English source-aligned edition
Herbert Backe
Herbert Backe served as agricultural minister and principal planner of the Hunger Plan. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Occupied Soviet territories and Eastern Europe through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- Backe became state secretary in the Reich food ministry in 1933, later exercised effective control of the ministry and formally became minister in 1944.
- He prepared the May 1941 memorandum and economic guidelines underlying the Hunger Plan for exploitation of the occupied Soviet territories.
- The plan deliberately diverted food to Germany and the Wehrmacht while accepting mass starvation among civilians and prisoners of war.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Backe used food allocation as an instrument of occupation and planned mass death rather than merely failing to prevent wartime shortages. The actual deaths resulted through a wider military and civilian occupation apparatus, so each famine death cannot be assigned to him alone.
Key events and mechanisms
- the 2 May 1941 memorandum and economic guidelines prepared before Operation Barbarossa
- the seizure and diversion of food from occupied Soviet territories for Germany and the Wehrmacht
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
Allied authorities detained Backe for a planned Ministries Trial. On 6 April 1947, before he could be tried, he hanged himself in his Nuremberg cell.
Limits of the evidence
The Hunger Plan projected deaths on a vastly greater scale than can be isolated as its realised result, and historians' estimates for starvation deaths vary. No judgment was issued against Backe because he died before trial.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.
