In March 1939, Ribbentrop assigned the largely ethnic Ukrainian Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia region of Czecho-Slovakia, which had just proclaimed its independence as the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, to Hungary, which then proceeded to annex it after a short war.

On 7 May 1940, Ribbentrop founded a new section of the Foreign Office, the Abteilung Deutschland ( Department of Internal German Affairs ), under Martin Luther, to which was assigned the responsibility for all anti-Semitic affairs.

Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who in turn ordered Benzler to co-operate fully in the massacre.

On 17 September the Red Army invaded Poland, violating the 1932 Soviet – Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

He returned to France in June 1940 following the German occupation and was assigned by Joachim von Ribbentrop to the embassy in Paris.

Following Hitler's June 30 directive, Abetz was assigned by Ribbentrop the project of " safeguarding " all objects of art, public, private, and especially Jewish-owned.

But Ribbentrop was not popular with the Nazi Party's Alte Kämpfer ( Old Fighters ); they nearly all disliked him.

British historian Laurence Rees described Ribbentrop as "... the Nazi almost all the other leading Nazis hated ".

For example, as Special Commissioner, Ribbentrop was allowed to see all diplomatic correspondence relating to disarmament, but he refused to share it with Neurath or von Bülow.

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.

On the basis of Lord Lothian's praise for the natural friendship between Germany and Britain, Ribbentrop informed Hitler that all elements of British society wished for closer ties with Germany.

was signed, Ribbentrop followed up with the next step that was intended to create the Anglo-German alliance, namely the Gleichschaltung ( co-ordination ) of all societies demanding the restoration of Germany's former colonies in Africa.

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.

In August 1936, Hitler appointed Ribbentrop Ambassador to Britain with orders to negotiate the Anglo-German alliance: ... et Britain to join the Anti-Comintern Pact, that is what I want most of all.

London's tailors retaliated for this abuse by telling all their well-off clients that Ribbentrop was impossible to deal with.

Ribbentrop further compounded the damage to his image and caused a minor crisis in Anglo-German relations by insisting that henceforward all German diplomats were to greet heads of state with the " German greeting ", who were in turn to return the fascist salute.

Almost all of the initially favourable reports Ribbentrop provided to Berlin about the alliance's prospects were based on friendly remarks about the " New Germany " from various British aristocrats like Lord Londonderry and Lord Lothian ; the rather cool reception that Ribbentrop received from British Cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats did not make much of an impression on him at first.

The American historian Gordon A. Craig once observed that of all the voluminous memoir literature of the diplomatic scene of 1930s Europe, there are only two positive references to Ribbentrop.

As the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, noted in his diary in late 1937, Ribbentrop had come to hate Britain with all the " fury of a woman scorned ".

Besides converting the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British military alliance, Ribbentrop argued that German foreign policy should work to " furthermore, winning over all states whose interests conform directly or indirectly to ours ".

During the course of all three periods, Ribbentrop met frequently with leaders and diplomats from Italy, Japan, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, and Hungary.

During all this time, Ribbentrop feuded with various other Nazi leaders ; at one point in August 1939 an armed clash took place between supporters of Ribbentrop and those of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels over the control of a radio station in Berlin that was meant to broadcast German propaganda abroad ( Goebbels claimed exclusive control of all propaganda both at home and abroad whereas Ribbentrop asserted a claim to monopolize all German propaganda abroad ).

In the same interview, Spitzy called Ribbentrop " pompous, conceited and not too intelligent ", and stated he was an utterly insufferable man to work for.

The Foreign Office took Weizsäcker's appointment as a sign that Ribbentrop was a man, who, though personally disagreeable and unpleasant, was one they could work under: no radical changes were in the offing.

Ribbentrop began his political career that summer by offering to be a secret emissary between Chancellor Franz von Papen, his old wartime friend, and Hitler.

And as time went by, Ribbentrop started to oust the Foreign Office's old diplomats from their senior positions and replace them with men from the Dienststelle.

Ribbentrop was widely disliked by the old diplomats.

On 19 May 1940 Ribbentrop met the new Italian Ambassador Dino Alfieri, who described the meeting as follows :" He commented at length on the " dazzling " successes of the German armies, extolling the military genius of the Führer ... who had " revealed himself as the greatest military genius since Napoleon "... He spoke of the inevitable clash between the young nations and the old ; of the necessity of breaking the ring with which the Judaeo-democratic-plutocratic powers were trying to encircle Germany and Italy ; and of the need to create a new European civilization.

Ribbentrop suffered a major blow when many old Foreign Office diplomats participated in the 20 July 1944 putsch and assassination attempt on Hitler.

He also was an advisor at the Dienststelle Ribbentrop from 1934 to 1938 ( when Ribbentrop was made foreign minister his old bureau was disbanded ).

Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop ( 30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946 ) was Foreign Minister of Germany from 1938 until 1945.

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.

But during a summer holiday in Switzerland in 1909, Ribbentrop fell in love with a wealthy young socialite named Catherine Bell, from a Montreal banking family, which led him to substitute Canada for Tanganyika as his preferred destination.

To this end, Ribbentrop often worked closely with General Hiroshi Ōshima, who served first as the Japanese military attaché, and then as Ambassador in Berlin, to strengthen German-Japanese ties despite furious opposition from the Wehrmacht and the Foreign Office, which preferred closer Sino-German ties.

A former aide recalled that Ribbentrop threw the German Embassy into chaos due to his erratic personality: He rose, muttering bad-temperedly ... Dressed in his pyjamas, he received the junior secretaries and press attachés in his bathroom ... He scolded, threatened, gesticulated with his razor and shouted at his valet ... As he took his bath, he ordered people to be summoned from Berlin, accepted and cancelled, appointed and dismissed, and dictated through the door to a nervous stenographer ... He cursed people in their absence, calling them saboteurs and communists ... It was my task to put his calls through ; his valet stood within splashing distance holding a white telephone ... Ribbentrop believed only ministers ranked above him: everyone else, including his ambassadorial colleagues, had to kept waiting on the line.

I had to console them with feeble excuses such as that His Excellency was not very well, or engaged in an urgent state call to Berlin ... For the rest of the morning he listened to reports from members of the Embassy staff, unless I had to accompany him to the Foreign Office ... When Ribbentrop strutted through the Office corridors like a peacock, his head thrown back, it was a miracle that he did not fall over.

Ribbentrop believed the British aristocracy comprised some sort of secret society that ruled from behind the scenes, and if he could befriend enough members of Britain's " secret government ", he could bring about the alliance.

The British historian / television producer Laurence Rees noted for his 1997 series The Nazis: A Warning from History that every single person interviewed for the series who knew Ribbentrop expressed a passionate hatred for him.

In the second, from 1939 – 43, Ribbentrop attempted to persuade other states to enter the war on Germany's side or at least maintain pro-German neutrality.

Herbert von Dirksen, who was German Ambassador in London from 1938 – 1939, described his predecessor, Ribbentrop, as " an unwholesome, half-comical figure ".

Many of the people Ribbentrop appointed to head German embassies, especially the " amateur " diplomats from the Dienststelle, were grossly incompetent.

As time went by, Ribbentrop took to restructuring the Foreign Office by creating new offices like the Agency for News Analysis which fought with the Propaganda Ministry for control of German propaganda abroad, and by creating an inner circle of loyalists, many of whom had come from the Dienststelle.

Before the Anglo-German summit at Berchtesgaden on 15 September 1938, Henderson and Weizsäcker worked out a private arrangement that Hitler and Chamberlain were to meet with no advisers present as a way of excluding the ultra-hawkish Ribbentrop from attending the talks.

In a moment of pique at his exclusion from the Chamberlain-Hitler meeting, Ribbentrop refused to hand over to Chamberlain Schmidt's notes of the summit, a move which caused much annoyance on the British side.

Ribbentrop played an important role in setting in motion the crisis that was to result in the end of Czecho-Slovakia by ordering German diplomats in Bratislava to contact Father Jozef Tiso, the Premier of the Slovak regional government, and pressuring him to declare independence from Prague.

Initially, Germany hoped to transform Poland into a satellite state, but by March 1939 German demands had been rejected by the Poles three times, which led Hitler to decide, with enthusiastic support from Ribbentrop, upon the destruction of Poland as the main German foreign policy goal of 1939.