Was Joachim von Ribbentrop Jewish?

[Karl Radl]

Was Joachim von Ribbentrop Jewish?

In order to pre-empt the claims that I read swirling about the internet, and even occasionally in print, that such and such prominent member of the Third Reich had jewish ancestry. I thought I would check the background of the Third Reich's long-time foreign minister: Joachim Ribbentrop (the 'von' came later).

Ribbentrop gets a bit of a bad rep from many historians for the simple reason that relatively few people are interested in the man and he, superficially, seems not to have succeeded in the tasks and projects that he undertook. However as John Weitz has pointed out: (1) this is both untrue and unfair. Since while Ribbentrop had many personal and professional failings – the worst of which was his sheer vanity – he was also a remarkably successful politician and foreign minister.

It was he who was central to the creation of the alliance of Axis powers and it was his office who directly worked with the German intelligence community (i.e. the Abwehr/NSDAP-AO/SD) to support pro-German nationalist elements in countries as diverse as the United States and Iraq with significant success.

To be perfectly honest I had a poor opinion of Ribbentrop prior to doing some actual research into the man and his life. Call it inherited opinions I suppose, but it does surprise you sometimes just how wrong 'received wisdom' can often be when you actually test it against the mettle of the specialist literature.

However I am getting away from the question that I originally posed: was Joachim von Ribbentop jewish?

The answer is a simple and categorical no.

Unlike some other high ranking members of the NSDAP, the most obvious of whom is Hitler himself, there is absolutely no wiggle room to claim that Ribbentrop had any jewish ancestry.

We know that Joachim Ribbentrop was born to First Lieutenant Richard Ribbentrop (of the 1st Westphalian Artillery Regiment) and Sophie Hertwig on 30th April 1893 in the garrison town of Wesel. (2)

The origins of the Ribbentrop (originally 'Ribbentrup') family are to be found in the twelfth century in the town of Salzuflen, while the first known member of Ribbentrop's direct family was a Habsburg soldier named Heinrich Meyer zu Ribbentrup who died in 1547. (3) Ribbentrop's paternal family are well-known to have been a prototypical German military family (and one that many a subaltern at the time would have been very jealous of) with nearly every generation contributing distinguished individuals to the German nation.

Ribbentrop's mother, Sophie Hertwig, was the daughter of a very wealthy Saxon landowner who was able to pledge a gift of ninety thousand gold marks per annum in order to allow the couple to marry per the German army's regulations of the time. Given that Hertwig's family had been in the area for generations it is little surprise to find that they don't have any known jewish ancestry either. (4)

So no Joachim von Ribbentrop wasn't jewish.

References

(1) Cf. John Weitz, 1992, 'Joachim von Ribbentrop: Hitler's Diplomat', 1st Edition, Weidenfeld and Nicolson: London
(2) Ibid, p. 4; Michael Bloch, 1992, 'Ribbentrop', 1st Edition, Bantam: London, pp. 1; 3
(3) Ibid, p. 1
(4) Ibid; Weitz, Op. Cit., p. 4

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This was originally published at the following address: http://www.semiticcontroversies.blog...op-jewish.html