Joachim von Ribbentrop was born in Wesel, Rhenish Prussia, to Richard Ulrich Friedrich Joachim Ribbentrop, a career army officer, and his wife, Johanne Sophie Hertwig.

Of the two references, General Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg, the German military attaché in London, commented that Ribbentrop had been a brave soldier in World War I, while the wife of the Italian Ambassador to Germany, Elisabetta Cerruti, called Ribbentrop " one of the most diverting of the Nazis ".

Believing himself to be in a state of disgrace with Hitler over his failure to achieve the British alliance, Ribbentrop spent December 1937 in a state of depression, and together with his wife, wrote two lengthy documents for Hitler denouncing Britain.

In October 1941, Ribbentrop ’ s prestige was badly damaged by the discovery of the Soviet spy ring in Tokyo headed by Richard Sorge, who was arrested by the Japanese while in bed with the wife of General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador.

In June 1939, Bonnet's reputation was badly damaged when the French agent of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, Otto Abetz, was expelled from France for engaging in espionage, French newspaper editors were charged with receiving bribes from Abetz, and the name of Bonnet's wife was prominently mentioned in connection with the Abetz case as a close friend of the two editors, but despite much lucid speculation in the French press at the time, that no evidence has ever emerged linking Bonnet or his wife to German espionage or bribery.

Speaking as one voice, husband and wife continued to make all the political noises they deemed necessary, denouncing first the Munich Agreement, then Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

The Spanish Foreign Minister then wired Ribbentrop on July 2 that he met with the Duke and reported the Duke's alleged antagonism against the Royal Family due to the treatment meted to his wife, as well as criticising Winston Churchill and his wartime policies.

In December 1942, during a meeting with the Italian Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, who brought a message from Mussolini asking for the Germans to go on the defensive in the Soviet Union in order to focus on North Africa, Ribbentrop joined with Hitler in belittling Italy's war effort.

The following month, Ribbentrop was arrested by Sergeant Jacques Goffinet, a French citizen who had joined the Belgian SAS and was working with British forces near Hamburg.

Born into a working-class family in Manchester, Duncan Hallas joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14 in 1939 but soon became disillusioned due to the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

On 1 September 1939, when World War II started, von Ribbentrop joined as a recruit in the replacement battalion of the SS-Infantry Regiment Deutschland in Munich.

In particular, Ribbentrop acquired the habit of listening carefully to what Hitler was saying, memorizing the Führer's pet ideas, and then later presenting Hitler's ideas as his own – a practice that much impressed Hitler as proving Ribbentrop was an ideal National Socialist diplomat.

In the spring and summer of 1939, Ribbentrop used Bonnet's alleged statement to convince Hitler that France would not go to war in the defence of Poland, despite the frequent denials by Bonnet that he ever made such a statement ( which would not have been legally binding even had Bonnet had made the alleged statement ; only a formal renunciation of the Franco-Polish treaty by the French National Assembly would end the French commitment to Poland ).

In 1938 Gross, then head of the Reich Bureau for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare, contributed a chapter entitled " National Socialist Racial Thought " to an English language book, Germany Speaks, prefaced by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler ’ s newly appointed Foreign Minister.

In Berlin he attended numerous functions, including a grand dinner for the British contingent hosted by Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain and later Foreign Minister, where he was introduced to Hitler and other leading members of the National Socialist government.

During the opening stages of World War II, the Soviet Union laid the foundation for the Eastern Bloc by directly annexing several countries as Soviet Socialist Republics that were initially ( and effectively ) ceded to it by Nazi Germany in the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

* 1893 – Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Nazi foreign minister ( d. 1946 )

After a failed attempt to sign an anti-German military alliance with France and Britain and talks with Germany regarding a potential political deal, on 23 August 1939, the Soviet Union entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, negotiated by Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

" In his diaries, he expressed the belief that German diplomacy should find a way to exploit the emerging tensions between Stalin and the West, but he proclaimed foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, whom Hitler would not abandon, incapable of such a feat.

From 1904 to 1908, Ribbentrop took French courses in a school at Metz, the German Empire's most powerful fortress.

His father was cashiered from the Imperial German Army in 1908 — after repeatedly disparaging Kaiser Wilhelm II for his alleged homosexuality — and the Ribbentrop family were often short of money.

Initially, Ribbentrop planned to emigrate to German East Africa, where he hoped to become a planter.

In 1928, Ribbentrop was introduced to Adolf Hitler as a businessman with foreign connections who " gets the same price for German champagne as others get for French champagne ".

One German diplomat later recalled that " Ribbentrop didn't understand anything about foreign policy.

Ribbentrop wanted to buy time to complete German rearmament by removing preventive war as a French policy option.

Though the Dienststelle Ribbentrop concerned itself with German foreign relations with every part of the world, a special emphasis was put on Anglo-German relations, as Ribbentrop knew that Hitler favoured an alliance with Britain.

Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that demanding colonial restoration would pressure the British into making an alliance with the Reich on German terms.

But there was a certain difference of opinion between Ribbentrop and Hitler: Ribbentrop sincerely wished to recover the former German colonies, whereas for Hitler, colonial demands were just a negotiating tactic: Germany would renounce its demands in exchange for a British alliance.

Ribbentrop persuaded the British Legion ( the leading veterans ' group in Britain ) and many French veterans ' groups to send delegations to Germany to meet German veterans as the best way to promote peace.

At the same time, Ribbentrop arranged for members of the Frontkämpferbund, the official German World War I veterans ' group, to visit Britain and France to meet veterans there.

As for the contradiction between German rearmament and his message of peace, Ribbentrop argued to whoever would listen that the German people had been “ humiliated ” by the Versailles treaty, that Germany wanted peace above all, and German violations of Versailles were part of an effort to restore Germany's " self-respect " By the 1930s, much of British opinion had been convinced that the treaty was monstrously unfair and unjust to Germany, so as a result, many in Britain like Thomas Jones were very open to Ribbentrop ’ s message that if only Versailles could be done away with, then European peace would be secured.

A German diplomat, Truetzschler von Falkenstein, complained after the war that " Ribbentrop, having had contact with only a small group in England – representatives of the so-called two hundred families – did not know the great mass of the English people.

Another German diplomat commented that Ribbentrop had the strange idea to " conduct international relations through aristocrats ".

In August 1934, Ribbentrop founded an organisation linked to the Nazi Party called the Büro Ribbentrop ( later renamed the Dienststelle Ribbentrop ).

The Dienststelle Ribbentrop, which had its offices directly across from the Foreign Office's building on the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, had in its membership a collection of Hitlerjugend alumni, dissatisfied businessmen, former reporters, and ambitious Nazi Party members, all of whom tried to conduct a foreign policy independent of, and often contrary to, the Foreign Office.

In September 1937, the British Consul in Munich, writing about the group Ribbentrop had brought to the Nuremberg Party Rally, reported that there were some " serious persons of standing among them " and that an equal number of Ribbentrop's British contingent were " eccentrics and few, if any, could be called representatives of serious English thought, either political or social, while they most certainly lacked any political or social influence in England ".

During the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact negotiations, Ribbentrop was overjoyed by a report from his Ambassador in Moscow, Count Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, of a speech by the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin before the 18th Party Congress in March 1939 that was strongly anti-Western, which Schulenburg reported meant that the Soviet Union might be seeking an accord with Germany.

Upon his return to Britain he became a vocal Soviet sympathiser who avidly read the Daily Worker ( the publication of the Communist Party of Great Britain ), although was heavily critical of some of the Soviet government's policies, in particular the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact that they made with Nazi Germany.

Whereas people like Arthur Koestler left the Party after seeing the friendly reception of Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop in Moscow during the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ( 1939-1941 ), Hobsbawm stood firm even after the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, though he was against them both.

Nonetheless, since the mid-1950s, despite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ( CPSU ) having disowned Stalinism, the political culture of Stalinism — an omnipotent General Secretary, anti-Trotskyism, a five-year planned economy ( post-New Economic Policy ), and repudiation of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact secret protocols — remained the character of Soviet society until the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as leader of the CPSU in 1985.

When the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact was signed in the summer of 1939, the French authorities declared the Communist Party illegal and in Indochina, all the Communists and the Trotskyists leaders were rounded up.

On March 27, 1935, Hitler had appointed Joachim von Ribbentrop, who served as both Hitler ’ s Extraordinary Ambassador-Plenipotentiary at Large ( making part of the Auswärtiges Amt, the German Foreign Office ) and as the chief of a Nazi Party organization named the Dienststelle Ribbentrop that competed with the Auswärtiges Amt was appointed to head the German delegation to negotiate any naval treaty.

Other contributions included two essays by George Orwell, " Fascism and Democracy " and " Patriots and Revolutionaries " that condemned the Communist Party of Great Britain for backing the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and for taking a revolutionary defeatist position in the war against Nazi Germany.

After the German attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June and the break of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact, the newly reconstituted Communist Party found itself firmly on the anti-Axis camp, a line confirmed by the Party's 6th Plenum during 1 – 3 July.