Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The German occupation of Ukraine during World War II

Before the German invasion, Ukraine was a constituent republic of the USSR. It was a key subject of Nazi planning for the post-war expansion of the German state and civilization.
Germany launched its invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. In the mind of Adolf Hitler and other German expansionists, the destruction of the "Judeo-Bolshevist" state would remove a threat from Germany's eastern borders and allow Germany to use the vast spaces of the western Soviet Union, which included the fertile Ukraine, as a source for the fulfillment of the material needs of the German people. The region would also provide "living space" for future German colonists.
On July 16, 1941, Hitler appointed the fervent Nazi Erich Koch as Reichskommissar for the planned Reichskommissariat Ukraine, created by a Führer decree on August 20, 1941. The first transfer of Ukrainian territory from military to civil administration took place on September 1, 1941. There were further transfers on October 20 and November 1, 1941, and a final transfer on September 1, 1942, which brought the boundaries of the province to beyond the Dnieper river.
The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, of its resources and people.
The Reichskommissariat Ukraine excluded several parts of present-day Ukraine, and included some territories outside of its modern borders. It extended in the west from the Volhynia region around Lutsk, to a line from Vinnytsia to Mykolaiv along the Southern Bug river in the south, to the areas surrounding Kyiv, Poltava and Zaporizhia in the east. Conquered territories further to the east, including the rest of Ukraine (the Crimea, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and the Donbas/Donets Basin), were under military governance until 1943–44. At its greatest extent, it included just under 340,000 square kilometers.
The Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories ordered Koch in March 1942 to supply 380,000 farm workers and 247,000 industrial workers for German work needs. Later Koch was mentioned during the new year message of 1943, how he "recruited" 710,000 workers in Ukraine. This and subsequent "worker registration" drives in Ukraine would eventually backfire after the Battle of Kursk (July–August 1943) when the Germans would attempt to build a defensive line along the Dnieper only to discover that the necessary manpower had been either recruited to forced labour in Germany or had gone underground to forestall such "recruitment".
Alfred Rosenberg implemented an "Agrarian New Order" in Ukraine, ordering the confiscation of Soviet state properties to establish German state properties. Additionally the replacement of Russian Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes, by their own "Gemeindwirtschaften" (German Communal Farms), the installation of state enterprise "Landbewirstschaftungsgessellschaft Ukraine M.b.H." for managing the new German state farms and cooperatives, and the foundation of numerous "Kombines" (Great German exploitation Monopolies) with government or private capital in the territory, to exploit the resources and Donbass area.
Hitler said "Ukraine and the East lands would produce 7 Million, or more likely 10 or 12 Million of Metric tonnes of Grain to provide Germany's food needs".
On 12 August 1941 Hitler ordered the complete destruction of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv by the use of incendiary bombs and gunfire. Because the German military lacked sufficient material for this operation it wasn't carried out, after which the Nazi planners instead decided to starve the city's inhabitants. 

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Related post: The part of Donetsk and Lugansk regions is an occupied territories now
72 th anniversary of the Koryukovka's tragedy








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