Ribbentrop and the Ciano Diaries at the Nuremberg Trial

Abstract

This article reviews the interrogation reports, trial transcript and the prosecutors' original administrative files to ascertain how extracts from the diaries of Mussolini's Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, were deployed within the Nuremberg trials to undermine key aspects of Hitler's wartime Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop's, defence. These diaries demonstrated the extent to which Ribbentrop was personally implicated in a purposive form of diplomacy that dovetailed into military preparations for 'waging aggressive war' - one of the newly invented and retrospectively applied crimes targeting senior diplomats. It also discusses the diaries' likely impact on the Court's judgment regarding Ribbentrop's guilt. The paper also suggests the positive impact of these diaries within the Nuremberg process needs to be recognized not only by the literature of international criminal law but also by the emerging discipline of 'intelligence studies'. This is because Allen Dulles, Head of US intelligence in Berne, was responsible for realizing the legally incriminating implications of these diaries and, having obtained this evidence by covert means, personally placed a translation into the hands of the US chief prosecutor, Justice Robert Jackson.