Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim Von Ribbentrop - Early Nazi Career

Early Nazi Career

In 1928, Ribbentrop was introduced to Adolf Hitler as a businessman with foreign connections who "gets the same price for German champagne as others get for French champagne". Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, with whom Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars in the First World War, arranged the introduction. Ribbentrop and his wife joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party on 1 May 1932. Ribbentrop began his political career that summer by offering to be a secret emissary between Chancellor of Germany Franz von Papen, his old wartime friend, and Hitler. His offer was initially refused. Six months later, though, Hitler and Papen accepted his help.

Their change of heart occurred after General Kurt von Schleicher ousted Papen in December 1932. This led to a complex set of intrigues in which Papen and various friends of president Paul von Hindenburg negotiated with Hitler to oust von Schleicher. On 22 January 1933, Meissner and Hindenburg's son met Hitler, Göring, and Frick at Ribbentrop's home in Berlin's exclusive Dahlem district. Over dinner, Papen made the fateful concession that if von Schleicher's government were to fall, he would abandon his demand for the Chancellorship and instead use his influence with president von Hindenburg to ensure that Hitler got the Chancellorship.

But Ribbentrop was not popular with the Nazi Party's Alte Kämpfer (Old Fighters); they nearly all disliked him. British historian Laurence Rees described Ribbentrop as "the Nazi almost all the other leading Nazis hated". Joseph Goebbels expressed a common view when he confided to his diary that "Von Ribbentrop bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office".

During most of the Weimar Republic era, Ribbentrop was apolitical and displayed no anti-Semitic prejudices. A visitor to a party Ribbentrop threw in 1928 recorded that Ribbentrop had no political views beyond a vague admiration for Gustav Stresemann, fear of Communism, and a wish to restore the monarchy. Several Berlin Jewish businessmen who did business with Ribbentrop in the 1920s and knew him well later expressed astonishment at the vicious anti-Semitism Ribbentrop later displayed in the Third Reich, saying that they did not see any indications that he had held such views when they knew him. As a partner in his father-in-law's champagne firm, Ribbentrop did business with Jewish bankers, and organised the Impegroma Importing Company ("Import und Export großer Marken") with Jewish financing.