Joachim von Ribbentrop
Joachim von Ribbentrop was Hitler's foreign minister, negotiated the pact with Stalin, and was the first man hanged at Nuremberg. Born in 1893 to an army officer's family, he spent four years in Canada as a young man working as a bank clerk and a timekeeper on a railway bridge, and came back to Europe when the war began. He acquired the aristocratic von in 1925 by arranging to be adopted by a distant relative who had a title, and his money by marrying into the Henkell sparkling wine family and selling it. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and made himself useful by lending his house in Dahlem for the negotiations that made Hitler chancellor. His qualification was that he spoke English and French and had been abroad, which in that party was rare. He negotiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement in 1935, was ambassador in London from 1936, where he gave the Nazi salute to the king and was widely disliked, and came back convinced that Britain was decadent and would not fight — advice Hitler wanted and acted on. He became foreign minister in 1938 and signed the pact with Molotov in August 1939. Almost everyone in the German government despised him, and his ministry lost influence steadily to the party and the SS as the war went on. He was captured in Hamburg in 1945, convicted on all four counts at Nuremberg including the conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and hanged in October 1946. His defence at Nuremberg was that he had only carried out Hitler's instructions and had not known what was being done in the east, and the tribunal found that he had signed the orders. He is reported to have said at the end that he wished to be remembered as having wanted peace.
- Lived: 1893 CE – 1946 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: foreign_minister, diplomat, nazi_official
