The Monster Who Loved Canada
Joachim von Ribbentrop’s charmed life in Canada betrayed little of his future role as a Nazi war criminal.
AFEW WEEKS BEFORE HE WAS HANGED IN GERMANY IN 1946, war criminal Joachim von Ribbentrop sat in Nuremberg prison’s cell number seven and wondered, “what course would my life have taken had I stayed in Canada?”
On the next line of his memoirs Ribbentrop wrote the obvious answer: “Certainly I would not have been in Nuremberg today.”
Then, as if to prove his fellow Nazis were right in calling him an idiot, he added: “But then I would have missed all the great and beautiful things that life has given me since then.”
What could he have been thinking? Since “then,” as Hitler’s foreign minister, he had helped to bring about the destruction of Europe and the murder of millions.
At the war-crimes tribunal held in Nuremberg, Germany, seventy-five years ago, the chief British prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, said of Ribbentrop: “No one in history has so debauched diplomacy; no one has been guilty of meaner treachery. But he, like the rest of [the Nazis], is just a common murderer.”
Ribbentrop was in Canada as a young man from 1910 to 1914. The worst thing said about him then was that he left without paying an Ottawa drugstore bill of $1.38. He found Canada to be a “hospitable country so beautiful and so rich in human relationships.” Ribbentrop then was a dapper young man about town, five feet ten, blond, and blueeyed. He had wealthy, influential friends. He seems to have liked and been liked by everyone he met. He was twenty-one when he went home to Germany, leaving “many friends, and a young girl whom I had wanted to marry.”
Even when he was wounded fighting for Germany during the First World War he kept in touch with his Canadian friends. In one 1916 letter to Gertrude Davis, a daughter of his former employer in Montreal, he asked her to “give my love to your mother and all your family and write soon!” The letter was signed, “Love, Rib.”
Some people saw Ribbentrop’s manner change before he met Adolf Hitler in 1932, and some didn’t. But all agree that he was a different man after Hitler gave him a taste of power. “In common, I believe, with all statesmen who had dealings with him, I found Ribbentrop intensely unlikeable,” Spanish diplomat Ramon Serrano Suner wrote in his memoirs. “Although he was handsome ... it was impossible
to regard him as either intelligent or humane, namely that he was completely bloated with affectation.”
Ribbentrop’s Jekyll and Hyde life began in 1893 in Wesel, a town in northwestern Germany on the Rhine River near the Dutch border. His father, Richard, was an army officer; his mother, Sophie, was the daughter of wealthy landowners. Joachim had a brother, Lothar, who was three years older and a sister, Ingeborg, three years younger.
His mother was tubercular and died when Joachim was nine. His father remarried and in 1908 left the army and moved to southeastern Switzerland, landing in Arosa, which now describes itself as a “holiday resort at the end of the romantic Schanfigg Valley.” It was developed as a health resort around 1880, and by the time the Ribbentrops arrived it was also a winter holiday destination for wealthy tourists.
Ribbentrop wrote in his jailhouse memoirs that the visitors included “Englishmen and Canadians [who] took an active part in winter sports. We met many of them and became close friends with one Canadian family. Both my brother and I were attracted by one particular Canadian girl, and it was partly through this friendship that we later spent several years on the other side of the Atlantic.”
He does not name the family, but several sources say he was referring to the family of Samuel William Ewing. Ewing’s wife, Ethel, was a granddaughter of author Susanna Moodie. His daughter Katharine, also born in 1893, is described as exceptionally beautiful in one account of Ribbentrop’s time in Montreal. In the 1930s she appeared in three silent British films under her screen name Doria March. The Ewing family had long been prominent in Montreal. Its business interests included the Molson Bank, where Ribbentrop later worked and which became part of the Bank of Montreal in 1925.
Ribbentrop said he and his brother “had an urge to travel. We wanted to see the world and my father agreed that we should buy property in South or East Africa. This made a grasp of English specially important.” Thus, in 1909, they accepted an invitation to live with a family in London, England. “The idea was that we should go to school there, perfect our English and thus prepare ourselves for a business career.”
In the fall of 1910 Joachim and Lothar dumped African plans and sailed for Canada “on a White Star steamer. ... Soon after my arrival in Montreal I became a bank clerk for 18 months. ... In those two winters and one summer I became thoroughly familiar with life in this, the largest town in Canada.”
Montreal’s population then was more than 450,000. Ribbentrop remarked on “its industrious business life, its amusements, its often wild poker parties, its sport, tennis, rugby and especially the famous ice hockey.”
Next he was a timekeeper with the engineering firm of J.T. and M.P. Davis that was rebuilding the Quebec Bridge, which had collapsed during construction in 1907, killing seventy-five men. Ribbentrop likely met the Davis family
via the Ewings. John Thomas Davis, another of Montreal’s wealthiest men, built a mansion in 1909 that now houses McGill University’s School of Physical and Occupational Therapy. “Ribbentrop was often invited to dine at the Davis home,” according to a 2009 article in the McGill Daily.
Dining there would have given Ribbentrop a preview of the lifestyle to which he became accustomed in the 1920s. The main floor of the Davis mansion included a billiard room, a breakfast room, and two dining rooms, one “intimate” and one anything but. The second floor had bedrooms and a library. One wing of the attic accommodated a governess, a housekeeper, and three maids. A manservant roomed in the basement, which also housed the main pantry and a wine cellar.
Later, Ribbentrop went west, working on the construction of the National Transcontinental Railway, where, he wrote, he “experienced the hard life of a Canadian pioneer. I saw the greatness, beauty and fertility of Canada’s virgin forest.”
In British Columbia, according to Strangers Entertained, a 1971 book by John Norris, Ribbentrop took a job as a logging camp bookkeeper and spent some of his off hours in the Ratskeller (bar) in the basement of the Copp Building at the corner of Hastings and Cambie streets in Vancouver. It was a popular hangout for the German community.
Ribbentrop said his time out West ended with “a serious illness.... Through drinking infected milk I had contracted tuberculosis of the kidneys, and one of them had to be removed.” His biographers suspect that Ribbentrop’s susceptibility to tuberculosis was inherited from his mother but that he didn’t want to say so. Lothar died of TB in 1918.
After Joachim recovered, he made a short visit to Germany and then went to New York, where he stayed for several months. In New York he met yet another “influential family” and found work as a newspaper reporter.
“From the start I had intended to return to Canada and when a friend invited me to Ottawa I accepted, hoping to set up in business on my own,” Ribbentrop wrote. “Since I had come into some of my mother’s money, the prospects were not unfavourable.”
In Ottawa as in Montreal, Ribbentrop’s social life began at the top, this time at the Governor General’s home at Rideau Hall. “Through the good offices of a friend of mine, whose father was the Chief Justice of Canada, I was introduced to Rideau Hall, and spent many a pleasant hour in the house of this English aristocrat [the Duke of Connaught] and his lady [born Princess Margarete of Prussia] — who was very kind to me as a German — and their daughter Patricia,” Ribbentrop recalled in his memoirs.
Social life, he said, “centred round Rideau Hall.... When there was a reception or festivity all the great families were invited from all over the country.” He chatted with the duchess in German and said his “violin, too, came into its own there occasionally.” Playing the violin was one of his passions. Dancing was another.
Ribbentrop’s own accommodations were less grand but apparently spacious. He lived “at a boarding house known as the Sherbrooke,” according to a Canadian Press story in 1945. “Those who knew him then recall he set up a miniature gym in his room, with parallel bars, a flying swing and a vaulting horse and delighted in giving exhibitions of his agility.” The story, written when he was captured by the Allies, said that in Ottawa Ribbentrop “was a dashing young blade who repeatedly said he saw a great future for himself.” He started a wine-import business, played tennis, and skated at the city’s Minto Club.
“He was playing tennis the day he was told of the outbreak of the first Great War and he left the game immediately,” said the newspaper article.
Ribbentrop left behind his property, his business prospects, his friends, the young woman he hoped to marry, and his seriously ill brother. The latter was later interned and then freed to go to Switzerland.
The Canadian Press noted one other thing Ribbentrop had abandoned: “Among residents [in Ottawa] who recall him is Harry Skinner, Wellington St. druggist, to whom he owes an account of $1.38, long overdue and written off as uncollectable.”
Back in Germany he enlisted with a Prussian cavalry unit, fought on both the eastern and western fronts, was wounded several times, was promoted to lieutenant, and was awarded the Iron Cross. When the war ended he got back into the wine trade, a business that took off after he married into money. His bride was Annelies Henkell, whose father Otto Henkell owned one of Germany’s biggest producers of sparkling wine.
By the end of the 1920s, according to biographer Michael Bloch, “Ribbentrop could count himself a rich man. He and his wife lived in a handsome modern villa [in Dahlem, a Berlin suburb] ... set in pleasant grounds, which included a swimming-pool and tennis courts.” The Ribbentrops had five children, and in 1925 Joachim added a title, becoming von Ribbentrop.
He moved into the nobility, at age thirty-two, by arranging to be adopted by a distant relative, Gertrude von Ribbentrop, who was sixty-two at the time. In return he was supposed to pay his aunt a monthly pension of 450 marks — the equivalent today of roughly US$1,300. Reinhard Spitzy, an SS officer who was Ribbentrop’s private secretary in 1936, said his boss reneged on his payments.
Ribbentrop’s marriage and title provoked sneers from fellow Nazis, who derided anyone they thought was doing better than themselves at currying Hitler’s favour. Ribbentrop “bought his name, he married his money and he swindled his way into office,” said Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.
Goebbels, Hermann Goering, and other top Nazis regarded Ribbentrop as a johnny-come-lately. He wasn’t involved in the Nazi party’s struggles of the 1920s and didn’t join it until 1932. Thereafter, his colleagues complained, Ribbentrop gained undeserved influence with Hitler and tried to usurp their powers.
Ribbentrop was an intermediary in negotiations that led to Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany and, almost immediately, its dictator. Hitler thought Ribbentrop a man of the world since, unlike himself, Ribbentrop had travelled to Britain, France, and even North America and was fluent in English and in French. He became Hitler’s foreign advisor, much to the fury of Goering, who fancied that role for himself. In 1938 Ribbentrop became the German ambassador to Britain.
“I tried to advise Hitler to remove [Ribbentrop] for two reasons,” Goering told psychologist G.M. Gilbert while he was in Nuremberg prison. “First of all he was persona non
grata with the British, and even Hitler wanted to keep on good terms with the British. ... He had hardly got off the train when he went on his mission to London before he started giving them expert advice on controlling the balance of power against Russia, completely insensitive to the fact that the British considered themselves the experts on power politics. ... The second reason was that Ribbentrop didn’t have the background for international diplomacy. ... Just because the wine merchants Ribbentrop associated with happened to include some English noblemen, Hitler thought he had a man with ‘connections.’”
Ribbentrop pleased Hitler by getting British agreement to a naval treaty that allowed Germany to strengthen itself. In 1939 he achieved a major coup, negotiating and signing a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. The deal led to Germany and Russia invading and occupying Poland. Hitler said Ribbentrop was a genius.
Then things went downhill.
Hitler invaded Russia in 1941 and later that year rashly declared war on the United States. As the war gradually turned against the Germans, Ribbentrop’s Nazi rivals started to refer to the conflict as “Ribbentrop’s war.” Ribbentrop “has been the Fuhrer’s evil genius, driving him from one reckless adventure to the next,” Goebbels complained in his diary entry for March 4, 1945.
As for Hitler, having assured Germany’s doom he blamed everyone but himself and listened only to himself. Ribbentrop and others were sidelined.
Ribbentrop tried to regain favour with Hitler by showing that he could be as murderous as any other Nazi. He urged minions to pressure countries allied to or controlled by Germany to step up Jewish deportations to death camps. The war crimes trial was told that he referred “with pride to the successes of ‘brutal measures’ in Norway, ‘brutal action’ in Greece, and in France and Poland the success of ‘Draconian’ measures.”
Ribbentrop told the trial he was only obeying Hitler’s orders. The judges thought otherwise. Ribbentrop was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and conspiring to commit all those acts.
On October 1, 1946, Ribbentrop was again a name known about town in Ottawa. The main headline in the Evening Citizen was “Death Decreed For 12 Nazi Warlords. Prison for 7 Others; Three Acquitted.”
A news report by the Associated Press described the shattered demeanour of the monster who had once been a society darling in Canada: “Gray and sickly, von Ribbentrop stood stunned as the death sentence was pronounced. He had to be helped out by military policemen.”
In the memoirs he never got to finish, Ribbentrop wrote, “I always liked my many Canadian friends very much, and two world wars in which we were enemies have not changed this. Many friends wrote to me during the First World War via neutral countries and again when it was over, suggesting that I should return, but after the sad experience of the war I felt too closely linked with my homeland [of Germany] to like the idea of leaving it again.”
On October 16, 1946, that’s where he was hanged.