Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941

CHAPTER1

INTRODUCTION

Organized Chaos: the German Occupation, 1941–1944

The power struggles and overlapping functions inherent in the National Socialist administrative and governmental ‘system’ can have no better example than that of ‘the East’– an all-inclusive reference to the lands east of Germany, initially in particular Poland, but from 1941 onwards almost exclusively used to allude to the seemingly endless reaches of the Soviet Union, stretching from Germany's eastern border, beyond the Ural Mountains to the Orient. To judge from the administrative chaos, interagency competition and wide-ranging policy disputes which were an integral part of, and indeed characterized, the three-year German occupation of large swathes of the Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944, one could form the impression that what passed for policy in these largely lawless regions was improvised, a complex of ad hoc solutions to problems which had not been anticipated.

At least in part, this is indeed accurate, as it had certainly not been foreseen that a definitive military victory over the Red Army would elude the Wehrmacht, and furthermore that major hostilities would continue for the whole duration of the German presence in the Soviet territories. In fact, an occupation administration in the sense envisaged by the Nazi leadership prior to the commencement of military engagements – i.e., a civil/political administration – only came into being in a comparatively small area of the territory under German control for shorter or longer periods of the three-year time span. In the event, the occupied territories were always split into three layers: the areas still in the combat zone under the direct control of the military commander (this layer was rarely deeper than about twelve miles);¹ the areas immediately behind under military administration intended for transfer over to the civil administration (further divided into the Army Rear Area, which functioned for the most part as a communications zone, and the similarly named Army Group Rear Area);² and at the rear of those areas the territories under civil administration.³ It is, therefore, necessary to make clear here that, for this as well as other reasons, such as the racial-ideological factors involved, German occupation policy in the Soviet Union cannot be assessed on the same basis as German occupation policy in France or in Denmark, for eXample, where major hostilities ceased and armistice terms were signed by the defeated nation. In the Soviet Union, the Nazi administrative apparatus was never in a position to administer a stabilized, complete territorial entity.

However, whilst many of the conditions facing Germany's would-be civil administrators in the Soviet Union were, as a result of the developments referred to above, not anticipated, this was in large part not due to an absence of advance planning for the occupation in the political and economic spheres. It can be argued that the ‘organized chaos’ experienced within the Nazi administrative apparatus in the Soviet Union belies the extensive preparations carried out during the course of the twelve months immediately prior to the commencement of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. The failure of the one prerequisite for the implementation of these terrible plans – decisive military victory – prevented the Nazi schemes from coming to fruition in anything like their entirety. Nevertheless, concrete plans, concepts and intentions on the part of Adolf Hitler, his lieutenants and their staffs did exist and are examined here. Although hostilities lasted for the duration of the German presence in the Soviet Union and the regions under civil administration never reached anything like the geographical extent envisaged, the German style of rule in those territories which were handed over by the military to the civil administration and the partial implementation of the Nazi regime's political and economic goals is enough to provide evidence of the realness of these plans.

If the disorder evident in German occupation policy in the Soviet Union cannot be clarified by pointing to a lack of planning prior to the military invasion, even if the preparations ultimately proved to be less than effective, perhaps the explanation lies in an inability on the part of the planners themselves and the German leadership as a whole to coordinate their various objectives and the exact methods by which they would be achieved. In this sense, perhaps the roots of the anarchy witnessed in German occupation policy can be found in the planning phase. Given that formal meetings of the Reich Cabinet ceased to take place after the end of 1937, and that Hitler thereafter practically forbade his ministers to assemble independently, no formal arena existed for the mutual exchange of ideas. An outlet was necessary for Hitler's henchmen and their subordinates in order to voice grievances on the one hand, but also to make proposals on the other hand. With no formal arena for mutual exchange, this outlet assumed the form of power struggles and interagency competition. All individuals and bodies, however, were ultimately dependent on Hitler's decisions and repeatedly sought him out to act as arbitrator in their disputes.

The State of Existing Scholarship

In the decades immediately following the end of the Second World War, it fell to non-German, in particular Anglo-Saxon, historians to analyse the German occupation of the Soviet Union. Despite its age and imperfections, Alexander Dallin's German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, which first appeared in 1957, remains the best singlevolume work encompassing both chronologically and geographically the entire German occupation in the Soviet Union.⁴ For all its undeniable value, however, Dallin's book focuses primarily on the implementation of German occupation policy itself rather than the planning for it, which is the subject of the present study. Similar reservations must be applied – despite the somewhat misleading starting date featured in its title – to Gerald Reitlinger's The House Built on Sand: The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia 1939–1945, published in 1960.⁵

From the mid-1960s onwards, high-quality studies from German historians began to appear on a whole range of aspects of National Socialist Germany, including the atrocities committed in the occupied East. One of the finest and most influential of these was Andreas Hillgruber's Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941, which focused, much like the current study, on the year-long period between the fall of France and the invasion of the Soviet Union.⁶ As well written and convincingly argued as Hillgruber's work undeniably is, it is more an examination of Hitler's strategic thinking during this critical juncture in the war, and not an analysis of plans for German occupation policy. Although the next twenty years saw the increasing appearance of specialist studies focusing on specific aspects of the German invasion and occupation in the East, major works on the planning for this undertaking – in particular its economic aspects – had to wait until the early 1980s. Military histories of the German–Soviet conflict have been in abundance since the 1960s, but the purely military aspects of the war are not of primary concern for this study.

During the last two decades, several excellent publications have appeared which have dealt either exclusively or in large part with the National Socialist economic and/or political planning for the post-‘Barbarossa’ future of the Soviet territories, or directly related issues. The most important of these works have all been German-language publications and include Götz Aly and Susanne Heim's Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung,⁷ and several studies from Rolf-Dieter Müller, in particular ‘Das Unternehmen Barbarossa als wirtschaftlicher Raubkrieg’,⁸ Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik,⁹ and his contributions to Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, volume four of the monumental series Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg from the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt in Potsdam.¹⁰ More recently, the Berlin historian Christian Gerlach has produced his authoritative and exhaustively researched Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944.¹¹

One of the most significant contributions of these works to the state of existing scholarship has been to stress the importance of agricultural-economic considerations within National Socialist planning for both the war against the Soviet Union itself and the subsequent occupation, rather than racial-ideological motivations, which have so often been given the role of principal causal factor. Although the aim of improving Germany's raw materials and foodstuffs basis through a rapid victory over the Soviet Union and the colonial exploitation of the conquered territories had already on occasion been emphasized in the historiography as ‘a decisive factor’ in bringing about the decision to invade the Soviet Union,¹² very little had been produced on the economic planning itself. Rolf-Dieter Müller effectively led the way in pushing issues of an economic nature to the forefront of German scholarship on the subject, and he has been followed by the likes of Aly, Heim and Gerlach, amongst others. Their works have considered the motivations and aims which featured most prominently in the formulation of plans for the post-war occupation of the Soviet territories, though for the most part without providing a clear and structured picture of the gradual development of these plans themselves. Gerlach's Kalkulierte Morde has gone some way towards establishing a clear time sequence, but further work is required.

Moreover, an examination of the simultaneous development of plans by the economic planners on the one hand and by the political planners on the other hand, the extent of agreement between those involved and the compatibility of their respective plans with those of the other group of planners has not yet been systematically undertaken. As a result of this important issue being neglected by historians, very little exists in the historiography on the participation of planners from a specific policy area in the preparations of planners from another area, or the agreement of those from one field with the ideas of those from another. In other words, the extent of collaboration between different groups of planners has been barely touched upon. This omission could particularly be applied to the man charged with producing a blueprint for the future shape of the political administration in the East, Alfred Rosenberg. Unusually for one of the senior members of the Nazi leadership, Rosenberg has not been the subject of a comprehensive political biography in recent years. Robert Cecil's 1972 book, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, as the title suggests, concentrates on Rosenberg's ideological influence on the Nazi movement.¹³ In addition, being, as it is, over thirty years old, the book no longer reflects the state of existing scholarship. Fritz Nova's Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust is more recent, but constitutes primarily an exploration of Rosenberg's ideological beliefs.¹⁴ Valuable as it undeniably is, an awareness of Rosenberg's fundamental ideological approach towards the Soviet Union and its peoples must, however, be coupled with an examination of his concrete involvement in both the political and the economic planning for German occupation policy in the East.

Aims of the Study

In light of these gaps in the secondary literature, the significance of this study is threefold. First, the development of both the political and the economic planning by senior bodies within the state and Nazi Party apparatuses for the German occupation policy in the Soviet Union is traced. Secondly, the extent to which these two aspects of planning and the approaches and objectives contained therein were compatible with each other is examined. Thirdly, the role of Alfred Rosenberg, not only in the political preparations for the occupation, but also with regard to his awareness of economic plans, his involvement in their formulation and the extent of his support for them, is thoroughly considered.

Examining the step-by-step development of both the political and the economic planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union, including how these two aspects intertwined and influenced both one another and the policy ultimately pursued by the regime itself, will demonstrate what the men involved had in store for Germany's supposed ‘region of destiny’,¹⁵aspects of which became reality for large parts of the Soviet Union and its population. Judging from the proposals of the political and economic planners, the notion expressed by the army leadership before the beginning of the campaign that in the East initial harshness would mean mildness for the future¹⁶ would clearly not apply. As it was anticipated that major military engagements against the Soviet Union would last no longer than three months, the plans drawn up in both the political and the economic spheres prior to the attack were in large part intended for implementation during the period after the conclusion of hostilities. Thus, these plans provide above all an idea of how the Nazi leadership envisaged the expected future German hegemony in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union.

Ascertaining the extent to which the two strands of planning were compatible with one another involves scrutinizing the simultaneous development of the political and economic plans and establishing the priorities, aims and chosen methods of both groups of planners. In other words, were the respective sets of plans leading towards mutually shared aims in the East, or did the assumptions, methods and objectives contained therein fundamentally contradict one another? By extension, this should allow an assessment of the degree to which the discord amongst Nazi occupation agencies witnessed after the invasion of June 1941, and examined in several excellent works,¹⁷ was present during the preparatory phase and how far this discord was based on unexpected events, miscalculations and misunderstandings, pure egotism or genuine policy disputes. Measuring the extent to which the political and economic plans were compatible with one another will involve considering how the respective policies were to be carried over in practice from the planners' desks in Berlin to the fields and forests of the European part of the Soviet Union. This in turn will assist in illustrating the degree to which the Nazi leadership and its planning staffs were in touch with reality – even a gruesome reality – and how feasible or otherwise their ideas were.

It is worth defining two concepts here which were of central importance for the formulation of occupation policy, namely the intended Neuordnung of the Soviet territories and the implementation of a Hungerpolitik in the regions under occupation. Particular emphasis will be attached throughout this study to the development of these concepts. The political Neuordnung in the East entailed the breaking up of the Soviet state into its constituent parts and the alteration of the existing political borders along ethnic and racial lines, as well as the displacement of large numbers of Soviet citizens from their homelands and the resettlement of Germanic peoples in their place. Neuordnung referred to both the process, thus ‘reorganization’ or ‘reordering’, and the desired end result of creating a political, racial and economic ‘New Order’ in Europe under German hegemony. The role of the occupied Soviet territories within this so-called ‘New Order’ would be to respond to the demands of a German-dominated continental Europe for agricultural produce and raw materials. The Soviet territories would not possess their own manufacturing capacity or heavy industry.

The Hungerpolitik, or ‘starvation policy’, was a strategy whereby substantial amounts of the agricultural produce of the European part of the Soviet Union, particularly its grain, would be forcefully removed to assist in the provisioning of German-occupied Europe and, above all, the entire invading army of over three million men. This would be achieved at the expense of the civilian population of the Soviet Union through the intentional sealing off of the so-called ‘deficit territories’ from those areas of the European part of the Soviet Union which were home to substantial amounts of agricultural produce, referred to as ‘surplus territories’. The inevitable consequence of such a strategy would be the starvation of large sections of the Soviet population.

The Importance of Economic Considerations

That the German–Soviet war and the German occupation which ran parallel to it were of a uniquely barbarous nature has been widely acknowledged for a long time, despite the continued failure of a certain proportion of the German public to grasp the extent and pervasiveness of the inculpation of German agencies in the crimes committed in the East.¹⁸ It is also the case that the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 has often been defined as essentially a racial-ideological war of annihilation, closely tied up with the subsequent genocide against the Jews and the large-scale resettlement plans envisaged by Adolf Hitler's elite cadre, the SS.¹⁹ Whilst these characteristics were indeed fundamental to the nature of the war, the invasion of the Soviet Union was no purely ideological impulse on the part of Hitler, but had rather a more calculated agenda with agricultural-economic considerations at its core. This has been skilfully demonstrated in recent years by several historians, as mentioned above, and is increasingly becoming part of established scholarship, a trend which this study seeks to continue. Although calculated and grounded in economic validation, such considerations were only ‘rational’ in the Nazi sense of this word. For most people, there is no trace of rationalism in the ideas, words or actions of the Nazi movement. Whilst their plans may have been irrational, the basis on which these men sought to justify such concepts – when not on purely racial-ideological grounds – tells us something about their brand of ‘rationalism’ and their thinking in general.

With respect to Nazi motivations in invading the Soviet state, there is, of course, little doubt that Hitler had yearned for a war against the Soviet Union, and with it the destruction of Bolshevism, which acted as the ideological impetus for the military campaign, since the mid-1920s.²⁰ Likewise, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 was seen by Hitler and much of the Nazi leadership as a political necessity, a short-term ‘tactical manoeuvre’.²¹ The desire to destroy the enormous empire in the East, though at times intentionally muted, was never forgotten. Alongside the racial-ideological nature and aims of the war, however, there existed another, increasingly important aspect of the forthcoming campaign, a factor which was intrinsically linked to the acquisition of Lebensraum (living space) for the German nation. As Hitler himself put it in his so-called Second Book, written between May and July 1928, though not published during his lifetime: ‘A healthy foreign policy will…always keep the winning of the basis of a people’s sustenance immovably in sight as its ultimate goal….’²² The object of attaining Lebensraum was to provide more space and thus more natural resources in order to allow the German nation to exist on a self-sufficient, ‘healthy’ basis. Hence, a campaign designed to exploit resources in order to make the German sphere of influence – which by mid-1941 included much of continental Europe – self-sufficient, would have the desired ‘side effect’ of exterminating those elements of the Soviet population whom the Nazis considered to be racially inferior and politically antagonistic. The exterminatory aspect then, though welcome, was not in itself the principal aim of the undertaking.

In this context, the impact of the experiences of the First World War on both Germany's political and military leadership during the preparatory phase for ‘Barbarossa’ should not be underestimated. A collapse on the home front through privation or hardship – particularly in terms of food shortages – could under no circumstances be tolerated. By extension, an Anglo-Saxon naval blockade could not be allowed to wreak the same havoc which the British blockade of 1917–1918 had wrought.²³ In view of the combined Anglo-Saxon threat which it was likely Germany would have to face in the not-too-distant future, the German economy, on a precarious footing in large part as a result of the unabated pace of rearmament during the mid- to late 1930s, would have to be stabilized as soon as possible by a massive influx of heavy goods, raw materials and foodstuffs. This had to be achieved, however, without a corresponding drop in the German standard of living. In Hitler's eyes, and those of many of his political and economic subordinates, the only way this could be brought about was through a swift, decisive and massively rewarding victory over the Soviet Union. This would put Germany on a solid footing to wage the ‘world war’ – the war between continents – once it arrived.²⁴

Structure and Additional Parameters of the Study

As contemporaries themselves recognized, the preparations for the eastern campaign and the subsequent occupation fell into four categories, though these categories inevitably overlapped: the tasks of the army; the SS and police; the economic organization; the political administration.²⁵ Given that the emphasis here is on the anticipated future structure, form and function of the territories in the East, the main focus of this study is logically on the political and economic preparations for the German occupation of the European part of the Soviet Union. The plans and goals of the SS, in other words the primarily racial and ideological aspects of the campaign and occupation, will also be taken into account, but to a more limited extent.²⁶ This is understandable, given that the intention of setting up an SS administration in the occupied Soviet territories for, say, settlement matters – one of the agency's primary concerns – did not as such exist, whereas both a civil/political and an economic administration, in the latter case for both the area under military jurisdiction and the area under civilian/Party control, were envisaged. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that, whereas this study focuses primarily on the planning for the post-war occupation which took place during the pre-invasion period, much concrete SS planning for schemes which foresaw the wholesale reorganization of Eastern Europe along racial lines did not take place until after June 1941. The emphasis in this study, therefore, remains on the development and compatibility of political and economic planning. That is not to say that the different projects always took an entirely separate course of development,²⁷ but rather that the individuals and organizations involved, not to mention the specific motivations and, in some cases, the exact methods, were often different. As this study examines the political and economic preparations within the German leadership and directly subordinate state and Party bodies, the involvement of private enterprises in the economic planning is not explored here.²⁸

The time frame selected for examination traces the preparations from the beginning of July 1940, when the first concrete proposals for a military campaign against the Soviet Union had begun to be made, to July 1941, when the campaign itself was under way and the administrative apparatus appointed. The decision to allow the study to overlap into the war itself rather than stopping on 22 June finds its justification in the fact that the personnel for the civil administration were not officially appointed to their posts until mid-July and that the form the administration would take was still in dispute right up to the signing of the relevant decrees by Hitler. The time frame selected allows the development over the course of twelve months of the preparations for ‘Barbarossa’ and the subsequent occupation to be illustrated in its entirety. This does not mean to say that the decision to invade the Soviet Union had been made as early as July 1940, almost a year before the commencement of the military campaign. Only towards the end of 1940 did Germany’s political leadership commit itself to this course of action. Preparations had of course already begun, however, by the time the decision was unalterably made. Furthermore, the timing of the decision assists in determining the motivations for it and indeed conveys something about the aims of the Nazi leadership and the establishment of priorities for the forthcoming conflict.

In dealing with this period, the study takes an essentially chronological course, although certain key issues, such as the importance of the Ukraine in Nazi plans (see chapter 7, ‘The Special Status of the Ukraine’), are dealt with thematically. The chronological approach is advantageous in that it allows a more effective monitoring of the planning process and the development of the plans themselves over the twelve-month period. In order to introduce institutions which feature repeatedly during the course of this study, and which made their entrance into the political and economic life of National Socialist Germany long before the planning phase for the German invasion of the Soviet Union commenced, the study begins with an overview of the most important of these institutions (see chapter 2). The principal planning organizations for the occupation of Soviet territories were, in the economic sphere, the Office of the Four-Year Plan (Vierjahresplanbehörde), and, in the political sphere, the Bureau Rosenberg (Dienststelle Rosenberg).²⁹ Although many different state and Party bodies took part in the planning process, the selection here has been limited to the two most important. In the case of the Office of the Four-Year Plan, most of the other key ministries and organizations involved in the economic planning either grew out of it (e.g., the Economic Staff East) or contributed key functionaries to its executive arm, the General Council for the Four-Year Plan (e.g., Herbert Backe from the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture; General Thomas from the War Economy and Armaments Office of the OKW). In this sense, the majority of bodies involved in the economic planning for the war were directly linked to the Office of the Four-Year Plan. Furthermore, the Four-Year Plan organization was under the control of the second most powerful man in the Reich, Hermann Göring, who was appointed to head the entire economic administration in the occupied Soviet territories.

The Bureau Rosenberg consisted of the Party functionaries around the Baltic-German Alfred Rosenberg, who planned the political restructuring, or Neuordnung, of the Soviet territories and would later make up the Berlin-based staff of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete), the administrative apparatus from mid-July 1941 onwards for those ‘pacified’ Soviet territories under German occupation. Many, though not all, of the senior posts in the

Bureau Rosenberg and then the East Ministry itself were filled by officials from the Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP (Außenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP), in particular its Eastern Office. The Foreign Affairs Office of the NSDAP was one of several agencies within the Amt Rosenberg, a collective term for the various offices of Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg. As a state and not a Party institution, the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories was not part of the Amt Rosenberg, but had of course recruited many of its employees from it.³⁰ An examination of the origins, make-up and function of the Four-Year Plan organization and the Bureau Rosenberg will thus provide an illustration of the foundations of the planning structure.

The third chapter of the study charts the initial phase – from July to December 1940 – of proposals and preparations for a military campaign, from the first purely military recommendations to the issuing of ‘Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa’ at the end of the year and the growing awareness of the necessity to bolster the Reich's food supply in view of the increasing likelihood of having to fight a war of attrition against the Anglo-Saxon nations. Subsequent chapters follow a more thematic approach within a chronological framework. Hence, chapters 4 to 6 examine the foundations of the Hungerpolitik, which were laid in January and February 1941; the preparations for establishing a civil administration in the pacified Soviet territories, which began in March; and the preparatory work of the different SS offices for population policy in the East, respectively. Chapter 7 returns to the Hungerpolitik, and examines both its radicalization during the months of April and May and the wide-ranging support of key institutions for the proposals made. Chapters 8 and 9 analyse the attitudes and positions of the different planning groups in the final weeks before the invasion, and those issues relating to occupation policy settled during the immediate postinvasion period. In chapter 10, the main arguments contained in the study are summarized and evaluated, and conclusions are drawn which directly address the aims this study has set itself.

Source Material

It is more the aims of the study and its overall approach which justify a fresh examination of the topic, rather than the use of radically different or recently released sources. Nevertheless, the study is grounded in an extensive analysis of the relevant documentary material. Of particular importance are the files of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories; the Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, especially the Task Force for Food; the Reich Chancellery; the Office of Alfred Rosenberg; and the Personal Staff of the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. These files are located in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde. The files of the OKW Operations Staff and the War Economy and Armaments Office of the OKW, particularly the War Diary of the Staff Section, which are located in the Bundesarchiv- Militärarchiv in Freiburg im Breisgau, are likewise important.

Given the central role of Hermann Göring within the planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union, as designated head of the entire economic administration in the occupied Soviet territories, the Appointments Diary of Hermann Göring, located in the archives of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich, has also been consulted. The same applies to the Estate of Herbert Backe, which is to be found in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. Backe, as the Staatssekretär in the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture and head of the Task Force for Food in the Office of the Four-Year Plan, was of fundamental importance in the development of economic plans for the German occupation policy. Additional material from the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt in Potsdam and the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts in Berlin has also been consulted. These archival sources are used in conjunction with numerous published documents and diaries.

As will become clear to the reader during the course of this study, much of significance was passed between the planners by word of mouth and never put down on paper. This is explicitly stated by men as central to the planning process as Alfred Rosenberg and Herbert Backe. Secrecy was without doubt of the utmost importance, even if those in the know did not always succeed in avoiding information leaks. As a result of this approach, written documentary evidence is in some cases not on hand and this inevitably creates gaps in the available record. This state of affairs, with which all historians are confronted to varying degrees, necessitates piecing the material that is available together in an attempt to form a more detailed and clearer picture of the events in question. The reader will judge the extent to which this task has been successfully accomplished in this study.

Notes

1. Christian Hartmann, ‘Verbrecherischer Krieg – verbrecherische Wehrmacht? Überlegungen zur Struktur des deutschen Ostheeres 1941–1944’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 52/1 (2004), pp. 1–75, here p. 7.

2. Ibid.

3. See Hans Umbreit, ‘Auf dem Weg zur Kontinentalherrschaft’, in Bernhard R. Kroener et al., Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Band 5: Organisation und Mobilisierung des deutschen Machtbereichs (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1988), pp. 1–345, here pp. 80–81; Christian Gerlach, ‘Militärische Versorgungszwänge, Besatzungspolitik und Massenverbrechen: Die Rolle des Generalquartiermeisters des Heeres und seiner Dienststellen im Krieg gegen die Sowjetunion’, in Norbert Frei et al. (eds), Ausbeutung, Vernichtung, Öffentlichkeit: Neue Studien zur nationalsozialistischen Lagerpolitik (K.G. Saur, Munich, 2000), pp. 175–208, here p. 179.

4. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies (Macmillan, London, 1957).

5. Gerald Reitlinger, The House Built on Sand: The Conflicts of German Policy in Russia 1939–1945 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1960).

6. Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers Strategie: Politik und Kriegführung 1940–1941 (Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1965).

7. Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hoffmann & Campe Verlag, Hamburg, 1991).

8. Rolf-Dieter Müller, ‘Das Unternehmen Barbarossa als wirtschaftlicher Raubkrieg’, in Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (eds), ‘Unternehmen Barbarossa’: Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941: Berichte, Analysen, Dokumente (Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn, 1984), pp. 173–196.

9. Rolf-Dieter Müller, Hitlers Ostkrieg und die deutsche Siedlungspolitik: Die Zusammenarbeit von Wehrmacht, Wirtschaft und SS (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1991).

10. See especially Rolf-Dieter Müller, ‘Von der Wirtschaftsallianz zum kolonialen Ausbeutungskrieg’, in Horst Boog et al., Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1991), pp. 141–245. This is the updated paperback edition of Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, Band 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1983), and is used throughout this study.

11. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburger Edition, Hamburg, 1999).

12. Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941–1945, 3rd edition (Dietz, Bonn, 1991) [1978], p. 26. In spite of it having first appeared almost thirty years ago, Streit's pioneering work on the treatment and fate of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity remains the benchmark on the subject.

13. Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (B.T. Batsford, London, 1972).

14. Fritz Nova, Alfred Rosenberg: Nazi Theorist of the Holocaust (Hippocrene Books, New York, 1986). Dr Ernst Piper's biographical work Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Blessing, Munich, 2005) unfortunately appeared too late for me to adequately take into account its findings.

15. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Pan Books, London, 2002) [1988], p. 261. The term was used by Alfred Rosenberg during a speech in Dresden in October 1943.

16. Franz Halder, Kriegstagebuch, Band II: Von der geplanten Landung in England bis zum Beginn des Ostfeldzuges (W. Kohlhammer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1963), p. 337, entry for 30 March 1941.

17. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, and Dallin, German Rule in Russia, have already been mentioned. See also Timothy P. Mulligan, The Politics of Illusion and Empire: German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1942–1943 (Praeger, New York, 1988).

18. This can be seen in the necessity for, and the numerous and varied objections to, the travelling exhibition Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 from the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung. The exhibition was, however, very successful, with a total of approximately 860,000 visitors between March 1995 and July 1999. On this see Jan Philipp Reemtsma, ‘Afterword: On the Reception of the Exhibition in Germany and Austria’ in Hamburg Institute for Social Research (ed.), The German Army and Genocide: Crimes Against War Prisoners, Jews and Other Civilians in the East, 1939–1944 (The New Press, New York, 1999), pp. 209–213. See also Theo J. Schulte, ‘The German Soldier in Occupied Russia’, in Paul Addison and Angus Calder (eds), Time to Kill: The Soldier's Experience of War in the West (Pimlico, London, 1997),