On
this date, April 6, 1947, Nazi Agronomist, Herbert Backe committed suicide
before he could be tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. I will post information
about him from Wikipedia.
Herbert
Backe
|
Reich
Minister of Food
|
|
In
office
1942–1945 |
|
Chancellor
|
Adolf Hitler
|
Preceded by
|
Richard Walther Darré
|
Succeeded by
|
none
|
Personal
details
|
|
Born
|
Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm
Backe
1 May 1896 Batumi, Russian Empire |
Died
|
6 April 1947 (aged 50)
Nuremberg, Allied-occupied Germany |
Nationality
|
German
|
Political party
|
NSDAP
|
Spouse(s)
|
Ursula Backe
|
Alma mater
|
University of Gottingen
|
Profession
|
Agronomist
|
Cabinet
|
Hitler
|
Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe (1 May 1896 – 6 April 1947) was a
German Nazi politician and Obergruppenführer in the SS.
Biography
Backe
was born in Batumi, Georgia, the son of a retired Prussian lieutenant turned
trader. His mother was a Caucasus German, whose family had emigrated from
Württemberg to Russia in the early 19th century. He studied at the Tbilisi
Gymnasium (grammar school) from 1905 and was interned on the outbreak of World
War I as an enemy alien because he was a citizen of Prussia. This experience of
being imprisoned for being German and witnessing the beginning of the Soviet
revolution made Backe an anti-communist. He moved to Germany during the Russian
Civil War with the help of the Swedish Red Cross. In Germany, he initially
worked as a labourer, and enrolled to study agronomy at the University of
Göttingen in 1920. After completing his degree he briefly worked in agriculture
and then became an assistant lecturer on agricultural geography at Hanover
Technical University. In 1926, he submitted his doctoral dissertation, titled The
Russian Cereals Economy as the Basis of Russian Agriculture and the Russian
Economy (German: Die russische Getreidewirtschaft als Grundlage der Land-
und Volkswirtschaft Russlands),
to the University of Göttingen, but it was not accepted. Later, after Germany
invaded the Soviet Union, Backe self-published his dissertation with a print of
10 000 copies.
Backe
was an SA member from 1922. He joined the Nazi Party in February 1925. Finally,
he joined the SS in October 1933.
He
undertook various duties in the administration of Nazi Germany, succeeding
Richard Walther Darré as Minister of Food in May 1942 and becoming Minister of
Agriculture in April 1944.
Soviet POWs standing before
a barracks in Mauthausen Concentration Camp,
Austria
|
Hunger
plan
Backe
was personally nominated by the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern
Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, as the Secretary of State (Staatssekretär)
of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine where he could implement his strategic
policy, the Hunger Plan (Der Hungerplan also Der
Backe-Plan). The objective of the Hunger Plan was to inflict deliberate
mass starvation on the Slavic civilian populations under German occupation by
directing all food supplies to the German home population and the Wehrmacht on
the Eastern Front. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, as a result of
Backe's plan, “4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and
Ukrainians) were starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944.”
Backe
was a prominent member of the younger generation of Nazi technocrats who
occupied second-tier administrative positions in the Nazi system such as
Reinhard Heydrich, Werner Best, and Wilhelm Stuckart. Like Stuckart, who held
the real power in the Interior Ministry (officially led by Wilhelm Frick) and
Wilhelm Ohnesorge in the Reichspostministry (officially led by the conservative
Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach), Backe was the de facto Minister of
Agriculture under Richard Walther Darré, even before his promotion to that
post.
From
April to May 1945, Backe continued as Minister of Food in the short-lived
post-Hitler Flensburg Government led by Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz. On 23 May
1945 he was arrested by British forces along with other members of the
Flensburg government, including Dönitz and Albert Speer.
Backe
was held in American custody and was due to be tried for war crimes at
Nuremberg in the Ministries Trial. However, he committed suicide by hanging
himself in his prison cell on 6 April 1947.
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