant.

Just how he met Hitler for the first time is yet to be obtained from him. He met him first in 1932, he said. What Ribbentrop’s first positions in the party or government were is also not mentioned. He does say that he assisted in “ways” (which he did not elaborate upon) to bring about the rise of National Socialism in the elections preceding Hitler’s accession to power. I asked him about the episode which is widely known, the business of his having given a “Heil Hitler” salute at the Court of St. James’s. He smiled wanly and said the English papers had taken it up badly, and extracted something out of it which wasn’t there. He had given the straight-up Hitler salute to the king on being presented; but he had not said, “Heil Hitler,” with the salute. In fact the king was very understanding and next day sent a note saying he understood, and that everything was quite all right. Besides, they gave that salute to many crowned heads, to the kings of Italy, Romania, and so forth. Gilbert remarked at that point that these were fascist states and that probably the fascist salute was appropriate there, but in England it was different perhaps. Ribbentrop said that Romania was not a fascist state, that it was the custom to give the salute of the country from which the ambassador comes.

There were many paradoxical statements in Ribbentrop’s recital. Hitler’s last testament was a bit disappointing, but once one recalled that he wrote it with shells exploding overhead, it could be understood. Hitler was ill during the last couple of years, became more unswayable, stubborn, became more anti-Semitic steadily. He never spoke of losing the war until late in April 1945. As short a time as six weeks before the end, Hitler spoke of winning the war by “a nose’s length.” At that time Ribbentrop first thought Hitler was not thinking clearly.

“I think the only way one can arrive at an understanding of his anti-Semitism growing all the time is because in America your Mr. Roosevelt had his brain trust which was made up of so many Jews, Felix Frankfurter, Claude Pepper — was it Pepper? I can’t recall the other names. Oh yes, Morgenthau.
¹
It made Hitler feel more and more that an international conspiracy had caused the war, with the Jews behind it.”

Asked whether he didn’t think Hitler knew he caused the war, Ribbentrop didn’t reply.