Word: ribbentrop
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Last week Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who likes nothing about the English except their ceremony, sent word to the Berlin diplomatic corps to be on hand in their cutaways at the Chancellery next morning for a momentous announcement. The press also was told to come, in blue serge suits. In due course the invited showed up, marched through the great gilded wood portals that had just replaced the bronze ones (now being melted into munitions), and Herr Ribbentrop shot the works...
Next day the British Foreign Office went to great pains to explain that the whole Ribbentrop speech and White Paper were a tapestry of lies and forgeries. As far as disinterested observers were concerned, this was needless effort. The tardiness with which British forces had reached Norway, and the lack of organization shown in their first attacks, were eloquent evidence that Britain had been ready for no such campaign...
Sweden's Sphere. One obvious purpose of Herr Ribbentrop's speech was to serve notice on neutrals that any suspicious traffic with Great Britain will subject them to the threat of extinction. In passing, Power Politician Ribbentrop gave Sweden a nice pat on the head. "The Swedish Government," he said, "interpreted their declaration of neutrality very seriously indeed, and at no time did anything . . . which might not have been in accord with...
Spoiled Premiere. Another purpose of the Ribbentrop revelations became plain when it was revealed that, like Gone With the Wind, his big production was to have had a double-barreled big-town premiere-one in Berlin, the other in Rome. But bad weather grounded the plane that was carrying the big show to Rome, so Ambassador Hans Georg von Mackensen had to call off his end of the opening...
...Government realized that a show is as much of a wartime bracer as a whiskey-&-soda, soon permitted every theatre in London to stay open till 10:45 or 11 p.m. For months, with the war so quiet that-as a wag put it-you could hear a Ribbentrop, London's theatre functioned virtually as in peacetime, except for a boom in musical shows and a drop in prices...