After the Tripartite Pact was signed by Axis Powers Germany, Japan and Italy, in October 1940, Stalin traded letters with Ribbentrop, with Stalin writing about entering an agreement regarding a " permanent basis " for their " mutual interests.

Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic proponents of aggressively pursuing Germany's territorial claims sooner rather than later, along with Himmler and Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop.

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

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.

Ribbentrop was educated irregularly at private schools in Germany and Switzerland.

A former teacher later recalled that Ribbentrop " was the most stupid in his class, full of vanity and very pushy ".

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.

When World War I began, Ribbentrop left Canada ( which, as part of the British Empire, was at war with Germany ) for the neutral United States.

In 1918 1st Lieutenant Ribbentrop was stationed in Istanbul as a staff officer.

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 ".

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

During most of the Weimar Republic era, Ribbentrop was apolitical and displayed no anti-Semitic prejudices.

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.

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

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.

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.

In the first part of his assignment, Ribbentrop was partly successful, but in the second part he more than fulfilled Hitler's expectations.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

In the first of his two reports to Hitler, which was presented on 2 January 1938, Ribbentrop stated that " England is our most dangerous enemy ".

Dirksen was later to write that he at first hoped that now that Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister this would mean the end of the Dienststelle " for no man can intrigue against himself.

Ribbentrop first seems to have considered the idea of a pact with the Soviet Union after an unsuccessful visit to Warsaw in January 1939, when the Poles again refused Ribbentrop's demands about Danzig, the " extra-territorial " roads across the Polish Corridor and the Anti-Comintern Pact.

Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference for focusing the war effort against Britain, on 28 June 1941, Ribbentrop began a sustained effort to have Japan attack the Soviet Union without bothering to inform Hitler first.

Ribbentrop halted deportations from Romania and Croatia ; in the case of the former, he was insulted because the SS were negotiating with the Romanians directly, and in the case of the latter because the SS and Luther were jointly pressuring the Italians in their zone of occupation in Croatia to deport their Jews without first informing Ribbentrop, who was supposed to be personally kept abreast of all developments in Italo-German relations.

Through Raeder expressed some worry in the first half of 1939 over the prospect of a war with Britain when the Plan Z had barely began, he accepted and believed in the assurances of Hitler and the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop that neither Britain nor France would go to war if the Reich attacked Poland.

At first, Hitler rebuffed Soviet diplomatic hints that Stalin desired a treaty, but in early August 1939, Hitler authorised Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to begin serious negotiations.

Along with Germany's Joachim von Ribbentrop, Molotov is among the first humans to orbit the Earth.

During the first Soviet occupation, as a result of the Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact, Telšiai became infamous for the nearby Rainiai massacre, the mass murder of 76 Lithuanian political prisoners perpetrated by the Red Army during the night of June 24 – 25, 1941.

Ribbentrop was awarded the Iron Cross first class for his personal bravery in these battles.

Baron Konstantin von Neurath, the German Foreign Minister was first opposed to this arrangement, but changed his mind when he decided that the British would never accept the 35: 100 ratio, and having Ribbentrop head the mission was the best way to discredit his rival.

He served as an advisor to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, first in the Dienststelle Ribbentrop (" Ribbentrop Bureau "), and later in the Auswärtiges Amt (" Foreign Office ") as a diplomat when von Ribbentrop replaced Konstantin von Neurath.

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.

To this end, Ribbentrop appointed a colleague, Otto Abetz, from the Dienststelle Ambassador to France with instructions to promote the political career of Pierre Laval, who Ribbentrop had decided was the French politician most favourable to Germany.

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.

But in November, Ribbentrop arranged a meeting between de Brinon, who wrote for the Le Matin newspaper, and Hitler, during which Hitler stressed what he claimed to be his love of peace and his friendship towards France.

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 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.

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 ".

In March 1937, Ribbentrop attracted much adverse comment in the British press when he gave a speech at the Leipzig Trade Fair in Leipzig, where he declared that German economic prosperity would be satisfied either " through the restoration of the former German colonial possessions, or by means of the German people's own strength ".

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.

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.

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.

By the last statement, Ribbentrop clearly implied that the Soviet Union should be included in the anti-British alliance system he had proposed.

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 ).

Ribbentrop told the head of Hitler's Press Office, Fritz Hesse, that the Munich Agreement was " first-class stupidity ... All it means is that we have to fight the English in a year, when they will be better armed ... It would have been much better if war had come now ".

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.

As a consequence, after Munich, Britain was considered to be the main enemy of the Reich, and as a result, the influence of ardently Anglophobic Ribbentrop correspondingly rose with Hitler.

Ribbentrop in turn sent out instructions to the German Ambassador in Warsaw, Count Hans-Adolf von Moltke, that if Poland agreed to the German demands, then Germany would ensure that Poland could partition Slovakia with Hungary and be ensured of German support for annexing the Ukraine.

Papen ’ s attempt to address Turkish fears of Italian expansionism by getting Ribbentrop to have Count Galeazzo Ciano promise the Turks that they had nothing to fear from Italy backfired when the Turks found the Italo-German effort to be both patronizing and insulting.

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.

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.