English source-aligned edition
Konrad Meyer
Konrad Meyer served as head of the RKFDV Planning Office and principal author of Generalplan Ost. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Berlin and plans for occupied 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
- Meyer, an agricultural scientist and professor, headed the Planning Office in Himmler's RKFDV staff from 1939.
- He supervised versions of Generalplan Ost that proposed mass removal, enslavement and German settlement across occupied Eastern Europe.
- The RuSHA Trial acquitted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity but convicted him of membership in the SS, with the sentence treated as time served.
Place in the chain of responsibility
Meyer supplied demographic and spatial-planning expertise to a programme of expulsion, Germanisation and colonial rule. Planned populations and later crimes influenced by the plan must be distinguished from direct implementation personally ordered by Meyer.
Key events and mechanisms
- the preparation of successive versions of Generalplan Ost from 1940
- partial implementation through expulsions, forced labour and child abduction in occupied Poland
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
Meyer was tried in the RuSHA Trial in 1947–1948. Released after conviction only for SS membership, he later returned to an academic career and died in 1973.
Limits of the evidence
The enormous figures in Generalplan Ost describe intended demographic transformation, not a number of people personally killed on Meyer's orders. His acquittal on the principal charges must be reported accurately alongside the content and institutional use of his planning work.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.