Incompetence is the hallmark of most forms of government, but especially of fascism. It’s amazing how many people die despite how ineffective and contradictory that incompetence is.
Fascism tends to promote insiders and confused ideologues and, like American prep or WASP culture, nitwits famed for drinking the most in college who piled up contacts and connections, extroverts who did the most networking, who were the most handsome or beautiful, or who came from a name family, preferably one with “enough” money but not too much.
Joachim von (the “von” was an affectation he added gratuitously) Ribbentrop was one of these men.
Primary occupation before becoming Hitler’s Foreign Minister in 1938: spirits salesman. A distributor of luxury products. Sales of whisky, wine, champagne in Europe. Biographer Michael Bloch in RIBBENTROP says that he was very good at selling beverages. His mild, benign, passive, easy touch hit the spot.
But noodled into action by his ambitious wife, Ribbentrop edged his way into politics. A conservative by nature, he was seduced by Hitler as so many other blank young Germans were.
And Hitler was seduced by him. Hitler was impressed by his half-assed knowledge of foreign languages, his salesmanship, his worldliness.
Eventually, Hitler felt he owed Ribbentrop one after the salesman lent his own country estate to the intricate secret negotiations that got Hitler installed in power.
The initial prize: Ribbentrop got to be Hitler’s private man-of-the-world, doing informal diplomacy, which was important since Hitler loathed “professional diplomats” that he inherited from the Weimar days of nominal German democracy.
By 1938, Ribbentrop (and his wife!) got what he wanted: appointment as the top secretary of state.
The end result was that he was hanged – it was a messy hanging, it took 10 to 20 minutes for him to die – by the Allies after the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
His primary crime was the primary crime of all the Nazi command. He had a hand, directly and indirectly, with the execution of the war and with genocide.
But as one of the lesser-known war criminals, the storyline Bloch tells of Ribbentrop is one of hopeless toadyism and of a hopeless passivity, a life not really lived despite wreaking havoc everywhere. Think of the Peter Sellers’ movie “Being There”, only with the Chauncy Gardener character as a Nazi. Things just seemed “to happen”.
Bloch quotes a neutral diplomat from Sweden as saying, ” . . . here was a man of very small mental stature, and moreover, rather ridiculous. It was an astonishing thought, that this man had all those years been Minister of Foreign Affairs of the German Reich.”
Hans Frank, a fellow Nazi, said of him at Nuremberg, “The poor fish . . . He is so untutored and so ignorant . . . I don’t see how he could have sold champagne let alone National Socialism . . . that poor simpleton . . . it was a crime on Hitler’s part to make him foreign minister of a nation of seventy million people.”
His other, more “famous” colleagues – Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Speer – thought even less of him. Words like snob, haughty, idiot, friendless, careless, and stupid come up often. Even Hitler tired of him over time. “Keep him away from me,” was Hitler’s response to the banal and boring Minister.
So why did he stick? Because he was part of the way HItler arranged “his people”, playing one off another in the perpetual wargame of Nazi officialdom and administration. That all his colleagues denigrated him and hated him and even sometimes pitied him was vital.
That Hitler could trust him to passively yet noisily – droning on and on – support the Fuhrer was another factor. That Ribbentrop let Hitler set all German foreign policy himself was another.
And yet another factor was that Hitler could hypnotize Ribbentrop like a snake can a rabbit. It was a love affair.
In the end, Hitler had essentially appointed the guy who replenishes the products inside cigarette and soda vending machines, going from country to country instead of from bar to dorm, as his chief foreign officer. And people died.
