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 ".

Ribbentrop used this privilege to go through the incoming diplomatic messages, snatching certain messages, taking them to Hitler and having a reply written without Neurath or von Bülow being informed first.

The Americans believed that Ribbentrop used Simpson's access to the King to funnel important information about the British to his superiors.

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 ).

This method was used to execute condemned Nazis under United States jurisdiction after the Nuremberg Trials including Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

* In science-fiction stories Samolot von Ribbentrop ( Von Ribbentrop's plane ) and Atomowa Ruletka ( Nuclear Roulette ) by Polish writer Andrzej Pilipiuk, " red mercury reactors " are used as highly efficient power sources, although no further information about either the substance or said reactors is given.

Although Hitler ostensibly used the Foreign Ministry ( Auswärtiges Amt ) for his foreign relations, he was in fact more dependent on the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, a competing foreign office operated by the ex-champagne salesman.

" 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.

Ribbentrop was tasked with ensuring that the world remained convinced that Germany sincerely wanted an arms-limitation treaty while also ensuring that no such treaty ever materialized.

As such, Ribbentrop worked hard during his early diplomatic career to realize Hitler's dream of an anti-Soviet Anglo-German alliance.

Neither Hitler nor Ribbentrop seemed to comprehend that when luminaries such as these declared their support for closer Anglo-German ties, they were speaking as private citizens, not on behalf of Whitehall.

The vain, arrogant, and tactless Ribbentrop was not the man for such a mission, but it is doubtful that even a more skilled diplomat could have fulfilled Hitler's dream.

That same day, on 21 March 1939, Ribbentrop presented a set of demands to the Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski about Poland allowing the Free City of Danzig to return to Germany in such violent and extreme language that it led to the Poles to fear their country was on the verge of an immediate German attack.

On the basis of such decrypts, Hitler and Ribbentrop believed that the British were bluffing with their warnings that they would go to war to defend Polish independence.

Ribbentrop argued that with Soviet economic support ( especially in the form of oil ), Germany was now immune to the effects of a British naval blockade, and as such, the British would never take on Germany.

Even if the British were serious in their warnings of war, Ribbentrop took the view that since a war with Britain was inevitable, the risk of a war with Britain was an acceptable one and accordingly he argued that Germany should not shy away from such challenges.

After signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, Ribbentrop expanded on this idea for an Axis alliance to include the Soviet Union to form a Eurasian bloc that would destroy maritime states such as Britain.

Ribbentrop argued that the Soviets and Germans shared a common enemy in the form of the British Empire, and as such, it was in the best interests of the Kremlin to enter the war on the Axis side.

In the winter of 1940 – 41, Ribbentrop strongly pressured Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, despite advice from the German Legation in Belgrade that such a move would probably lead to the overthrow of Crown Prince Paul, the Yugoslav Regent.

Ribbentrop argued to Hitler that a war between the United States and Germany was inevitable given the extent of American aid to Britain and the increasingly frequent " incidents " in the North Atlantic between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to Britain, and that having such a war begin with a Japanese attack on the United States was the best way to begin it.

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.

Philby engaged in a concerted effort to make contact with Germans such as Joachim von Ribbentrop, at that time the German ambassador in London.

The same German foresters who headed the Forest Service of India, such as Dietrich Brandis and Berthold Ribbentrop, traveled back to Europe and taught at forestry schools in England ( Cooper's Hill, later moved to Oxford ).

Neither group had an avowed mission to Nazify Britain and instead the two groups would unite to host grand dinners at which leading German figures noted for their Anglophilia or their familial links to the UK such as Rudolf Hess, von Ribbentrop, General Werner von Blomberg, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Brunswick and Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha would be guests of honour.

In particular, this idea appealed to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Special Ambassador at Large and head of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop and the Japanese Military Attaché in Berlin, General Oshima Hiroshi, who hoped that such an alliance might lead to China's subordination to Japan.

Ribbentrop denied correctly that Germany was going to invade Romania, but since his denials were issued in almost identical language to the denials that he had issued in early March, when he denied that anything was being planned against the Czechs, this increased rather than diminished the “ Romanian war scare ” of March 1939.

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.