http://www.grolier.com/wwii/wwii_ribbentrop.html JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP, (1893-1946), German diplomat, who was foreign minister during the Nazi regime. He was born in Wesel on April 30, 1893, and educated in Metz and later in Grenoble, France. He traveled in Europe and North America while in his teens. In World War I he fought on the Eastern front. After meeting Adolf HITLER in the early 1930s, Ribbentrop joined the NATIONAL SOCIALIST (Nazi) party. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he became Hitler's personal adviser on foreign affairs. In his capacity as ambassador at large he negotiated the 1935 Anglo-German naval agreement, and the 1936 Anti-Comintern pact with Japan, aimed at the Soviet Union. As ambassador to Britain from 1936 to 1938 he failed to establish an Anglo-German understanding but assured Hitler that the British would not offer any effective resistance to a German attack on Poland.
Who got the biggest laugh at the Nuremberg Trials ? The answer is, von Ribbentrop. It happened when he was denying that he had bullied President Hacha of Czechoslovakia. `What further pressure could you put on the head of a country except to threaten him that your army would march in and your airforce would bomb his capital?' demanded Sir David Maxwell-Fife `War, for instance', Ribbentrop replied and the court erupted. The other prisoners shook their heads in embarrassed disbelief while one asked his neighbour `How could such a man be Foreign Minister of the Reich ?' I've been reading his autobiography again .... it's unbelievable the "faux pas" he made and yet Hitler kept him .... !!
