Ribbentrop, in turn, greatly admired Hitler.

Up to the time he became Germany's Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop aggressively competed with Neurath's Foreign Office and sought to undercut Neurath at every turn.

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.

Since Hitler was not really interested in obtaining the former colonies, especially if the price was a brake on expansion into Eastern Europe, Ribbentrop was forced to turn down the Anglo-French offer that he had largely brought about.

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

The German minister to Lisbon reported this to Ribbentrop on July 11 and added the Duke " intends to postpone his departure as long as possible ... in hope of a turn of events favourable to him ," and basically reiterated what was reported by Minister Beigbeder.

So to discredit his rival, he appointed Ribbentrop head of the delegation sent to London to negotiate it.

By April 1938, Ribbentrop had ended all German arms shipments to China and had all of the German Army officers serving with the Kuomintang government of Chiang Kai-shek recalled ( with the threat that the families of the officers in China would be sent to concentration camps if the officers did not return to Germany immediately ).

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.

On 25 May 1939, Ribbentrop sent a secret message to Moscow to tell the Soviet Foreign Commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, that if Germany attacked Poland " Russia's special interests would be taken into consideration ".

On 27 August 1939, Chamberlain sent the following letter to Hitler, which was intended to counteract reports Chamberlain had heard from intelligence sources in Berlin that Ribbentrop had convinced Hitler that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact would ensure that Britain would abandon Poland.

On the following day, 31 July 1944, in view of the likely invasion by German forces, the state sent three letters of protest: one to Joachim von Ribbentrop, German Foreign Minister, one to Adolf Hitler and one to Benito Mussolini, the latter delivered by a delegation to Serafino Mazzolini, a high-ranking diplomat in the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In April 1941, Hans Thomsen, a diplomat at the German embassy in Washington, D. C., sent a message to Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, informing him that " an absolutely reliable source " had told Thomsen that the Americans had broken the Japanese diplomatic cipher ( that is, Purple ).

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

The Bureau's source ( Duke Carl Alexander of Württemberg, a distant relative of Queen Mary then living as a monk in the United States ) claimed that Simpson and Ribbentrop had a relationship, and that Ribbentrop sent her 17 carnations every day, one for each occasion they had slept together.

The German foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was sent to negotiate a new treaty with Japan.

On September 25, 1940, Ribbentrop sent a telegram to Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, informing him that Germany, Italy and Japan were about to sign a military alliance.

' Ultra ', the British code-breaking system based at Bletchley Park was routinely reading coded messages between German ambassadors and von Ribbentrop in Berlin ; they were sent by the ' Enigma ' code machine.

In late August 1939 ( a week before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II ) Hitler sent his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to Moscow to arrange a pact of non aggression with the Soviet Union.

After the Western Campaign, Ribbentrop was sent to the SS-Junkerschule in Braunschweig in order to gain training as platoon leader.

Upon the invasion of Russia, SS-Kampfgruppe Nord was sent to Finland where Ribbentrop was to distinguish himself and was awarded the Finnish Freedom Cross, fourth class.

" On 20 August 1939, Hitler sent a personal message to Stalin, asking him to receive Ribbentrop no later than the twenty-third.

Weizsäcker never sent his memo to Ribbentrop.

When Ribbentrop was sent to London as Ambassador in 1936, he hired Luther to move his furniture from Berlin and, later, to do the interior decorating of the new German Embassy in London.

In 1943, with the aid of Franz Rademacher, he tried to supplant von Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister, but was thwarted and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Through the Japanese, Hitler learned about the results of the invasion of the Soviet Union and sent Joachim von Ribbentrop to negotiate peace between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Despite this, Hitler never quite trusted the Foreign Office and was always on the lookout for someone like Ribbentrop to carry out his foreign-policy goals.

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.

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.

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.

Like Hitler, Ribbentrop was determined that in the next crisis, Germany would not have its professed demands met in another Munich-type summit, and that the next crisis to be caused by Germany would result in the war that Chamberlain had " cheated " the Germans out of at Munich.

In April 1939, Ribbentrop received intelligence that Britain and Turkey were negotiating an alliance intended to keep Germany out of the Balkans.

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.

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.

When Dekanozov finally appeared, Ribbentrop read out a short statement saying that the Reich had been forced into " military countermeasures " because of an alleged Soviet plan to attack Germany in July 1941.

Ribbentrop did not actually present a declaration of war to General Dekanozov, instead confining himself to reading out the statement about Germany being forced to take " military countermeasures ".

Ribbentrop also worked closely with the SS for what turned out to be his last significant foreign-policy move: Operation Panzerfaust, the coup that deposed Admiral Horthy on 15 October 1944.

Lack of Chinese interest doomed the project's original intention, but October – November 1935, Ribbentrop and Oshima worked out a treaty directed against the Comintern.

In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union each carved out their own spheres of influence in Poland and Eastern Europe via the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact.

" He also claimed to have carried a loaded pistol in his coat pocket at a meeting with Hitler and Ribbentrop in July 1939 and was " seriously troubled " about not shooting when he had the chance, adding "... f this war breaks out, as I feel sure it will, then I shall feel very much to blame for not killing these two.

Simon was visibly angry with Ribbentrop ’ s behavior, stated that “ It is not usual to make such conditions at the beginning of negotiations ”, and walked out of the talks.

In his memoirs, Abetz assumed that he was considered " too francophile " and that his constant warnings about the loss of the French fleet and the loss of the French North Africa colonies were a thorn in the side of von Ribbentrop, particularly now that they had turned out to be correct.

On 13 April 1945, he met with Ribbentrop — for the last time, it turned out — and vowed to stand with the leaders of the Third Reich in their hour of crisis.