was any tension with the Soviet government. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, pressure was placed on the Japanese government to join the invasion. On 9 July 1942, Ribbentrop tried to convince Ōshima to urge his government to join the attack on the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop's main argument being that "never again would Japan have such an opportunity as existed at present to eliminate once and for all the Russian colossus in eastern Asia". On 6 March 1943, Ōshima delivered Ribbentrop the following official statement from the Japanese government: Supporting war crimes Ōshima's high esteem with Hitler made him privy to some of the planning relating to actions later to be defined as war crimes and atrocities. One example was a meeting held between Ōshima and Hitler on 3 January 1942, where they both agreed on the action of sinking life-boats working for the rescue of Allied naval personnel fleeing ships sunk in military action. The official text reads: At a meeting that Ōshima had on 27 May 1944 with Hitler and Ribbentrop, Hitler advised that the Japanese government should publicly hang every captured US pilot who was involved in air raids in hope of deterring further such attacks. Intercepted dispatches Virtually all of Ōshima's dispatches as ambassador were intercepted: approximately 75 during the last 11 months of 1941, some 100 in 1942, 400 in 1943, 600 in 1944, and about 300 during the just over four months of 1945 when Germany was at war. For example, in a dispatch decoded on 19 January 1942, Ribbentrop agreed to supply daily intelligence reports to Ōshima, which he could pass on to Tokyo. He warned that "any leakage of these reports due to our fault would be of grave consequence, so all the handling of these reports should be strictly secret". This despite the fact that the Germans often reproached him of the unreliability of the Japanese codes, although Ōshima assured them of its security. This laxity proved to be fatal to Japanese espionage efforts, as even much of the intelligence gathered by the Japanese spy network codenamed TO in Spain (with implicit support given by the Spanish authorities) was channelled through him. This evidence halted the loading of petroleum by the United States onto Spanish tankers in 1944. While some of his predictions were wrong (Ōshima predicted that Britain would surrender to Germany before the end