Hitler's Last Peace Offer? The Secret Ribbentrop Mission April 1945

TL;DR

In April 1945, Ribbentrop claimed Hitler secretly ordered him to negotiate an Anglo-German anti-Soviet alliance with Churchill, though historians question whether the mission was real.

Key Points

• 1.Hitler genuinely believed the Allied coalition would collapse in 1945. Intercepted Soviet communications showed US advances making Stalin nervous, and Roosevelt's death on April 12 briefly lifted morale in the Berlin bunker, with Goebbels calling it an omen of the coalition's breakup.
• 2.Ribbentrop had been sidelined and humiliated within the Nazi inner circle. After the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt implicated foreign office diplomats, Göring publicly screamed at Ribbentrop — calling him a 'dirty little champagne salesman' — and threatened him with his marshal's baton.
• 3.Ribbentrop circulated a secret 14-page memorandum through diplomatic channels without Hitler's knowledge. The memo argued Stalin's postwar ambitions threatened British imperial routes to the Middle East and India, designed to drive a wedge between the Western Allies and the USSR.
• 4.Hitler allegedly ordered Ribbentrop on a peace mission during their final meeting on April 23, 1945. According to Ribbentrop's account — the only source — Hitler told him to contact the British, propose an Anglo-German anti-Soviet bloc, and deliver a personal letter to Churchill.
• 5.Ribbentrop took a week to travel less than 200 miles from Berlin to Plön and tried to return to the bunker. He telegraphed Walter Hewel requesting an aircraft to share Hitler's fate; Hitler declined via message, and Ribbentrop was effectively rejected by the Führer he refused to leave.
• 6.Ribbentrop hid in a Hamburg apartment for six weeks after the war ended instead of delivering his letter to Churchill. He was discovered accidentally when a vintner acquaintance was overheard and a woman tried to blackmail him; British Lieutenant Jimmy Adam arrested Ribbentrop in pajamas on June 14, 1945.
• 7.Ribbentrop's 5,000-word letter to Churchill was handed up the chain of command to Field Marshal Montgomery, then Churchill, then Stalin. Whether the peace mission was real or a self-serving fabrication remains debated; Ribbentrop was ultimately hanged first at Nuremberg on October 16, 1946, taking 14 minutes to die in a botched execution.