Joachim von Ribbentrop was Nazi Germany's foreign minister, a vain and ambitious former wine merchant who became one of Hitler's chief diplomats and was hanged for war crimes after the Second World War. Born into a military family, he spent time abroad in his youth, married into a wealthy champagne-trading family, and acquired the aristocratic "von" through a dubious adoption.
Joining the Nazi Party relatively late, Ribbentrop ingratiated himself with Hitler, who valued his supposed knowledge of the wider world and his social connections. He rose quickly, serving as ambassador to Britain — where his arrogance and clumsiness made him widely disliked — before being appointed foreign minister in 1938.
In that role he helped engineer some of the key diplomatic moves that led to war. He negotiated the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact with his Soviet counterpart Molotov, an astonishing agreement between the two ideological enemies that paved the way for the German invasion of Poland and the outbreak of the Second World War. Throughout the war his influence waned as Hitler increasingly bypassed him, but he remained a loyal and willing instrument of the regime.
Ribbentrop was complicit in the regime's aggression and in the deportation of Jews to their deaths. Captured at the end of the war, he was tried at Nuremberg, convicted on all counts, and in 1946 became the first of the major Nazi leaders to be hanged.