Martin Luther Represented von Ribbentrop

No surprise here – the former was the prot;g; of the latter. first as an advisor in the Ribbentrop Bureau, and later as a diplomat in the Foreign Office. Interestingly was the 1946 discovery of his copy of the minutes of that conference (Wannsee Protocol) that first brought to light the conference and its diabolical purpose.

Luther was a Great War veteran – he served in a railway unit, attained the rank of Leutnant of reserves in 1917 and was awarded the Iron Cross, second class. Discharged from the army at the end of the war, he went into business and used his skill at logistics to found a hauling and furniture moving business.

His first venture went bankrupt in the poor economic climate of the Weimar Republic (happened all the time) but he started another furniture moving and interior decorating business.

His persistence paid off: in this second venture he was very successful (which allowed him to buy a house in the affluent Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin). He also owned an apartment building and was sufficiently financially secure to turn his attention to politics.

Sensing the Zeitgeist, he joined NSDAP in March of 1932. He was active in helping to raise funds for the Party in his capacity as the head of the local National Socialist People’s Welfare, the Party’s charity organization. In the course of his work, he made the acquaintance of the wealthy wine merchant and Adolf Hitler’s foreign policy advisor Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife.

Initially, Ribbentrop hired him as just an interior decorator, but soon he offered Luther ф position in the Ribbentrop Bureau – the shadow foreign policy unit in the Nazi Party that Ribbentrop had established to circumvent the long-serving career diplomats in the Foreign Office (which had no love for the Nazis). Luther accepted and was placed in charge of the Party liaison office.

In November 1938, Luther was appointed as head of the sub-department Referat Partei, which carried out liaison activities between the ministry and the Party. In 1940, he persuaded Ribbentrop to appoint him as head of the Abteilung D (Deutschland), a new department combining several Referate.

In addition to his existing functions, the ambitious Luther (too ambitious as it would turn out soon) now was given responsibility for foreign travel, printing and distribution of written materials, liaison with the SS and, significantly, Jewish policy under Referat D III, which he entrusted to Franz Rademacher (the one who proposed the Madagascar Plan).

His control over the “Jewish” department in the Foreign Office and his liason functions with the SS were two other reasons why Luther was chosen to represent Ribbentrop at Wannsee Conference.

By July 1941, Luther was advanced to the civil service rank of Ministerialdirektor with the title of Unterstaatssekret;r (Under State Secretary). Thus, Luther was at the height of his power when he attended the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 as the official representative of the Foreign Ministry.

 He was the only undersecretary invited, with most other ministry representatives being full state secretaries. This was due to the conference organizer, SS-Obergruppenf;hrer Reinhard Heydrich, who much preferred dealing with the ambitious and cooperative Luther (a committed Nazi), rather than the aristocratic Foreign Office traditionalist, State Secretary Ernst von Weizs;cker.

The “Luther memorandum” composed specifically for the conference, committed the Foreign Ministry to working with other countries to introduce antisemitic restrictions modeled on the Nuremberg Laws, and then to transport their Jews to the killing centers in occupied Poland.

Following the conference, Luther’s department was involved with preparing and securing agreement at the diplomatic level for the deportation of Jews from the countries allied with Germany, such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, as well as from the areas occupied by Germany such as the nominally independent countries such as Vichy France.

However, by early 1943, Luther fell out of favor with Ribbentrop for a number of reasons (happens all the time in bureaucratic systems). Threatened on several fronts, Luther plotted to supplant Ribbentrop by attempting to discredit him.

He most likely sought assistance in this from SS-Brigadef;hrer Walter Schellenberg, head of the SS foreign intelligence service, who himself had ambitions of replacing Ribbentrop.

The plot failed; clever Schellenberg escaped unscathed… and poor Luther ended up in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in March. There he was put to work cultivating the camp herb garden.

After two suicide attempts, he was freed over two years later when the camp was liberated by the Red Army in April 1945, but was hospitalized and died shortly afterward of heart failure at the age of 49.

He never faced trial (or even investigation) for his involvement in the Holocaust, which was actually quite significant.