Whether it’s Stalin, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein, who was going to stand up to them and tell the real truth? There were a few, in Hitler’s case—even a couple of shouting matches from some of his more courageous generals—but he overrode every competent military objection—trusting on his intuition, which, coupled with his gambler’s luck had paid off in the early stages of the war.
One of the reasons Hitler went into Poland was because of that incompetent, Joichim von Ribbentrop’s ‘assurances’ that Britain wouldn’t support the Poles; and if the British didn’t, neither would the French.
Von Ribbentrop, whom Hitler touted as the most brilliant statesman since Otto von Bismarck, was generally considered a complete nincompoop by everyone—Goebbels, Göering. Von Ribbentrop was appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, but was hardly ever at the embassy–afraid to stay away from Berlin for very long. He greeted George VI with the Nazi stiff-arm salute when presenting his credentials to the King. Von Ribbentrop supposedly had an affair with Wallis Simpson before her royal lover abdicated(did he receive confidential information from her?, since Edward was notoriously careless about leaving state papers lying around), and completely misunderstood the British constitutional system insofar as the power of the monarch went. He was probably the slimiest Nazi of them all—including Martin Bormann.
