Rudolf von Ribbentrop
Decorated officer in the Nazis’ Waffen-ss and son of Hitler’s confidant and foreign minister
RUDOLF VON RIBBENTROP, who has died aged 98, was the son of Hitler’s foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and became a highly decorated soldier in the Waffen-ss, the military wing of the Nazi corps.
According to Joachim’s biographer, Michael Bloch, when Joachim was appointed German Ambassador in London in 1936, Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under-secretary at the Foreign Office, tried to get the gawky, bespectacled 15-year-old “Rudi” into “Eton for the coming half ”. Ribbentrop believed that “Eton would show Rudolf ‘how English boys live, and he will be able to teach the Hitler Youth’.”
The school rejected him, however. Instead, Rudolf spent a year as a day boy at Westminster School, where a contemporary, Brian Urquhart, later Undersecretary-general of the United Nations, described him in his memoirs, A Life in Peace and War (1987), as “doltish, surly and arrogant”, recalling that he “arrived each morning in one of two plum-coloured Mercedesbenz limousines … On arrival in Dean’s Yard, both chauffeurs would spring out, give the Nazi salute and shout ‘Heil Hitler!’”
Rudolf von Ribbentrop himself, however, gave a rather different account of his time at the school in his memoir Mein Vater Joachim von Ribbentrop (2008, published in English earlier this year by Pen and Sword Books). Far from being driven to school, he maintained, he had walked there every day from the ambassadorial residence in Eaton Square. The chauffeur, moreover, was an Englishman.
Rudolf claimed he had been sent to Westminster so that he could inform his father about the true feelings of the British upper echelons towards Hitler and how the British were preparing their officer class for war.
One day “a sympathetic young teacher, wearing a captain’s uniform”, invited him to join the school’s officer training corps: “Father was as surprised as I was. In Germany, until the war broke out, there had been no premilitary training of young people.
In my view, a great mistake. We could have saved a great deal of bloodshed.”
Von Ribbentrop senior gave his permission, provided his son was allowed to wear German uniform; Westminster politely declined. Instead, Rudolf established a reputation on the sports field, The Daily Telegraph reporting his coming first in “putting the 12lb weight” at school sports day in March 1937 and qualifying for the final of the half mile.
The miseries of public school life, however, were outweighed for young Rudolf by the British sense of fair play. A school debate about whether the German colonies should be returned ended up with a vote in favour of the Germans, and when the young von Ribbentrop was reprimanded by a teacher after he had risen to contradict a visiting MP who had criticised Hitler in a speech, he claimed that his fellow pupils had walked out in protest at his treatment – all of which seems to have convinced his father of British sympathy for Germany.
Another schoolmate was Peter Ustinov, whose anti-nazi father had given up his job as press attaché at the German embassy and subsequently worked for MI5 during the war. The actor described young Rudi as “a pleasant lad who, no doubt under his father’s instructions, wore a red diamond-shaped badge with a swastika as its crowning glory in his lapel”. Yet it was said to have been Ustinov who leaked the boy’s presence at his school to The Times. As a result Rudolf was withdrawn for his own safety and dispatched to a boarding school in Germany.
He was born Rudolf Ribbentrop on May 11 1921 in Wiesbaden, the oldest of five children of Joachim Ribbentrop and his formidable wife, “Anneliese”, née Henkell, the daughter of a wealthy Wiesbaden sparkling-wine producer. In 1925 the social-climbing Joachim convinced an aunt, whose husband had been knighted, to adopt him, allowing him to add the aristocratic von to his name.
When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, Rudolf volunteered for the SS Infantry Regiment Deutschland, and he went on to serve in occupied Czechoslovakia, during the invasion of France and in the Finnish campaign against the Soviet Union, by the end of which he had been wounded twice and awarded the Iron Cross Second Class and the Finnish Freedom Cross Fourth Class.
In early 1942 he was assigned to the newly created Panzerregiment of the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, and in early 1943 he participated as a tank commander in the Third Battle of Kharkov, the last major engagement the Germans won on the Eastern Front, which temporarily turned the direction of the war in their favour after von Ribbentrop’s regiment launched a two-pronged attack into northern Kharkov. By March 16, after vicious fighting, the city was back in German hands.
During the fighting von Ribbentrop was shot through the lung by a sniper. Despite this he continued to rescue wounded soldiers and refused to be taken to a hospital. He was awarded the Iron Cross and later the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his leadership and bravery. In August 1943 he saw action during the retreat from Kharkov and was wounded in both shoulders.
Later on in the war, von Ribbentrop was transferred to the SS 12th Panzer Division, where he was awarded the German Cross in Gold during the battle for Normandy, commanding another tank platoon, in June 1944. He also led a tank platoon in the Battle of the Bulge. Altogether he was wounded five times and in December 1944 was awarded the Wound Badge in Gold.
He then commanded I./ SS-PZRGT 12, remaining in command until his division surrendered to American forces in May 1945.
Von Ribbentrop ended up a British prisoner in Hamburg, where conditions, he recalled wryly, were even worse than those he had endured at Westminster. He smuggled a letter to the school’s headmaster, appealing for help, and claimed that a few weeks later conditions improved.
On October 16 1946 his father became the first of those sentenced to death at Nuremberg to be hanged after being found guilty of war crimes. In his memoir Rudolf dismissed the trials as “so structured as to make unequivocally sure that the process taken was directed to capital punishment”.
He also reported meeting Hitler in the Berlin bunker a month before his suicide, and his shock at seeing the Führer’s physical deterioration: “His body was a wreck. His face was grey and puffy, his bearing bent … holding one uncontrollably shaking hand with the other, his steps a shuffle. Only his striking blue eyes kept a certain brilliance … We said goodbye.”
After the war Rudolf ’s mother Anneliese tried to get her son a job in the family wine business. However other family members felt that the Ribbentrop name would be bad for business and in 1952 Anneliese went to court claiming that the company had failed to fulfil an agreement of 1942 which gave Rudolf a partnership. The court ruled that the company should accept him as a full partner and director.
No such qualms affected Rudolf-august Oetker, who had also served in the Waffen-ss and afterwards ran his family baking products company, Dr Oetker. In 1958 Rudolf von Ribbentrop was appointed to the Oetker family’s private bank, Bankhaus Lampe, in Bielefeld. He became a director of the bank and its spokesman from 1972 to 1980.
In 1960, Rudolf von Ribbentrop married Baroness Ilse-marie von Munchhausen, who died in 2010.
Rudolf von Ribbentrop, born May 11 1921, died May 20 2019