ABSTRACT
It is unlikely that even the new challenge that he faced from Ribbentrop dampened the pride that Ernst Wilhelm Bohle must have felt when, on his birthday in 1938, he opened a personal message from the Führer, which read: “It gives me great pleasure to extend my heartfelt good wishes to you on your birthday on the 28th of July.”1 At thirty-fi ve years of age, Bohle had every reason to believe that his meteoric rise in the new Germany was due to the impressive strides he had made in establishing the Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP as an important infl uence in the German communities around the world.
