Hitler’s Last Peace Offer? The Secret Ribbentrop Mission April 1945
Many sources suggest that Hitler wanted to prolong the w4r because he believed that the allies would fall out, specifically the Americans and the Soviets, and that open conflict between the two was likely. This was certainly his thinking in April 1945 as the Third Reich faced oblivion. A rump Nazi state might still survive if the Allied coalition against him fell to pieces.
On the 15th of April 1945, Hitler had been given a copy of the post w4r Allied division of a defeated Germany plan, which had been captured from the British. Over the next couple of weeks, Hitler noted that, for example, the United States had entered into the post w4r Soviet zone by reaching the Elbe demarcation line and then crossing over, pushing on, and also moving into parts of Czechoslovakia.
He thought some kind of clash between the two was inevitable. Indeed, German military intelligence had intercepted Soviet communications showing that the US advances were making them nervous, and that they were preparing a military contingency if the United States fell to move back from these areas once peace was declared.
German intelligence also reported that the British were preparing to f1ght the Soviets. These rumors kept Hitler going in his bunker. He also believed that the remaining forces of Nazi Germany f1ghting hard against the onrushing Soviets were capable, with Western Allied help, of stemming the so called Bolshevik horde.
The sudden de4th of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 12th of April 1945 had genuinely lifted the mood in Hitler’s bunker. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, was convinced that it was an omen presaging the breakup of the Allied coalition. It wasn’t. For German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the w4r had been a personal disaster for him.
Diplomacy was sidelined and he with it. Hitler had grown tired of him and actively avoided meeting him as the w4r dr4gged on. In the fallout from the 20th of July 1944 a.ssa.ssination attempt on Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, it was shown that many Foreign Office diplomats had been involved in the coup attempt and Ribbentrop’s star fell yet further.
Hours after the b0mb, Ribbentrop had joined a shaken Hitler for tea with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the head of the Navy, and the head of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Dönitz had beg.un to rail against the failures of the Luftwaffe and in his embarra.ssment, Göring had turned the conversation onto Ribbentrop and the failures of German foreign policy and of the treacherous diplomats that had been found in his department.
Göring had railed at Ribbentrop during this confrontation, shouting at him in response when he tried to defend himself, “Ribbentrop, you dirty little champagne salesman, shut your mouth.” Göring had then thre4tened to hit Ribbentrop with his Reichsmarschall’s baton. Ribbentrop, outraged, had argued back, “I am still the Foreign Minister and my name is von Ribbentrop.
” The truth was Ribbentrop was being phased out of the inner circle around Hitler and he was by early April 1945 desperate to still be relevant and most importantly back in the Führer’s favor. With the final showdown with the Soviets rapidly approaching, it was important to keep up the morale of the troops. Hitler never went to near the front lines after about 1940, so it was left to his acolytes to visit the troops in an attempt to raise morale.
Propaganda Minister Goebbels had made a highly publicized visit to Lauban on the 6th of March 1945 following a local German victory there, where he decorated troops and also watched German artillery pounding Soviet positions. Ribbentrop decided to do the same. He made a visit to the Oder front on the 3rd of April 1945, one of the very last made by a German leader.
Ribbentrop was a former World W4r I cavalry officer who had earned the Iron Cross first cla.ss in the trenches, so he was familiar with combat. He was photographed studying Soviet positions through field gla.sses from a trench. Unbeknownst to Hitler, since Roosevelt’s de4th, Ribbentrop had been circulating a 14 page memorandum via German diplomatic channels designed for Allied consumption.
It was based on what would turn out to be a fairly accurate proposition, an account of what Stalin was planning for Europe post w4r. It asked whether Britain could allow the Soviets to menace her traditional routes to her empire in the Middle East and India, particularly once the United States withdrew most of its forces from Western Europe, which Ribbentrop believed they would do at some point.
On the 16th of April 1945, the Soviet offensive against Berlin opened, and for three bl00dy days, the Red Army fought its way through the last German defense line east of Berlin, the Seelow Heights. The Germans managed to inflict a lot of damage before falling back on Berlin. The end was now approaching as the ma.ssive Soviet spearheads approached Berlin, planning eventually to encircle it and capture it street by street, house by house.
On the 20th of April, Hitler emerged from his bunker to attend a formal reception in the battered Reich Chancellery held to celebrate his 56th birthday. Ribbentrop was in attendance along with most of the other senior Nazi leaders. Later that day, Berlin came under direct Soviet artillery fire for the first time.
Ribbentrop returned to his headquarters in the city. Since the 13th of April, Ribbentrop had ordered almost all of his staff evacuated south, primarily to his huge country estate Schloss Fuschl over the border in Austria, not far from Hitler’s residence at Obersalzberg, and located next to the lake of the same name.
However, Ribbentrop and a skeleton staff remained based in the Foreign Ministry bunkers in Berlin, Ribbentrop unwilling to give up his close physical proximity to the Führer. It was on the 22nd of April that Hitler, his latest military idea for the relief of Berlin frustrated, flew into a terrible rage at his staff and generals and announced that he would d1e in Berlin.
Soon after this, Hitler received a message from Ribbentrop to the effect that a diplomatic breakthrough was imminent in the West. This changed the mood in the bunker immediately. Inquiries were made, and the Luftwaffe reported that US air @ttacks had seemingly been suspended. However, it all turned out to be an illusion.
On the evening of the 23rd of April, Ribbentrop came to the Führerbunker hoping to meet with Hitler. Hitler, however, was in a meeting with Albert Speer, his armaments minister. When Hitler was reminded that Ribbentrop was waiting to see him, he wasn’t happy, reiterating that he didn’t want to meet him at all.
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary, persisted, telling Hitler, “Ribbentrop says he won’t move from the threshold, and he’ll wait like a faithful dog until you call him.” Hitler eventually relented. What we know of Ribbentrop’s last meeting with Hitler comes entirely from Ribbentrop’s account, made to Allied interrogators and members of his own staff, and therefore Ribbentrop is the only source.
Hitler allegedly told Ribbentrop that the w4r was lost. But Hitler still had a job for Ribbentrop, which, considering that he had been actively resisting meeting with him, sounds a little bit fishy. According to Ribbentrop, the Führer ordered him to leave Berlin at once and go to northwestern Germany and make contact with the British.
He was to tell them that Hitler had always desired close relations with the British and to propose an Anglo German bloc to confront the Soviets. Ribbentrop was also to write a letter to this effect to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and deliver it into British hands. For Hitler, apparently, Ribbentrop was the man.
After all, he had been German amba.ssador to London before the w4r and spoke fluent English. Some historians suggest that if the exchange between Hitler and Ribbentrop was genuine, it was just a ruse on Hitler’s part to get Ribbentrop away from Berlin and stop bothering the Führer. It could also be a ruse on the part of Ribbentrop to save himself from the approaching cataclysm in Berlin, though other evidence I’ll present shortly tends to go against that particular thesis.
Perhaps Ribbentrop imagined the plaudits if he was successful with the British to split the enemy alliance using diplomacy. Later that night, Ribbentrop reported all of this to the State Secretary at the Foreign Office and his top aide, Gustav Steengracht von Moyland. The two men had a bit of an argument over the mission before Ribbentrop said, “I must write this letter to Churchill.
” “At my conference with the Führer, he was quite lucid. He said he had never had anything against England. His goal had always been in a great reconciliation with the Germanic English.” This was very familiar territory for Ribbentrop because he had been intimately involved with Hitler’s 1939 to 40 peace offers to Britain, multiple offers.
But Winston Churchill, once he became Prime Minister in May 1940, refused all such entreaties. Soon afterw4rds, von Moyland departed for Schloss Fuschl in the south, but would later appear in Schleswig Holstein where the Dönitz rump government had been created in northern Germany following Hitler’s de4th. Grand Admiral Dönitz had already set up his military headquarters at Plön on the 22nd of April, a.ssuming command of all German forces in Schleswig Holstein, the western Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway per Hitler’s order of the 20th of April.
Ribbentrop prepared to depart north to Plön as well, leaving Walter Hewel, another State Secretary in the Foreign Office and a career diplomat, his personal representative at Führer headquarters. Hewel wouldn’t survive the Battle for Berlin. At some point on the 24th of April, Ribbentrop managed to leave Berlin by car just before the Soviets completed the encirclement of the city.
In one or two cars, Ribbentrop’s party, consisting of Ribbentrop, a driver, and a bodyguard, a secretary, a doctor, his adjutant, his valet, and his dog left the burning city. The distance from Berlin to Plön is less than 200 mi, yet it took Ribbentrop a week to arrive. It appears that Ribbentrop found it very difficult to give up his close proximity to the Führer.
It also appears that at one point Ribbentrop tried to go back to Berlin, being halted at Nauen, some miles west of the capital. From there, he telegraphed Walter Hewel and told him that he and his party wish to share the Führer’s fate in the capital and asked for an aircraft to come and pick them up. Hewel relayed a message from Hitler, “The Führer appreciates your intentions, but has turned you down.
” Had Ribbentrop realized that he had been sent on a fool’s errand by his beloved Führer? Perhaps. Did he not fancy surrendering himself to the British in order to deliver his letter? Again, perhaps. A little while later, Ribbentrop’s party turned up at the headquarters of General Lieutenant Rudolf Holste, commanding the 56th Panzer Corps on the lower Elbe.
Holste’s headquarters was at Friesack, 40 mi northwest of Nauen. Ribbentrop wanted information on the local military situation. At some point thereafter, Ribbentrop managed to get his hands on an aircraft. For he and his party were flown to Wittstock airfield near Kiel, arriving on the night of the 30th of April, some hours after Hitler had d1ed in the bunker.
Martin Bormann had telegraphed Grand Admiral Dönitz at Plön, informing Dönitz that he was now Reich President, but didn’t tell him that Hitler was de@d until the 1st of May. Dönitz determined to continue the w4r for the time being for his own reasons. He could appoint his own cabinet and wanted Konstantin von Neurath, a career diplomat and former foreign minister until 1938 to be the new foreign minister, but he couldn’t be found.
Ribbentrop arrived at Plön soon afterw4rds and est4blished a small headquarters nearby. Dönitz’s adjutant actually phoned Ribbentrop’s adjutant to ask if anyone knew of the whereabouts of von Neurath. Ribbentrop was sh0cked. He was the foreign minister and should be under Dönitz as well. He demanded an interview with the new Reich President.
The meeting took place late on the 1st of May, Ribbentrop arguing that he had the legal right to be the foreign minister and that he knew the British and they had always been pleased to deal with him. The area of Schleswig Holstein was in the part of Germany to fall under British occupation post w4r. Dönitz, however, stuck to his g.uns.
He would not appoint him foreign minister, but he would be happy to hear any suggestions Ribbentrop might have for the post. But when he phoned back on the 2nd of May, his only suggestion was himself. Ribbentrop also drafted a memorandum for Dönitz that argued that his government must obtain Allied recognition and serve as the nucleus for a new Nazi government of Germany.
Dönitz would eventually appoint Count Schwerin von Krosigk as foreign minister. On the 2nd of May, due to the advance of British forces, Dönitz moved his seat of government to the Naval Academy at Flensburg Mürwik on the Danish border. Ribbentrop did not go with him. For some reason, Ribbentrop headed south to Hamburg, the last major German city on the Western Front to be captured, which was an active b4ttle zone at the time.
It would fall to the British on the 3rd of May, 1945. Why did he do this? If Ribbentrop’s intention was to contact the British as per Hitler’s alleged instructions, he did the opposite by going into hiding soon after arriving in the city. He visited the home of a vintner that he knew from his pre w4r life as a champagne salesman.
The vintner didn’t want Ribbentrop at his own home, so he arranged for him to stay in the apartment of an attractive brunette in the suburbs. Here, Ribbentrop remained for the next 6 weeks working on his letter to Churchill while the British searched for him. The Dönitz government itself was dissolved on the 23rd of May 1945 by the order of the British and its members hauled off to pr1son.
From Allied headquarters aboard the Patria at Flensburg, North Germany, orders go out for the arr.est of the last top Nazis. German sailors, marines, and sold1ers who had guarded the so called Flensburg government of Admiral Dönitz are made captive. And the high commanders of this curious organization, which had served as the surrendering authority for defeated Germany, are put under arr.est.
Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff, leaves the enemy’s Flensburg headquarters for internment. Jodl signed the German surrender to Eisenhower in Reims. Flensburg’s g.un placements never saw action. Now, the Führer of the beaten Third Reich, Grand Admiral Dönitz himself, comes out under Allied arr.est.
With Jodl, he walks through a tunnel in the Flensburg compound to impr1sonment. A fanatical Nazi, Dönitz was the commander of Germany’s unrestricted submarine w4rfare. With the arr.est of Jodl and Dönitz, the Third Reich is ended forever. Ribbentrop worked on on his letter, all 5,000 words of it, but by now the w4r in Europe was over and the letter was quite superfluous to the Nazi cause, which had ceased to exist.
The manh.unt for Ribbentrop, however, was intensifying. His photo was circulated widely and his relatives were brought in for questioning. But Ribbentrop, living under the false name of Herr Reiser, was not found. He was only located accidentally when the Wintner, friend of his, was overheard by a woman remarking that he knew Ribbentrop was in Hamburg, and this woman attempted to bl4ckmail him with this information.
But the Wintner’s son went to the British Field Security Headquarters in Hamburg and told them everything. Late on the evening of the 14th of June, 1945, the British sprang into action. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Jimmy Adam, gathered three NCOs, one of them a Frenchman serving in the Belgian SAS, and drove to Ribbentrop’s hideout.
Adam knocked on the door, which was opened by the aforementioned attractive brunette wearing a dressing gown. The British sold1ers marched inside and began searching. In the fifth room, they found Ribbentrop dressed in pajamas, asleep in bed. He was woken up and looked exhausted and disheveled, but spoke English to his captors.
At the British Field Security Headquarters at Osterufer in Hamburg, Ribbentrop was examined by a doctor. He was found to have a small cyanide capsule in a case taped to one of his legs. The next morning, 15th of June, he was interviewed by Major Morris Hockliff and Captain Harold Harris. Ribbentrop was chatty and jovial and discussed his efforts to make peace with Britain.
He also outlined his secret peace mission given to him by Hitler, producing the long letter he had written as evidence. Hockliffe sent the letter up the chain of command to Field Marshal Montgomery, who sent it on to Winston Churchill, who sent it on to Stalin for his information. Hockliffe also asked Ribbentrop why he had not contacted the British authorities instead of hiding for 6 weeks.
Ribbentrop’s explanation was that he had been alarmed by the hatred and bitterness of the British tow4rds the Germans, based probably on what he was seeing in occupied Hamburg at the time, and had decided to lie low for a while to allow pa.ssions to cool. Whether this man was even Ribbentrop was brought into question by Hockliffe’s superior, Colonel Neil McDermott, who had been told by the Americans that they had just captured Ribbentrop in Bremen.
A proper identification was required. The British obtained Ribbentrop’s sister, Ingeborg Jenke, and she confirmed that the pr1soner was indeed her brother. Following this, Ribbentrop was flown to Luxembourg, to Bad Mondorf, in a converted hotel known as Camp Ashcan, where he was housed with other w4r crime suspects until the Nuremberg trials opened later in 1945.
Whether Ribbentrop’s peace mission ever existed is debatable. Perhaps it was simply invented by Ribbentrop to give his position some meaning tow4rds the end of the w4r, or was simply some kind of opportunistic tactic that he had lost interest in carrying through once he knew that Hitler was de@d. Joachim von Ribbentrop was found guilty of crimes against peace, deliberately planning a w4r of aggression, w4r crimes, and crimes against humanity.
He was the first to be ex3cuted, hanged on the 16th of October, 1946, in a botched execution. He took 14 minutes to d1e. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share and also visit my audiobook channel W4r Stories with Mark Felton. You can also help to support both of my channels at PayPal and Patreon.
Many sources suggest that Hitler wanted to prolong the w4r because he believed that the allies would fall out, specifically the Americans and the Soviets, and that open conflict between the two was likely. This was certainly his thinking in April 1945 as the Third Reich faced oblivion. A rump Nazi state might still survive if the Allied coalition against him fell to pieces.
On the 15th of April 1945, Hitler had been given a copy of the post w4r Allied division of a defeated Germany plan, which had been captured from the British. Over the next couple of weeks, Hitler noted that, for example, the United States had entered into the post w4r Soviet zone by reaching the Elbe demarcation line and then crossing over, pushing on, and also moving into parts of Czechoslovakia.
He thought some kind of clash between the two was inevitable. Indeed, German military intelligence had intercepted Soviet communications showing that the US advances were making them nervous, and that they were preparing a military contingency if the United States fell to move back from these areas once peace was declared.
German intelligence also reported that the British were preparing to f1ght the Soviets. These rumors kept Hitler going in his bunker. He also believed that the remaining forces of Nazi Germany f1ghting hard against the onrushing Soviets were capable, with Western Allied help, of stemming the so called Bolshevik horde.
The sudden de4th of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the 12th of April 1945 had genuinely lifted the mood in Hitler’s bunker. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, was convinced that it was an omen presaging the breakup of the Allied coalition. It wasn’t. For German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the w4r had been a personal disaster for him.
Diplomacy was sidelined and he with it. Hitler had grown tired of him and actively avoided meeting him as the w4r dr4gged on. In the fallout from the 20th of July 1944 a.ssa.ssination attempt on Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, it was shown that many Foreign Office diplomats had been involved in the coup attempt and Ribbentrop’s star fell yet further.
Hours after the b0mb, Ribbentrop had joined a shaken Hitler for tea with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the head of the Navy, and the head of the Luftwaffe, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. Dönitz had beg.un to rail against the failures of the Luftwaffe and in his embarra.ssment, Göring had turned the conversation onto Ribbentrop and the failures of German foreign policy and of the treacherous diplomats that had been found in his department.
Göring had railed at Ribbentrop during this confrontation, shouting at him in response when he tried to defend himself, “Ribbentrop, you dirty little champagne salesman, shut your mouth.” Göring had then thre4tened to hit Ribbentrop with his Reichsmarschall’s baton. Ribbentrop, outraged, had argued back, “I am still the Foreign Minister and my name is von Ribbentrop.
” The truth was Ribbentrop was being phased out of the inner circle around Hitler and he was by early April 1945 desperate to still be relevant and most importantly back in the Führer’s favor. With the final showdown with the Soviets rapidly approaching, it was important to keep up the morale of the troops. Hitler never went to near the front lines after about 1940, so it was left to his acolytes to visit the troops in an attempt to raise morale.
Propaganda Minister Goebbels had made a highly publicized visit to Lauban on the 6th of March 1945 following a local German victory there, where he decorated troops and also watched German artillery pounding Soviet positions. Ribbentrop decided to do the same. He made a visit to the Oder front on the 3rd of April 1945, one of the very last made by a German leader.
Ribbentrop was a former World W4r I cavalry officer who had earned the Iron Cross first cla.ss in the trenches, so he was familiar with combat. He was photographed studying Soviet positions through field gla.sses from a trench. Unbeknownst to Hitler, since Roosevelt’s de4th, Ribbentrop had been circulating a 14 page memorandum via German diplomatic channels designed for Allied consumption.
It was based on what would turn out to be a fairly accurate proposition, an account of what Stalin was planning for Europe post w4r. It asked whether Britain could allow the Soviets to menace her traditional routes to her empire in the Middle East and India, particularly once the United States withdrew most of its forces from Western Europe, which Ribbentrop believed they would do at some point.
On the 16th of April 1945, the Soviet offensive against Berlin opened, and for three bl00dy days, the Red Army fought its way through the last German defense line east of Berlin, the Seelow Heights. The Germans managed to inflict a lot of damage before falling back on Berlin. The end was now approaching as the ma.ssive Soviet spearheads approached Berlin, planning eventually to encircle it and capture it street by street, house by house.
On the 20th of April, Hitler emerged from his bunker to attend a formal reception in the battered Reich Chancellery held to celebrate his 56th birthday. Ribbentrop was in attendance along with most of the other senior Nazi leaders. Later that day, Berlin came under direct Soviet artillery fire for the first time.
Ribbentrop returned to his headquarters in the city. Since the 13th of April, Ribbentrop had ordered almost all of his staff evacuated south, primarily to his huge country estate Schloss Fuschl over the border in Austria, not far from Hitler’s residence at Obersalzberg, and located next to the lake of the same name.
However, Ribbentrop and a skeleton staff remained based in the Foreign Ministry bunkers in Berlin, Ribbentrop unwilling to give up his close physical proximity to the Führer. It was on the 22nd of April that Hitler, his latest military idea for the relief of Berlin frustrated, flew into a terrible rage at his staff and generals and announced that he would d1e in Berlin.
Soon after this, Hitler received a message from Ribbentrop to the effect that a diplomatic breakthrough was imminent in the West. This changed the mood in the bunker immediately. Inquiries were made, and the Luftwaffe reported that US air @ttacks had seemingly been suspended. However, it all turned out to be an illusion.
On the evening of the 23rd of April, Ribbentrop came to the Führerbunker hoping to meet with Hitler. Hitler, however, was in a meeting with Albert Speer, his armaments minister. When Hitler was reminded that Ribbentrop was waiting to see him, he wasn’t happy, reiterating that he didn’t want to meet him at all.
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s powerful private secretary, persisted, telling Hitler, “Ribbentrop says he won’t move from the threshold, and he’ll wait like a faithful dog until you call him.” Hitler eventually relented. What we know of Ribbentrop’s last meeting with Hitler comes entirely from Ribbentrop’s account, made to Allied interrogators and members of his own staff, and therefore Ribbentrop is the only source.
Hitler allegedly told Ribbentrop that the w4r was lost. But Hitler still had a job for Ribbentrop, which, considering that he had been actively resisting meeting with him, sounds a little bit fishy. According to Ribbentrop, the Führer ordered him to leave Berlin at once and go to northwestern Germany and make contact with the British.
He was to tell them that Hitler had always desired close relations with the British and to propose an Anglo German bloc to confront the Soviets. Ribbentrop was also to write a letter to this effect to Prime Minister Winston Churchill and deliver it into British hands. For Hitler, apparently, Ribbentrop was the man.
After all, he had been German amba.ssador to London before the w4r and spoke fluent English. Some historians suggest that if the exchange between Hitler and Ribbentrop was genuine, it was just a ruse on Hitler’s part to get Ribbentrop away from Berlin and stop bothering the Führer. It could also be a ruse on the part of Ribbentrop to save himself from the approaching cataclysm in Berlin, though other evidence I’ll present shortly tends to go against that particular thesis.
Perhaps Ribbentrop imagined the plaudits if he was successful with the British to split the enemy alliance using diplomacy. Later that night, Ribbentrop reported all of this to the State Secretary at the Foreign Office and his top aide, Gustav Steengracht von Moyland. The two men had a bit of an argument over the mission before Ribbentrop said, “I must write this letter to Churchill.
” “At my conference with the Führer, he was quite lucid. He said he had never had anything against England. His goal had always been in a great reconciliation with the Germanic English.” This was very familiar territory for Ribbentrop because he had been intimately involved with Hitler’s 1939 to 40 peace offers to Britain, multiple offers.
But Winston Churchill, once he became Prime Minister in May 1940, refused all such entreaties. Soon afterw4rds, von Moyland departed for Schloss Fuschl in the south, but would later appear in Schleswig Holstein where the Dönitz rump government had been created in northern Germany following Hitler’s de4th. Grand Admiral Dönitz had already set up his military headquarters at Plön on the 22nd of April, a.ssuming command of all German forces in Schleswig Holstein, the western Netherlands, Denmark, and Norway per Hitler’s order of the 20th of April.
Ribbentrop prepared to depart north to Plön as well, leaving Walter Hewel, another State Secretary in the Foreign Office and a career diplomat, his personal representative at Führer headquarters. Hewel wouldn’t survive the Battle for Berlin. At some point on the 24th of April, Ribbentrop managed to leave Berlin by car just before the Soviets completed the encirclement of the city.
In one or two cars, Ribbentrop’s party, consisting of Ribbentrop, a driver, and a bodyguard, a secretary, a doctor, his adjutant, his valet, and his dog left the burning city. The distance from Berlin to Plön is less than 200 mi, yet it took Ribbentrop a week to arrive. It appears that Ribbentrop found it very difficult to give up his close proximity to the Führer.
It also appears that at one point Ribbentrop tried to go back to Berlin, being halted at Nauen, some miles west of the capital. From there, he telegraphed Walter Hewel and told him that he and his party wish to share the Führer’s fate in the capital and asked for an aircraft to come and pick them up. Hewel relayed a message from Hitler, “The Führer appreciates your intentions, but has turned you down.
” Had Ribbentrop realized that he had been sent on a fool’s errand by his beloved Führer? Perhaps. Did he not fancy surrendering himself to the British in order to deliver his letter? Again, perhaps. A little while later, Ribbentrop’s party turned up at the headquarters of General Lieutenant Rudolf Holste, commanding the 56th Panzer Corps on the lower Elbe.
Holste’s headquarters was at Friesack, 40 mi northwest of Nauen. Ribbentrop wanted information on the local military situation. At some point thereafter, Ribbentrop managed to get his hands on an aircraft. For he and his party were flown to Wittstock airfield near Kiel, arriving on the night of the 30th of April, some hours after Hitler had d1ed in the bunker.
Martin Bormann had telegraphed Grand Admiral Dönitz at Plön, informing Dönitz that he was now Reich President, but didn’t tell him that Hitler was de@d until the 1st of May. Dönitz determined to continue the w4r for the time being for his own reasons. He could appoint his own cabinet and wanted Konstantin von Neurath, a career diplomat and former foreign minister until 1938 to be the new foreign minister, but he couldn’t be found.
Ribbentrop arrived at Plön soon afterw4rds and est4blished a small headquarters nearby. Dönitz’s adjutant actually phoned Ribbentrop’s adjutant to ask if anyone knew of the whereabouts of von Neurath. Ribbentrop was sh0cked. He was the foreign minister and should be under Dönitz as well. He demanded an interview with the new Reich President.
The meeting took place late on the 1st of May, Ribbentrop arguing that he had the legal right to be the foreign minister and that he knew the British and they had always been pleased to deal with him. The area of Schleswig Holstein was in the part of Germany to fall under British occupation post w4r. Dönitz, however, stuck to his g.uns.
He would not appoint him foreign minister, but he would be happy to hear any suggestions Ribbentrop might have for the post. But when he phoned back on the 2nd of May, his only suggestion was himself. Ribbentrop also drafted a memorandum for Dönitz that argued that his government must obtain Allied recognition and serve as the nucleus for a new Nazi government of Germany.
Dönitz would eventually appoint Count Schwerin von Krosigk as foreign minister. On the 2nd of May, due to the advance of British forces, Dönitz moved his seat of government to the Naval Academy at Flensburg Mürwik on the Danish border. Ribbentrop did not go with him. For some reason, Ribbentrop headed south to Hamburg, the last major German city on the Western Front to be captured, which was an active b4ttle zone at the time.
It would fall to the British on the 3rd of May, 1945. Why did he do this? If Ribbentrop’s intention was to contact the British as per Hitler’s alleged instructions, he did the opposite by going into hiding soon after arriving in the city. He visited the home of a vintner that he knew from his pre w4r life as a champagne salesman.
The vintner didn’t want Ribbentrop at his own home, so he arranged for him to stay in the apartment of an attractive brunette in the suburbs. Here, Ribbentrop remained for the next 6 weeks working on his letter to Churchill while the British searched for him. The Dönitz government itself was dissolved on the 23rd of May 1945 by the order of the British and its members hauled off to pr1son.
From Allied headquarters aboard the Patria at Flensburg, North Germany, orders go out for the arr.est of the last top Nazis. German sailors, marines, and sold1ers who had guarded the so called Flensburg government of Admiral Dönitz are made captive. And the high commanders of this curious organization, which had served as the surrendering authority for defeated Germany, are put under arr.est.
Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of Staff, leaves the enemy’s Flensburg headquarters for internment. Jodl signed the German surrender to Eisenhower in Reims. Flensburg’s g.un placements never saw action. Now, the Führer of the beaten Third Reich, Grand Admiral Dönitz himself, comes out under Allied arr.est.
With Jodl, he walks through a tunnel in the Flensburg compound to impr1sonment. A fanatical Nazi, Dönitz was the commander of Germany’s unrestricted submarine w4rfare. With the arr.est of Jodl and Dönitz, the Third Reich is ended forever. Ribbentrop worked on on his letter, all 5,000 words of it, but by now the w4r in Europe was over and the letter was quite superfluous to the Nazi cause, which had ceased to exist.
The manh.unt for Ribbentrop, however, was intensifying. His photo was circulated widely and his relatives were brought in for questioning. But Ribbentrop, living under the false name of Herr Reiser, was not found. He was only located accidentally when the Wintner, friend of his, was overheard by a woman remarking that he knew Ribbentrop was in Hamburg, and this woman attempted to bl4ckmail him with this information.
But the Wintner’s son went to the British Field Security Headquarters in Hamburg and told them everything. Late on the evening of the 14th of June, 1945, the British sprang into action. The officer on duty, Lieutenant Jimmy Adam, gathered three NCOs, one of them a Frenchman serving in the Belgian SAS, and drove to Ribbentrop’s hideout.
Adam knocked on the door, which was opened by the aforementioned attractive brunette wearing a dressing gown. The British sold1ers marched inside and began searching. In the fifth room, they found Ribbentrop dressed in pajamas, asleep in bed. He was woken up and looked exhausted and disheveled, but spoke English to his captors.
At the British Field Security Headquarters at Osterufer in Hamburg, Ribbentrop was examined by a doctor. He was found to have a small cyanide capsule in a case taped to one of his legs. The next morning, 15th of June, he was interviewed by Major Morris Hockliff and Captain Harold Harris. Ribbentrop was chatty and jovial and discussed his efforts to make peace with Britain.
He also outlined his secret peace mission given to him by Hitler, producing the long letter he had written as evidence. Hockliffe sent the letter up the chain of command to Field Marshal Montgomery, who sent it on to Winston Churchill, who sent it on to Stalin for his information. Hockliffe also asked Ribbentrop why he had not contacted the British authorities instead of hiding for 6 weeks.
Ribbentrop’s explanation was that he had been alarmed by the hatred and bitterness of the British tow4rds the Germans, based probably on what he was seeing in occupied Hamburg at the time, and had decided to lie low for a while to allow pa.ssions to cool. Whether this man was even Ribbentrop was brought into question by Hockliffe’s superior, Colonel Neil McDermott, who had been told by the Americans that they had just captured Ribbentrop in Bremen.
A proper identification was required. The British obtained Ribbentrop’s sister, Ingeborg Jenke, and she confirmed that the pr1soner was indeed her brother. Following this, Ribbentrop was flown to Luxembourg, to Bad Mondorf, in a converted hotel known as Camp Ashcan, where he was housed with other w4r crime suspects until the Nuremberg trials opened later in 1945.
Whether Ribbentrop’s peace mission ever existed is debatable. Perhaps it was simply invented by Ribbentrop to give his position some meaning tow4rds the end of the w4r, or was simply some kind of opportunistic tactic that he had lost interest in carrying through once he knew that Hitler was de@d. Joachim von Ribbentrop was found guilty of crimes against peace, deliberately planning a w4r of aggression, w4r crimes, and crimes against humanity.
He was the first to be ex3cuted, hanged on the 16th of October, 1946, in a botched execution. He took 14 minutes to d1e. Many thanks for watching. Please subscribe and share and also visit my audiobook channel W4r Stories with Mark Felton. You can also help to support both of my channels at PayPal and Patreon.
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