Weimar chancellor who ended passive resistance in 1923 and, as foreign minister, concluded the Locarno treaties
Born in Berlin, he entered the Reichstag for the National Liberals in 1907 and during the war backed annexations and unrestricted submarine warfare. After the defeat he founded the German People’s Party and came to accept the republic. Chancellor and foreign minister from August 1923, he ended passive resistance in the Ruhr, used the army to remove the Saxon and Thuringian governments that included Communists, and halted hyperinflation with the Rentenmark. Ousted by a no-confidence vote in November, he remained foreign minister until his death, shaping the Dawes Plan, the Locarno treaties and entry into the League of Nations, and shared the 1926 Nobel Peace Prize. He died of a stroke in 1929.
Career timeline
- 1907Reichstag deputy (National Liberal Party)
- 1917Leader of the National Liberal Party
- 1918Founded the German People’s Party
- 1923Chancellor and foreign minister
- 1923–1929Foreign minister
- 1925Locarno Treaties
- 1926Nobel Peace Prize
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.
Career timeline
- 1938–1945German foreign minister
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.
Career timeline
- 1928Doctorate in political science, Munich
- 1932Joined the Nazi Party
- 1939Worked on dismembering Czechoslovakia
- 1941Arranged the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in Zagreb
- 1944Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary
- 1949–1951Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial; released 1951
German communist who drafted the KPD’s 1945 appeal and argued for a “special German road to socialism”
The son of a hosier from Thalheim in Saxony, he joined the KPD in 1926 and attended the International Lenin School in Moscow. After underground work and exile under the Nazis he directed a political school of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and in Moscow ran the “Free Germany” radio station. In 1945 he led the KPD group sent to Saxony and drafted the party’s appeal of 11 June 1945. In 1946 he argued that socialism could be built in Germany without a preceding dictatorship of the proletariat, a “special German road to socialism” he had to recant after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. He served as deputy foreign minister and first head of the GDR’s foreign intelligence service, and in 1953 was stripped of all posts for supporting Zaisser. Gravely ill with cancer, he took his own life in 1973.
Career timeline
- 1926Joined the KPD
- 1935KPD Central Committee member and Politburo candidate
- 1945Head of the KPD group in Saxony; drafted the 11 June appeal
- 1946Member of the SED Central Secretariat
- 1949–1953Deputy foreign minister
- 1953Removed from all posts
The architect of détente who used 'linkage' to build the first framework for superpower arms control, the face of American realism
In his notorious 1972 interview with Oriana Fallaci, he declared: 'Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse. This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely.' The comment infuriated Nixon.
A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany at fifteen, Kissinger rose through Harvard's academic ranks to become the most consequential American foreign-policy maker of the Cold War. As National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Nixon and Ford, he pioneered détente with the Soviet Union, devising the 'linkage' strategy that tied arms control and trade to Soviet restraint and conducting the secret backchannel with Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that broke the deadlock over SALT I and the ABM Treaty at the 1972 Moscow Summit. He opened relations with Mao's China through clandestine diplomacy, mediated the Paris Peace Accords to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but also presided over the bombing of Cambodia and covert interventions that earned him lasting accusations of war crimes.
Career timeline
- 1938–1943Fled Nazi Germany for the U.S.; studied accounting at CCNY, then drafted into the U.S. Army
- 1943–1949Served in U.S. Army intelligence in Europe, Battle of the Bulge; CIC agent tracking Gestapo and administering denazification
- 1950–1969Harvard professor of government, director of the Defense Studies Program; foreign-policy advisor to Rockefeller and Nixon campaigns
- 1969–1975National Security Advisor: led détente, China opening, SALT I negotiations; managed the secret Dobrynin backchannel
- 1971–1972Secret trips to Beijing, meeting Zhou Enlai; paved the way for Nixon's 1972 China visit
- 1973–1977Secretary of State: Paris Peace Accords, Nobel Peace Prize (1973), Middle East shuttle diplomacy; implicated in 1973 Chilean coup
- 1977–2023Founded Kissinger Associates; authored books and advised twelve U.S. presidents
