April 30, 1893 - Joachim von Ribbentrop
As Nazi Germany's Foreign Minister, Ribbentrop shaped the diplomatic architecture that enabled the war — most consequentially through the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which neutralized the Soviet threat long enough for Germany to move westward. His role was less that of an ideologue than a facilitator: leveraging social connections and foreign exposure to open doors that other senior Nazis could not. The Nuremberg tribunal found him guilty on all four counts, including crimes against peace and war crimes, and he was the first of the major defendants to be hanged.
From Wikipedia
Ulrich Friedrich-Wilhelm Joachim von Ribbentrop (German: [joˈʔaxɪm fɔn ˈʁɪbəntʁɔp]; 30 April 1893 – 16 October 1946) was a German politician, diplomat, and war criminal who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945.
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 as a perceived authority on foreign affairs. He offered his house Schloss Fuschl for the secret meetings in January 1933 that resulted in Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany. He became a close confidant of Hitler, to the dismay of some party members, who thought him unintelligent, superficial and lacking in talent. He was appointed ambassador to the Court of St James's, the royal court of the United Kingdom, in 1936 and then Foreign Minister of Germany in February 1938.
Before World War II, he played a key role in brokering the Pact of Steel (an alliance with Fascist Italy) and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the German–Soviet non-aggression pact). He favoured retaining good relations with the Soviet Union, opposing the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late 1941, due to American aid to Britain and the increasingly frequent "incidents" in the North Atlantic between U-boats and American warships guarding convoys to Britain, Ribbentrop worked for the failure of the Japanese-American talks in Washington and for Japan to attack the United States.
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