The third Reich

He met Adolf Hitler in 1932 and joined the National Socialist Party the same year, becoming the führer’s chief adviser on foreign affairs after the Nazi accession to power (Jan. 30, 1933).

Ribbentrop’s greatest diplomatic coup, however, was the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of Aug. 23, 1939, which cleared the way for Hitler’s attack on Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, thus beginning World War II.

As such, he was in charge of both the Gestapo and the system of Nazi concentration camps scattered throughout Europe.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner controlled the administrative apparatus for carrying out the extermination of European Jewry in 1943–45.

He chaired the notorious Wannsee Conference (January 20, 1942), whose participants discussed the logistics of the “final solution.”

On July 31, 1941, Hermann Göring commissioned Heydrich to carry out a “final solution to the Jewish question,” authorizing him to take all organizational and administrative steps necessary for the extermination of the Jews.