Hitler's Diplomat
This first full-length English-language biography of Joachim von Ribbentrop, Adolf Hitler's notorious foreign minister, is also an authoritative account of the social and political workings of Nazi Germany. The result of a lifetime of research and firsthand experience, the book combines narrative history of the highest order and intimate familiarity with the people, events, and social currents that animated Hitler's regime. A well-to-do social climber who made and married money, von Ribbentrop was among the few in Hitler's circle with a claim to social prominence.
As ambassador to England, von Ribbentrop quickly worked his way up to head the Foreign Ministry, along the way negotiating the British Naval Agreement, the Anti-Comintern Pact, and the Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Frustrated during the war, when diplomacy was rendered virtually obsolete, von Ribbentrop never forsook his Fuhrer even at Nurnberg, where he was tried and hanged as a senior war criminal. With a provocative foreword by Tom Wolfe that draws disturbing comparisons between the Berlin of the 1930s and American society of the 1980s, Hitler's Diplomat is not only the riveting story of one of Hitler's closest collaborators, it also provides a window onto a side of Nazi Germany that is as fascinating as it is troubling: the men and women of culture and means who gave themselves to Hitler and his war machine.
Hitler's Diplomat by John Weitz and Tom Wolfe
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- Title : Hitler's Diplomat
- ISBN-13: 9780395621523
- Author : John Weitz, Tom Wolfe
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
- Publication date: 08/18/1992
Editorial Reviews - Publishers Weekly
As Hitler's foreign minister, Ribbentrop played an important role in the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis and the Russo-German nonaggression pact of 1939. Captured by British troops at war's end, he was tried at Nuremberg and hanged for his roles in the deportation of Jews and in planning the attack on Poland. Weitz ( Friends in High Places ) describes how Ribbentrop became a wealthy wine merchant after WW I, a successful social climber in Berlin and an early member of the Nazi Party. His motive for joining remains baffling, however. Weitz's canvas is excessively broad: information that bandleader Harry James hired a young singer named Frank Sinatra in 1939 is typical of the irrelevancies included in this biography. One would have wished for more Life and less Times. Photos. (Aug.)
Fewer Reviews - From The Critics
A popular rather than a scholarly biography, based on secondary works and a smattering of memoir literature, this account follows von Ribbentrop's early life as a Berlin social climber, his relatively late adherence to the National Socialist party after meeting Hitler in 1932, and his subsequent career as the party's special diplomatic envoy, ambassador to England in 1936, and, finally, foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. Although written with a certain verve and sprinkled with occasionally interesting anecdotes, the biography provides little analysis of von Ribbentrop's influence on German diplomacy or Nazi policies.
The author, a prominent clothing designer who has written several novels (e.g., Friends in High Places , LJ 10/1/82), loses sight of his subject for pages while he expatiates on Berlin smart society in the 1920s and British fascism in the 1930s. Too often Weitz speculates on his subject's attitudes or positions without finding reliable sources to confirm these speculations. The result is biography as accumulated anecdote, a light read on a heavy subject.-- James B. Street, Santa Cruz P.L., Cal.