The Nuremberg Interviews (35 page)

The former foreign minister was writing at his flimsy table (so constructed that the weight of a man would cause its collapse) with his back toward the door of the cell when I entered. He had on his horn-rimmed glasses, no tie, strings instead of shoelaces (all laces are removed when prisoners are brought back from court, as a suicide prevention measure). His cell is rather sloppy and littered with junk, in contrast with the spartan cleanliness of many of the other defendants’ cells. Pieces of paper, boxes, matchboxes, coat strewn on bed, clothing not neatly hung up — certainly not the orderliness of the obsessive or the supposedly typical German.

He is quite an affected fellow, but his affectation is so practiced it is almost natural. He spoke of the work he was doing when I entered the cell. In large, sprawling letters he was writing several legal-size pages of material in pencil, telling of his impressions of the last few years, as he expressed it. He said it was hard to put down, because he could not recall many episodes, which would require his files. He has requested certain files through his attorneys, but as yet they haven’t appeared. He read me part of what he was composing. It had to do with his impressions and attitudes toward Hitler. More and more I get the feeling that this is a calculated attitude on Ribbentrop’s part: that he is assisting the building up of an already well-on-its-way myth of the magnetism of Hitler, the one-man rule, the self-enforced isolation of the man, his human qualities, at the same time the inability of any of his fellow workers to ever get to know the man.

He described his first meeting with Hitler. It was in 1932. He evades (it seemed to me) saying exactly where it was or under what circumstances. There were several others present. The impression one got was of a dark face, very blue eyes, a compelling facial expression which held you with
a glance. Further, Hitler’s personality was more strongly impressed on him when he met him the second time, in 1933. Then, he remarks, Hitler was becoming more powerful. He introduced Papen to Hitler at his (Ribbentrop’s) house, and the latter already had a dictatorial air of great power and charm. “He knew how to handle people, especially men, and charmingly. He would speak for twenty-five minutes, then I would say two words; he would change the subject and talk for twenty-five more minutes on other matters. He had a wide knowledge of every subject. He dominated everyone. Once a ‘prominent British’ statesman was urged [by Ribbentrop] to meet Hitler. The former refused, saying, ‘I can’t talk to dictators.’ By this he meant that normally he could sit down as you or I, have an exchange of ideas. With Hitler this was not possible. Hitler did the talking, you listened.”

Ribbentrop has the air at times of a ham actor taking the part of the great statesman who has become a little foggy because of all he has undergone in the past few years. He has a serious face, at times illumined by his old, charming smile, which can be turned on and off at will. When at rest or repose, the face registers blankness and there is a dogged quality in the forced set of the lips. When observed or during conversation, he speaks constantly, with some moments of void in the conversation, but not moments in which he expects the listener to contribute any words. In fact, when I want to steer the conversation along certain lines, or ask a question which would perhaps open new channels in his thinking, he deliberately seems to have difficulty hearing, then asks for the question to be repeated, then usually answers evasively or in such broad terms as amount to an evasion.

The content of his monologue today was Hitler. What a great personality. How charming, diplomatic, magnetic he was. How he could hold the whole of Germany in his palm. “They were all like schoolboys in front of him, even Bormann.” Yet it is so obvious from these trials that Hitler had his cruel side. But a man who brought Germany out of the dirt, didn’t he have to be cruel at times in achieving his great purpose? But, of course, Ribbentrop never dreamt that Hitler or the Nazis were being cruel until the revelations of these trials. I asked about his reaction to the Russian case thus far. Terrible stuff they are saying, he said. Then he laughed and observed: “If you listen to them, every German is a monster.” I queried, just how much did he think was true, how much exaggeration? He looked serious and blank for a moment. He admitted he
could not tell. Some must be true, he said. I then asked about his reaction to Hans Frank’s diary and the revelations which had been read. (Frank confessed that if he had reported to Hitler he had killed 150,000 more Poles, Hitler would have said, “Fine.”)
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Ribbentrop shook his head and held the left temporal region. “That fellow, why did he write such stuff?” he exclaimed.

I persisted in trying to get some reaction, good or bad, from him. If it were true, was it not bad? Or was it justified in the sense that the Nazis justified it? Ribbentrop said of course it was bad, but the feeling I got was that he was really not concerned about the killings, brutalities, and horrors of the German methods, but rather that such a fool like Frank was injudicious enough to write it all down in a diary.

He then went on to describe his meeting with Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov in Moscow when he consummated the Nonaggression Pact.
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He was there but a day and a night, and later returned for a large banquet, in which toasts were made. Molotov he considers very competent and clever. Stalin rules Russia (using again the same cliché he applied to Hitler) “holding the Russian people in the palm of his hand. That is the way with dictatorial governments,” he said. “In our government it was Hitler’s policy to have each minister or department head know only what concerned his work. Therefore I didn’t know of the invasion of Norway, for instance, until twenty-four hours before it occurred. He kept the Foreign Office out of the military. The same with the Russian war. I never knew about it until twenty-four hours before it happened.”

Personally, I believe this myth of Hitler’s taking nobody into his confidence about his plans, methods, attitudes of state, and so forth is a means of avoiding, in a rather obvious manner, the responsibilities of sharing in guilt. Ribbentrop will state he knew nothing of anything until after it happened. Goering says the same thing. So do all the other ministers and members of the cabinet. Everything is now blamed on Hitler, Himmler, and Bormann.

“I rather liked Stalin and Molotov, got along fine with them,” Ribbentrop remarked in his bright, sophisticated, charming manner, so incongruous with the surroundings and the general atmosphere of Nazi depravity that the trials have clearly indicated.

He also described that he had at times severe left-sided headaches and once had slight weakness of the right upper and lower limbs. At the time he was told it was a “cramp” of one of the blood vessels in the head.
I tapped his deep reflexes with my fingers but could not make out any large differences in responses. He does take sleeping pills at night, he says, and sometimes APCs during the day for the headache.

Ribbentrop was seated in his cell, working on his notes. There were voluminous pages of court transcript, typewritten pages of his own notes, many large folders full of documents strewn all over the cell. On his table, he had some notes on the Czechoslovakian situation in the time of Hitler and said that he would give these notes to his lawyer.

He said that this morning he again experienced difficulty in opening his left eye and some buzzing sound of high-pitched quality in his left ear. I examined the left eye and found that there was some tendency to drooping of the left lid, which appeared to be on a nonorganic basis. It was interesting that during the course of the subsequent interview, which lasted for about an hour, his eye completely opened and there was no longer any ptosis.

He spoke again about his physical difficulties. He said that he wanted my frank opinion as to whether he had some disease of the brain or not. He repeated his oft-phrased opinion that there was something the matter with his vagus nerve and that probably the blood circulation to the left side of his head was defective. He said that this feeling came and went at certain periods, that he had been feeling fairly well and free of symptoms for about two weeks, but that today he felt worse. He said that the outstanding symptom he suffered was an inability to concentrate; for example, “I will read a page or a paragraph of my notes and not know what I have been reading at all.” He gave other examples of a similar nature. He said that sometimes he could not remember what had transpired in court the previous day. Then suddenly he would recall such events and he would be startled because of his poor memory. He wondered at one time whether he was developing the same type of mental weakness that Hess had.

Ribbentrop went on to discuss his favorite topics, namely, Hitler and National Socialist foreign policy. He said, “I know that you don’t like to hear about the Versailles Treaty, but you know and everyone knows that this treaty was a great injustice. Hitler sprang up as a result of this tremendous injustice that had been done to Germany. I have been thinking it all over these many months. I remember that in 1928, 1929,
and 1930, before I became a National Socialist and before Hitler came into power, I told my French and English friends abroad that they must render assistance to the German government of Bruening, or they would have Hitler on their hands. But England and France refused to give Germany anything at all.”

He said that the greatest mistake today was this trial. “I don’t mean that it is important whether a few of us like Goering, myself, or the others are sentenced to death or hard labor or whatever, but to the German people we will always remain their leaders, right or wrong, and in a few years even you Americans and the rest of the world will see this trial as a mistake. The German people will learn to hate the Americans, distrust the British and French, and unfortunately, perhaps be taken in by the Russians. That will be the worst calamity of all. I hate to think of Moscow ruling Germany or Germany becoming a territorial possession of the Soviet Union. The Allies should take the attitude, now that the war is over, that mistakes have been made on both sides, that those of us here on trial are German patriots, and that though we may have been misled and gone too far with Hitler, we did it in good faith and as German citizens. Furthermore, the German people will always regard our condemnation by a foreign court as unjust and will consider us martyrs.

“Hitler has been the greatest riddle for me. He always was. We often commented in our private circle in the Foreign Office that Hitler had taken too literally the old Hapsburg slogan of ‘Divide and conquer.’ He went so far as to not allow his own ministers to achieve much power. He would not tell me of many things that were going on. The same is true of his other subordinates. As years went on, Hitler became more and more distrustful. In the end he appointed a new cabinet, with a new foreign minister. That was in his last testament. I can’t understand it. I was one of his most faithful followers — perhaps
the
most faithful.”

Ribbentrop brushed aside the Jewish extermination events. He said that in the long view, historically, the Jews’ extermination would always be a blot on German history, but that it was in a way attributable to the fact that Hitler had lost his sense of proportion and, because he was losing the war, went “wild” on the subject of the Jews. But the big historical issue was not that Jews had been exterminated but that Germany had really been oppressed and never given a chance.

“In 1940 after the outbreak of the war I sent two Foreign Office representatives to America to contact several large Jewish banking houses,
to try to get them to use their influence to keep America out of the war and influence England to make peace with Germany. Unfortunately, my representatives received a very cool reception. The American Jews and others obviously distrusted and hated the Nazi regime. They refused to cooperate in preventing President Roosevelt and his brain trust from lending assistance to England. Lend-lease continued and the whole American atmosphere toward Germany was hostile.
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If only these American bankers had intervened and threatened England, forced her to accept Hitler’s peace offers — and we were prepared to make a peace with England in 1940 — all these terrible exterminations of the Jews could have been prevented.”

I remarked that it seemed to me he was still seeing things from a rather one-sided viewpoint. Did he really think, like Hitler, that it was the Jews in America who were opposed to Nazi Germany’s aggression, or did he realize that all the democratic peoples in the world disliked Hitlerism and were opposed to it? Did he not realize that in the eyes of the world, Hitler and the Nazi government were seen as war makers and guilty of fascist terror and nationalism of such an abnormal sort, that any peace at that time would have meant the victory of Germany and the subsequent victory of Nazi ideology? Did he not see that no nation, other than Germany, wanted Hitler to rule the world?

Ribbentrop gestured with his hands. “I am sure that Hitler only wanted the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor, a trade agreement with Austria, and perhaps a few colonies, that is all. I am sure that he would not have tried to pursue further aggressive actions. Hitler was not yet off balance and had not gone in the wrong direction, which he later did.”

I remarked that in an interview that I had with Streicher, the latter told me that Jackson’s real name was Jacobson, that the reason for all the difficulties Germany had was a “Jewish plot” by the rich Jews in America, England, and France, and the Bolshevik Jews in Russia. Furthermore, Streicher had told me yesterday that his opinion was that if all the Jews in the world, down to the last person with any Jewish blood in him, had been successfully exterminated, there would be no trials and the world would be better off. Did Hitler, in Ribbentrop’s opinion, have more or less identical views? “I think he did. I think Hitler was off balance in regard to the Jewish question, too. He told me often that the Jews caused the war, and that there was a complicity between Jewish capitalism and Jewish Bolshevism. I never could understand this and I
thought he was mistaken. In fact, I know he was mistaken. After I went to Russia and met Stalin, to conclude the German-Russian Nonaggression Pact, I came back to Berlin and told Hitler that I saw no Jews in the leading positions in Russia. The only Jew I met was Lazar Kaganovich, who impressed me as being a very nice old gentleman.
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Hitler simply ignored my observation. I know for a fact that this idea of the Jews causing the war and the Jews being so all-important is nonsense. But that was Hitler’s idea, and as time went on he became more and more obsessed with this idea. It was pure fantasy. As I say, Hitler is a riddle to me and will always remain so.