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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 at Nuremberg in the Ministries Trial, but committed suicide in his prison cell in 1947.
Backe moved to Germany during the Russian Civil War with the help of the Swedish Red Cross. In Germany, he initially worked as a laborer, and enrolled to study agronomy at the University of Göttingen in 1920. After completing his studies he briefly worked in agriculture and then became an assistant lecturer on agricultural geography at Hanover Technical University. In 1926, he submitted his doctoral dissertation to the University of Göttingen, but it was rejected. "Backe's thesis was in fact a manifesto for racial imperialism", where an upper class of German occupiers would fight against the local, 'ethnically inferior' population for the control of their foodstuff.
Backe joined the Sturmabteilung in 1922, and in 1925 he joined the Nazi Party at Hanover. After the dissolution of the regional political entity ( Gau) for South-Hanover, Backe let his membership expire. In 1927, Backe was inspector and administrator on a big farm in Pomerania. In 1928, he was married to Ursula. With financial support of his father-in-law, in November 1928 he became tenant of domain Hornsen, with around 950 acres in the district of Alfeld. He proceeded to lead the farm successfully. On 27 October 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Backe became the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and in the same month he joined the Schutzstaffel. Backe became a member of the Prussian State Council and in October 1936 he was made the agricultural representative to Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan. When Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture Richard Walther Darré was placed on an extended leave of absence on 23 May 1942, Backe was charged with carrying out his responsibilities, among which was his role as Reich Farmers Leader in the Nazi Party national leadership, though nominally remaining State Secretary. On 9 November 1942, Backe was promoted to SS-Senior Group Leader (SS- Obergruppenführer), a rank roughly equivalent to lieutenant general. On 6 April 1944, Hitler named Backe as Darré's successor as Reichsminister of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture.
Backe was a prominent member of the younger generation of Nazi Technocracy who occupied second-tier administrative positions in the Nazi system, such as Reinhard Heydrich, Werner Best, and Wilhelm Stuckart. Like Stuckart, who held the real power in the Interior Ministry (officially led by Wilhelm Frick) and Wilhelm Ohnesorge in the Reich Postal Ministry (officially led by the conservative Paul Eltz-Rübenach), Backe had already been the de facto Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture under Darré, even before he formally attained the position.
After the German Instrument of Surrender, Backe was ordered by the allies to fly to Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims, along with Julius Dorpmüller, the Reichsminister of Transport. citing Backe thought the Americans would need him as an expert to handle Germany's imminent starvation and had prepared himself for an expected conversation on that subject with General Dwight D. Eisenhower; he was surprised when he was arrested instead.
In a letter to his wife on 31 January 1946, he defended Nazism as one of the "greatest ideas of all times", which "found its strongest blow in the National Socialist agricultural policy".From a letter to his wife, dated 31 January 1946.
In Allied captivity, Backe was interrogated during the Nuremberg trials of 21 February and 14 March 1947. Records of the United States Nuernberg War Crimes trials Interrogations 1946–1949. (PDF; 186 kB), published 1977. In his cell in the Nuremberg war criminals' prison, Backe wrote two treatises: a so-called "big report" about his life and his work on Nazism, and a testament outline for his wife Ursula and his four children, dated 31 January 1946.
Due to his fear of being Extradition to the Soviet Union, "Arrest German Reich Heads: To Face Trial." Lodi News-Sentinel, 24 May 1945. Retrieved: 19 March 2013. Backe committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell on 6 or 7 April 1947. mentions a different date for Backe's death: 7 April 1947.
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