In September 1941, Stalin told British diplomats that he wanted two agreements: ( 1 ) a mutual assistance / aid pact and ( 2 ) a recognition that, after the war, the Soviet Union would gain the territories in countries that it had taken pursuant to its division of Eastern Europe with Hitler in the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

Count Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf, with whom Ribbentrop had served in the 12th Torgau Hussars in the First World War, arranged the introduction.

A visitor to a party Ribbentrop threw in 1928 recorded that Ribbentrop had no political views beyond a vague admiration for Gustav Stresemann, fear of Communism, and a wish to restore the monarchy.

Several Berlin Jewish businessmen who did business with Ribbentrop in the 1920s and knew him well later expressed astonishment at the vicious anti-Semitism Ribbentrop later displayed in the Third Reich, saying that they did not see any indications that he had held such views when they knew him.

And Ribbentrop was blowing up the whole day and I had to do nothing.

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.

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 ".

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.

To help with his move to London, and with the design of the new German Embassy Ribbentrop had built ( the existing Embassy was insufficiently grand for Ribbentrop ), Ribbentrop, at his wife's suggestion, hired a Berlin interior decorator named Martin Luther.

During the abdication crisis of December 1936, Ribbentrop reported to Berlin that the reason the crisis had occurred was an anti-German Jewish-Masonic-reactionary conspiracy to depose Edward ( whom Ribbentrop represented as a staunch friend of Germany ), and that civil war would soon break out in Britain between the King's supporters and those of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin's.

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 ".

His report delighted Hitler, causing him to remark that Ribbentrop was the only person who told him " the truth about the world abroad ".

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.

In both cases the praise was limited, with Cerruti going on to write that only in the Third Reich was it possible for someone as superficial as Ribbentrop to rise to be a minister of foreign affairs, while Geyr von Schweppenburg called Ribbentrop an absolute disaster as Ambassador in London.

Ribbentrop wrote in his " Memorandum for the Führer " that " a change in the status quo in the East to Germany's advantage can only be accomplished by force ", and that the best way to achieve this change was to build a global anti-British alliance system.

That Ribbentrop was able to perform even this miracle only came home to me much later ".

By allowing the Hungarians to destroy Europe's only Ukrainian state, Ribbentrop had signified that Germany was not interested ( at least for the moment ) in sponsoring Ukrainian nationalism.

On 26 March, in an extremely stormy meeting with the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski, Ribbentrop accused the Poles of attempting to bully Germany by their partial mobilization and violently attacked them for only offering consideration of the German demand about the " extra-territorial " roads.

Even Ribbentrop ’ s standard line that Germany was only reacting to an unjust Versailles treaty, and really only wanted peace with everyone, which had worked so well in the past, failed to carry weight.

The German Embassy in Ankara had been vacant ever since the retirement of the previous ambassador Friedrich von Keller in November 1938, and Ribbentrop was only able to get the Turks to accept Papen as Ambassador when the Turkish Foreign Minister Şükrü Saracoğlu complained to Kroll in April 1939 about when the Germans were ever going to sent a new ambassador.

Ribbentrop believed that Turks were so stupid that only by shouting at them could one make them understand.

In public, Ribbentrop expressed great fury at the Polish refusal to allow for Danzig's return to the Reich, or to grant Polish permission for the " extra-territorial " highways, but since these matters were only intended after March 1939 to be a pretext for German aggression, Ribbentrop always refused in private to allow for any talks between German and Polish diplomats about these matters.

Ribbentrop informed Hitler that any war with Poland would last for only 24 hours, and that the British would be so stunned with this display of German power that they would not honour their commitments.

Ribbentrop supported his analysis of the situation by only showing Hitler diplomatic dispatches that supported his view that neither Britain or France would honour their commitments to Poland.

The British historian Victor Rothwell wrote that the newspapers that Ribbentrop used to provide his press summaries for Hitler, such as the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, were out of touch not only with British public opinion, but also with British government policy in regard to Poland.

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 ).

Ribbentrop expressed his firmly-held belief that neither Britain nor France would go to war for Poland, but if that should occur, he fully expected the Italians to honour the terms of the Pact of Steel ( which was both an offensive and defensive treaty ), and declare war not only on Poland, but on the Western powers if necessary.

Ciano complained furiously that Ribbentrop had violated his promise given only that spring, when Italy signed the Pact of Steel, that there would be no war for the next three years.

Ribbentrop spent the last weeks of September 1938 looking forward very much to the German-Czechoslovak war he expected to break out on 1 October 1938.

When Ribbentrop finally got around to announcing his decision, the Hungarian delegation who had expected Ribbentrop to rule in favour of Romania broke out in cheers while the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu fainted.

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.

In June 1937, when Lord Mount Temple, the Chairman of the Anglo-German Fellowship, asked to see the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after meeting Hitler in a visit arranged by Ribbentrop, Robert Vansittart, the British Foreign Office's Undersecretary wrote a memo stating that :" The P. M. Minister should certainly not see Lord Mount Temple – nor should the S of S. We really must put a stop to this eternal butting in of amateurs – and Lord Mount Temple is a particularly silly one.

Ribbentrop regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat for Germany, as it deprived Germany of the opportunity to wage the war to destroy Czechoslovakia that Ribbentrop wanted to see ; the Sudetenland issue, which was the ostensible subject of the German-Czechoslovak dispute, had been just a pretext for German aggression.

To further block German-Polish diplomatic talks, Ribbentrop had the German Ambassador to Poland, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, recalled, and refused to see the Polish Ambassador, Józef Lipski.

No wonder Henderson was angry ; von Ribbentrop on the other hand could see war ahead and went home beaming.

Ribbentrop who considered taking declarations of war from such small states as Costa Rica and Ecuador to be deeply humiliating refused to see any of the Latin American ambassadors and instead had Weizsäcker take the Latin declarations of war.

Admiral Miklós Horthy met with Hitler and Ribbentrop at Schloss Klessheim and was informed that he could either accept German occupation or see Hungary invaded and destroyed.

" Nuremberg Prison Commandant Burton C. Andrus later recalled that immediately before the hood was placed over his head, Ribbentrop, who had experienced a late conversion to Christianity while imprisoned at Nuremberg, turned to the prison's Lutheran chaplain and whispered, " I'll see you again.

In November 1940 Stalin sent Molotov to Berlin to meet von Ribbentrop and Adolf Hitler ( see German – Soviet Axis talks # Molotov travels to Berlin ).