The Nuremberg Interviews (36 page)

“Hitler had a brutal side to him as well as a decent side. It was the decent side that appealed to me. He was very nice to me. He was often very affectionate. Yet on the other hand, he would be most friendly and affectionate on one day, and the very next time I saw him he would criticize me and even accuse me of betraying him in some way or another. I was his most faithful follower and such accusations hurt me. Do you know that after the
Attentat
of July 20, 1944, Hitler said, in the presence of several generals, that it was I who sent emissaries to Sweden to sue for peace? It cut me to the quick. I said nothing. I clicked my heels and walked out of the room. It was another example of Hitler’s mistrusting everyone.” Ribbentrop went on at length to describe how Germany had had 7 million unemployed in 1932 and how Hitler came to power because the masses felt that they would be benefited by him. “Besides, they had no alternative — it was either Hitler and Nazism or Communism.”

This morning Ribbentrop wanted to remain in his cell instead of going to court because he felt weak and had a headache. He localized the pain in his head as being in the left parietal region near the midline.

He spoke of the trials and of the past. He complained of inability to concentrate. “Maybe I can’t concentrate because I work too steadily in my cell from the moment court is over until lights are turned low. Perhaps I work so hard because it prevents me from thinking.”

He wanted to know what the general reaction to his attorney’s court pleading the other day had been. I said that in general the other defendants seemed to have thought Dr. Horn, his defense counsel, had done a good job. I said there was one defendant who made a remark which was
not flattering to Ribbentrop but complimentary to Horn. Ribbentrop insisted on knowing what this remark had been. I told him that Gilbert had mentioned the matter to me, that I had not heard the remark directly. According to Gilbert, the remark had been a jocular one, something to the effect that Dr. Horn would have made a better foreign minister than Ribbentrop.

He laughed in a halfhearted way. “Yes, they are always making digs at my expense. Nothing succeeds like success. While I was foreign minister nobody ever criticized a word I said or a deed I performed. Now, suddenly all these defendants feel they were smarter than I, that I was stupid as a foreign minister, and I have read that in the Allied press I’m referred to as the former champagne salesman who became foreign minister to the former corporal.

“I was truly under Hitler’s spell, that cannot be denied. I was impressed with him from the moment I first met him, in 1932. He had terrific power, especially in his eyes. Now the tribunal accuses us of conspiracy. I say, how can one have a conspiracy in a dictatorship government? One man and one man only made all the crucial decisions. That was the Führer. In all my dealings with him I never discussed the exterminations or anything of that sort.

“What I shall never comprehend is that six weeks before the end of the war he assured me we’d win by a nose. I left his presence then and said that from that time forth I was completely at a loss — that I didn’t understand a thing. Hitler always, until the end, and even now, had a strange fascination over me. Would you call it abnormal of me? Sometimes, in his presence, when he spoke of all his plans, the good things he would do for the
Volk
, vacations, highways, new buildings, cultural advantages and so forth, tears would come to my eyes. Would that be because I’m a hysterical weak man?

“I don’t think I’m particularly weak as a man. Of course, you see me now, beset with illness, which may be functional, but it is nevertheless an illness I have had for at least four years. But until I met Hitler in 1932 or 1933 I was never a coward, or easily influenced. That is why I keep repeating what a magnetic, powerful personality he was.”

The conversation, or monologue, lagged a bit. I asked him of what he was thinking. “Of you. Of your role here. It must be interesting to live with and speak to us defeated leaders of a foreign state. As a psychiatrist you probably know more about us than we ourselves know. Do you
think perhaps I have a tumor up here?” He pointed to the spot on the head at the midparietal region. I said that it was doubtful and unlikely, since his eyegrounds were normal and there were no other neurological manifestations. “Yes, I hardly think it is a tumor either, because I never had any venereal disease. Tumors always come from venereal diseases like syphilis, don’t they?”

I reiterated what I had told him several times in the past few months, that venereal disease was not usually the cause of tumor. He seemed quite obsessed with this concept, and unconsciously seemed to be defending himself from the charge that he might have a dread venereal disease. “Sometimes I think that my memory is going bad, like poor Hess. I know that is stupid and silly. Hess is quite without memory or logic at present. I can think all right, but only if I obtain enough sleep.”

We talked for a bit on his early development. His memory had always been good, he felt, even as a child. Hence his aptitude for languages. He attended school in Kassel and in Metz. He is vague as to just how many years of school he achieved, but in all it was not beyond high school, if that far. He lived in Switzerland for a time and had some schooling there, and “private lessons in London and France.” At the age of seventeen he went to Canada, “to visit some friends,” and remained there from 1910 until the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914. He then went to New York, where he obtained work as a “freelance reporter” on several daily papers and lived for a time at the Hotel Vanderbilt, “which became too expensive and so I later moved to a boardinghouse.” He spent six months in New York. Then war was declared, and he felt it his “patriotic duty” to return to the “Fatherland.” He went aboard a Dutch steamer in New York harbor as a passenger. When the boat entered Falmouth, England, he was hidden by a German engineer in the coal bunker of the ship. An English officer came aboard and “was very decent but said I would have to be removed and interned in England along with several hundred other German nationals who were aboard.” After this visit by the English officer he was hidden successfully in the coal bunker until the ship was cleared and came to Holland. He believed that the officer did not search very thoroughly for him aboard the ship because he had struck up an acquaintance with him and he was not too interested in apprehending him.

Thereafter he made his way from Holland to Germany, enlisted in the army, in which he served in a cavalry regiment until the end of the war.

In Canada he had a “very interesting and pleasant time.” He met many wealthy people and had a position with a firm that built a thousand miles of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. He himself worked as a foreman and in other capacities, and helped build the cantilever bridge across the St. Lawrence River near Quebec. In Canada, a year or two after his arrival, he developed tuberculosis of the right kidney and it was removed in a hospital in Quebec. He was below standards for acceptance in the German army at the time he returned to Germany, but he managed to serve nevertheless. He had tuberculosis of the lungs for a short time during the First World War but was completely cured.

He feels that tuberculosis is a familial disease. His mother died in her early thirties of tuberculosis of lungs and kidneys, when he was eleven years of age. His brother, a year or so his senior, was in Canada with him, where he contracted tuberculosis and was hospitalized. He died in a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1918, at the age of twenty-six.

“Strange to say, my mother’s death when I was ten or eleven was a great shock to me and my brother and sister. We loved her greatly, although for years we could not be with her much because of her ill health. I can see her lying dead in her bed just as clearly now as when it happened, forty-one years ago. But the second great shock of my life was even stranger for an adult to admit. That was in 1941, on New Year’s Day, when my father, who was past eighty-two, died in my home in Berlin. I was depressed and shocked for weeks, and perhaps still am. He was my closest friend. He was a soldierly type of man, but very human and sympathetic with his children.

“Father resigned from the army in 1909 because of differences of opinion with Emperor Wilhelm II. But during World War I, my father again entered the army and fought bravely. He had an independent mind, always monarchist but also democratic in thinking. He approved of the National Socialist Party though he never joined until after 1933. He did so then in my interest and on my request. He opposed the anti-Jewish attitude of the party.

“I myself was always of the opinion that the Jewish question was a temporary political one that would find its own solution. I never conceived of the Jew as the great danger, such as Hitler later claimed, and which led to Himmler’s atrocities. If I had known about them, even at the end of this war, I would have committed suicide. The first I ever heard of exterminations was late in 1944, when the Russians recaptured
the region in which Camp Majdanek was installed. They spread the story of Jew exterminations after they captured Majdanek.
⁶
I went to Hitler and asked him. He said it was enemy propaganda.”

Did Ribbentrop still feel he should have committed suicide? “I fully intended to commit suicide when I was captured. I had poison on my person. I wrote a letter to the British early in May after the capitulation, in which I strove for some sort of peace terms. But before I could mail the letter, British police arrived and arrested me. I handed them the letter. They searched me and I gave them the poison. I was sent at once to the prison in Mondorf.”

Did he still feel he should have committed suicide? “No. I feel now that I must face the music, as you say in English. I must accept responsibility even though I had no power as foreign minister because it was a dictator state. That was what I meant when I said in my defense that I stand up for the foreign policy of Germany from 1938 to the end, but regarding the atrocities, the actions in domestic politics, or the actions in occupied territories I can take no responsibility. For example, Hitler often said, ‘Wherever there is a German bayonet, we have no foreign policy but a military one.’ Therefore the entire East, Poland and Russia, Norway, and so forth, were not in my jurisdiction. I probably had a liaison man there with the military authorities, that was all. My function as foreign minister during the war was with the neutral countries, the allied Axis countries, such as Romania, Hungary, Italy, and Japan, and with South America. In France we had an ambassador, Otto Abetz, but I had no control over him. In Denmark I had Werner Best of my office; for two years I tried to avert the Jewish deportations. Best can affirm that.”
⁷

I said: Werner Best, when I interviewed him a few weeks ago, had told me that he was of the opinion you were in favor of his policies in Denmark, but had sent several telegrams to you and had received no reply. Best interpreted that as an affirmation of his request that no Jew be deported, but he was unable to quote you or your attitudes, I said.

Ribbentrop sighed. “Ah, well. I should think Best would at least be loyal. I did a lot for him. I removed him from the Gestapo and placed him in the Foreign Office. Now to save their skins, all these fellows are apt to betray you.” I replied that Best had said quite the opposite, had in fact attempted to support Ribbentrop but had done so in the fashion I just described. Had Ribbentrop sent any reply to the telegrams of Werner Best from Denmark? “I don’t remember. I do know that it was
through my efforts and those of Best that we averted Jewish deportations from Denmark for two years. Then finally Hitler gave Himmler the order, and it was done. But Best tipped off the Jews in Denmark and I think most of them escaped to Sweden or somewhere by small boats before Eichmann and his transports arrived.”

We discussed his own attitude toward Jews again. He repeated the story of how he gave Hermann Neubacher of Vienna a job in his Foreign Office after the party wanted to remove him from office in Vienna because he had associated with Jews when he was mayor there. “I told Hitler that if Neubacher was to be prosecuted, I should be removed from office too, as I had many dealings with Jews before 1933. Hitler merely told me that he would arrange things, and I was able to take Neubacher into my office.”

Ribbentrop’s wife was the former Annelies Henkell, daughter of the German champagne manufacturer Henkell. “In Canada, I was engaged to marry the daughter of my boss, a millionaire, but the war interfered. I married in July 1920 in Wiesbaden. It was a love affair. I had completely gotten over my first love. My married life has been ideal. It’s hard for me to talk about my marriage because it’s so dear to me. Unfortunately, I could not spend as much time with my children as I should have liked because I was so busy with state affairs from 1933, and before that with international business. You met my daughter. What did you think of her? She’s a sweet little girl, isn’t she?”

I said she impressed me quite favorably, but she was not a little girl, rather a tall, well-built young lady. “Yes. She is tall. What worries me now is that she is expecting a baby in six weeks, and this is a terrible time for her to have a baby, isn’t it? I don’t give a darn for my own fate, but she will worry. The grandchild will be my first.”

His daughter, the second oldest of his children, was twenty-two. She married last May while Ribbentrop was a prisoner in Mondorf. “Bettina has always been my favorite, though I love all of my five children. My oldest child, Rudolf Lothar, was born in 1921 in Wiesbaden. He was educated primarily in Berlin, then spent a year at a preparatory school in London when I was ambassador there, then the usual period in the Hitler Youth, labor duty, and the army. He was with an SS panzer division, and at the end of the war was a captain, sustained a few wounds, and was decorated for distinguished service. He is still a POW in an American camp. Bettina was born in 1922, Ursula in 1932, Adolf in 1935,
and Barthold in 1940. All are in good health, with the exception of Adolf, who seems to have weak lungs.”