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SS-Gruppenführer Herbert Backe
Herbert Backe (1 May 1896 – 6 April 1947) was a German politician and SS-Obergruppenführer.
He was born in Batumi, Georgia. He performed duties in the Third Reich government and was named Minister of Food in May 1942 and Minister of Agriculture in April 1944. He continued to hold that position in the ephemeral Cabinet led by Admiral Karl Dönitz in the last days of World War II, from late April to May 1945, as according to the political will of Adolf Hitler. During the war, Alfred Rosenberg proposed Backe as administrator of the Ukraine Reichskommissariat.
Backe was a prominent member of the younger generation of Nazi intellectuals who occupied second tier positions in the Hitlerian system--Reinhard Heydrich, Chief of the RSHA, Dr.Werner Best, Heydrich's deputy in the Gestapo and then Reich Plenopotentiary in Denmark, and Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of the Interior--to mention only three among this cohort, all were Backe's close friends and collaborators in implementing Germany's wartime programs for conquest and extermination. Like Stuckart, who was the real power in the Interior Ministry behind the inept Reich Minister Wilhelm Frick, Backe was the de facto Minister of Agriculture, working around the hapless Reich Minister Richard Walther Darre even before Hitler promoted him to head the Ministry in title as well as fact. He was one of the orchestrators of the Hunger Plan - the plan to starve tens of millions of Slavs in order to ensure steady food supplies for the German people and troops.[1]
Captured by the Allies after the war, he was to face the Ministries Trial, but he committed suicide by hanging in his cell at Nuremberg on 6 April 1947.
Though little known, according to historian, Dr. Gesine Gerhard, Backe was responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million Soviet citizens. Although seen by some as a man behind a desk and forgotten by others, he is one of the least well known mass murderers in history.
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