Hitler

compelled to occupy an area to bring order, and to impose security. In the interest of the native population we had to see to providing calm, food, transport etc. etc. Therefore our settlement. It should then not be recognizable that a final settlement is beginning! All necessary measures – shooting, deportation etc. – we will and can do anyway. We don’t want to make premature and unnecessary enemies. We will simply act, therefore, as if we wish to carry out a mandate. But it must be clear to us that we will never again leave these territories,’ Hitler’s blunt statement continued. ‘Accordingly, it is a matter of: 1. doing nothing to hinder the final settlement but rather preparing this in secret; 2. emphasizing that we are the liberators … Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the giantcake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it. The Russians have now given out the order for a partisan war behind our front. This partisan war again has its advantage: it gives us the possibility of exterminating anything opposing us. As a basic principle: the construction of a military power west of the Urals must never again be possible, even if as a consequence we have to wage war for a hundred years.’
    Hitler proceeded to make appointments to the key positions in the occupied east. Rosenberg was confirmed next day as head of what appeared on the surface to be the all-powerful Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. But nothing was as it seemed in the Third Reich. Rosenberg’s authority, as Hitler’s decree made clear, did not touch the respective spheres of competence of the army, Göring’s Four-Year Plan organization, and the SS. The big guns, in other words, were outside Rosenberg’s control. More than that, Rosenberg’s own conception of winning certain nationalities as allies, under German tutelage, against Greater Russia – notions which he and his staff had been working on since the spring – fell foul of Himmler’s policy of maximum repression and brutal resettlement and Göring’s aims of total economic exploitation. Himmler was within weeks in receipt of plans for deporting in the coming twenty-five years or so over 30 million people into far more inhospitable climes further eastward. Göring was envisaging the starvation in Russia of 20–30 million persons – a prospect advanced even before the German invasion by the Agricultural Group of the Economic Staff for the East. All three – Rosenberg, Himmler, and Göring – could find a common denominator in Hitler’s goal of destroying Bolshevism and acquiring ‘living space’. But beyond that minimum, Rosenberg’s concept – no less ruthless, but more pragmatic – had no chance when opposed to the contrary idea, backed by Hitler’s own vision, of absolute rapaciousness and repression.
    Opposing Rosenberg’s wishes, Hitler had yielded in the conference of 16 July to the suggestion of Göring, backed by Bormann, that the – even by Nazi standards – extraordinarily brutal and independent-minded Erich Koch, Gauleiter of East Prussia, should be made Reich Commissar of the key territory of the Ukraine. Koch, like Hitler, but in contrast to Rosenberg, rejected any idea of a Ukrainian buffer-state. His view was that from the very beginning it was necessary ‘to be hard and brutal’. He was held in favour at Führer Headquarters. Everyone there thoughthe was the most suitable person to carry out the requirements in the Ukraine. It was seen as a compliment when they called him the ‘second Stalin’.
    In contrast to the tyrant, Koch, who continued to prefer his old East Prussian domain to his new fiefdom, Hinrich Lohse, appointed as Reich Commissar in the Baltic, now renamed the Ostland, made himself a subject of ridicule among the German occupying forces in his own territory with his fanatical and often petty bureaucratization, unleashed in torrents of decrees and directives. For all that, he was weak in the face of the power of the SS, and other competing agencies. Similarly, Wilhelm Kube, appointed at the suggestion of Göring and Rosenberg as Reich Commissar in Belorussia, proved not only corrupt and incompetent on a grandiose scale, but another weak petty dictator in his province, his instructions often ignored by his own subordinates, and forced repeatedly to yield to the superior power of the SS.
    The course was set, therefore, for a ‘New Order’ in the east which belied the very