Joachim von Ribbentrop

Biography

Joachim von Ribbentrop was born in Wesel in 1893. After serving with a hussar regiment in the First World War, he worked as a wine and champagne salesman and in 1920 married Anna Henkell, the daughter of a Wiesbaden wine producer. Introduced to Adolf Hitler in 1928, he joined the Nazi Party in May 1932 and lent his house for the January 1933 meetings that led to Hitler's appointment as chancellor.

His own bureau, the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, worked as a rival to the Foreign Office. As ambassador-at-large he negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in 1935 and the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan in 1936. He served as ambassador in London from 1936 and became foreign minister on 4 February 1938.

As foreign minister he brokered the Pact of Steel with Italy and the August 1939 non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union that cleared the way for the invasion of Poland. During the war he oversaw the Second Vienna Award, pressed other states to join the Tripartite Pact and handed over Germany's declarations of war on the Soviet Union and the United States in 1941, though his influence with Hitler faded. Arrested in June 1945, he was convicted at the Nuremberg trials and on 16 October 1946 became the first of the defendants to be hanged.