Herbert Backe

Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe (1 May 1896 – 6 April 1947) was a German politician and SS-Obergruppenführer (equivalent to the rank of lieutenant general in Nazi Germany) who served as State Secretary and Reichsminister in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture. He was a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time associate of Richard Walther Darré and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. He developed and implemented the Hunger Plan that envisioned death by starvation of tens of millions of Slavic and Jewish "useless eaters" following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The Hunger Plan was developed during the organization phase of Operation Barbarossa and provided for diverting and redirecting of Ukrainian food stuffs away from central and northern Russia for the benefit of the invading army and the population in Germany. As a result, millions of local civilians died in the German-occupied territories. Backe was arrested in 1945 at the end of World War II and was due to be tried for war crimes at Nuremberg in the Ministries Trial, but committed suicide in his prison cell in 1947.