Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was Foreign Minister of Nazi Germany from 1938 until 1945. A businessman, he was appointed German Ambassador to Britain in 1936, serving in London.
Ribbentrop first came to Adolf Hitler's notice as a well-travelled businessman with more knowledge of the outside world than most senior Nazis, and apparently an authority on world affairs. He offered his house for the secret meetings in January 1933 that resulted in Hitler's appointment as Chancellor. He became a close confidant of the Führer, to the disgust of long-serving party members, who thought him superficial and lacking in talent. Despite this, he was appointed as Ambassador to Britain in 1936, and then Foreign Minister in February 1938.
In the run-up to World War II, he played a key role in brokering the Pact of Steel (with fascist Italy) and the Soviet-German non-aggression pact, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. However, his diplomatic record is mainly one of failure. After 1941, Ribbentrop's influence declined, partly because he was basically pro-Russian and anti-British, while Hitler was the other way round. Few countries maintained diplomatic relations with Germany.
Arrested in June 1945, he was tried at the Nuremberg Trials and convicted of war crimes for his role in starting World War II and enabling the Holocaust. On 16 October 1946 he became the first of those sentenced to death to be hanged.
Read more about Ulrich Friedrich Wilhelm Joachim Von Ribbentrop: Early Life, Early Nazi Career, Ambassador To The United Kingdom, Foreign Minister of The Reich, Trial and Execution, Portrayal in Popular Culture, See Also
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“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. The plausibility of this suggestion has won for it general assent and admiration.... But the examination can be only carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same as to know it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer, Walther Frank, Julius Streicher and Robert Ley did pass under my inspection and interrogation in 1945 but they only proved that National Socialism was a gangster interlude at a rather low order of mental capacity and with a surprisingly high incidence of alcoholism.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“New inventions can and will be made; however, nothing new can be thought of that concerns moral man. Everything has already been thought and said which at best we can express in different forms and give new expressions to.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)