Ulrich Friedrich Willy Joachim Ribbentrop, known by his last forename of Joachim, future Foreign Minister of the Third Reich, was born on 30 April 1893 at Wesel, a Prussian garrison town of some twenty thousand inhabitants on the Lower Rhine near the Dutch frontier, where his father, First Lieutenant Richard Ribbentrop, aged thirty-three, was then stationed with the 1st Westphalian Field Artillery Regiment.