People of the Revolution and the USSR

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1893–1946 ✕ Executed

Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, he played a key role in negotiating the German-Soviet nonaggression pact.

Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. He played a key role in negotiating the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which made possible Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. He also directed diplomatic efforts to persuade Axis partners to deport Jews to German killing centers and to hand over their Jewish citizens in Germany to deportation. The International Military Tribunal convicted him on all four counts and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Italy state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1895–1988 ○ Natural causes

A Fascist power broker who helped bring down Mussolini

At 2 a.m. on 25 July 1943, the Grandi motion passed 19–8 and shattered Mussolini’s grip on power.

Dino Grandi was a leading Italian Fascist and diplomat who exercised power at the centre of the regime. As foreign minister and ambassador in London, he pursued a cautious diplomatic line toward war, but he also bore responsibility for administering the Fascist state and its policies. After the Allied invasion of Sicily, he drafted and organized the vote on the July 1943 motion calling on the king to resume constitutional command of the armed forces, helping bring about Benito Mussolini’s removal. He went into exile and was later sentenced to death in absentia by the Italian Social Republic’s Fascist tribunal.

Italy state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1903–1944 ✕ Executed

A Fascist diplomat who became a witness to the regime's internal collapse

On 25 July 1943, Ciano voted for Grandi's motion, the act that helped bring down his father-in-law Mussolini.

Galeazzo Ciano was Mussolini's son-in-law and a leading diplomat of Fascist Italy who helped drive the regime's expansion and dependence on Germany before turning against a war he saw ending in catastrophe. He supported the Ethiopian war, the invasion of Albania, and the attack on Greece, while keeping diaries and diplomatic papers during his years as foreign minister. In July 1943 he voted for Dino Grandi's motion at the Fascist Grand Council, helping remove Mussolini, but miscalculated that his privileged position would survive the regime's change. After fleeing to Germany and being handed to the Italian Social Republic, he was executed after the Verona trial; his diaries remain a major record of Fascist responsibility and internal collapse.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1904–1977 ○ Natural death

SS diplomat who, as Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary in 1944, pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz

Born in Bad Kissingen, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied political science in Munich and took his doctorate in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and took part in forcing the resignation of Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, he became Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary when Germany occupied it in March 1944, with authority over all occupying forces except the Wehrmacht, chiefly the Gestapo, and pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz. In June he cabled Ribbentrop that some 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich, and in October he helped the Arrow Cross take power. Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial in 1949, he was released in 1951 and died in Darmstadt in 1977.