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TMS in German, signed "Joachim v. Ribbentrop," five pages, 8 x 13, no date but delivered before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on the 216th day of the trial, Saturday, August 31, 1946. Ribbentrop's closing address to the Tribunal, delivered roughly six weeks before his conviction and execution. He argues the trial failed to address the true root causes of the war, principally the Treaty of Versailles, and states he devoted over twenty years of his life to eliminating the "evil" of Versailles. He denies German foreign policy was a premeditated conspiracy for aggressive war, arguing Germany's territorial demands were no different in kind from British, American, and Russian territorial and imperial interests, only smaller in scale.
He recounts his 1939 meeting with Stalin in Moscow, quoting Stalin's own telegram praising German-Soviet friendship "based on the blood which they have shed together" as evidence that waging war was not then regarded as an international crime. He argues the Tribunal's own defense evidence was heavily restricted (over half of submitted defense documents rejected), calls the conspiracy charge a "historical falsehood," and states that fate made him an exponent of the Nazi "revolution," whose atrocities he says he deplores but could not have foreseen. He closes stating the only guilt he feels is before his own people, not before the Tribunal, for having failed in his foreign policy aims. In overall very good to fine condition, with uniform toning and some unobtrusive edge tears and paper loss. Accompanied by a deckle-edge photograph of Ribbentrop's corpse after his execution by hanging.
Ribbentrop delivered this statement on August 31, 1946, the final day of courtroom proceedings, when Article 24(d)(j) of the Tribunal’s Charter gave each defendant an opportunity to make a last personal statement before judgment. His address distilled the central themes of his defense: that Versailles, rather than Nazi expansionism, lay at the root of the European crisis; that German foreign policy had not been directed toward aggressive war; and that he had merely carried out a policy ultimately determined by Hitler.
The Tribunal rejected that account. On October 1, 1946, just one month later, Ribbentrop was convicted on all four counts against him—conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity—and sentenced to death. He was hanged at Nuremberg on October 16. As such, this manuscript represents Ribbentrop’s final substantive defense before the court: an attempt to recast two decades of Nazi foreign policy as a response to Versailles and national necessity at the very moment the Tribunal was preparing to hold him personally responsible for helping plan and execute aggressive war.
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