Niall Ferguson on Alfred Rosenberg

“For the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - some sixty million of whose citizens at some time or other came under Nazi occupation - a different but equally resonant note could now be struck. As an Estonian, Alfred Rosenberg well understood the visceral hostility felt by many East European peoples towards Stalin's Soviet Union, which had inflicted immense cruelties on them behind a façade of national self-determination. It was not only the (relatively few) ethnic Germans who welcomed the advancing Wehrmacht. German troops were feted when they marched into Lwôw and Riga. Ukrainian peasants saw the black crosses on the invaders' panzers as the insignia of a holy crusade against the Antichrist of Moscow. At Hrubieszôw the people greeted the Germans with bread and salt.”

“Rosenberg now envisaged not only a German protectorate over Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia ('Baltica'), but also an expanded Ukraine, a Caucasian federation - perhaps even a Crimean Muftiate and a 'Pan-Turanic' bloc in Soviet Central Asia. Appeals were directed at ethnic minorities, notably the Chechens, Karachai and Balkars, in the hope of stripping away all Russia's imperial possessions, to leave nothing more than a rump Muscovy. In truth, neither Hitler nor Goebbels had ever sincerely believed in harnessing the power of East European nationalism. A far truer indication of Nazi intentions were the various versions of the 'General Plan East' {Generalplan Ost) devised to extend German settlement as far as Archangel in the north and Astrakhan in the south (the so-called A-A Line). One draft, by SS Oberfiihrer Professor Konrad Meyer, proposed establishing three vast 'marcher settlements' ('Ingermanland', 'Memel-Narew' and 'Gothengau') with around five million German settlers. A rival scheme drawn up by the Reich Main Security Office envisaged twice as many settlers and the expulsion of an estimated forty-five million of the existing inhabitants. In fact, as was punctiliously pointed out by Erhard Wetzel, the racial ex pert in Rosenberg's Ministry, this estimate included between five and six million Jews and failed to take into account high Slavic birth rates, so that the total unwanted population would be closer to fifty or even fifty-seven million, assuming that 15 per cent of Poles, 25 per cent of Ruthenians and 3 5 per cent of Ukrainians would need to be retained as agricultural labourers, the rest being deported to Siberia. The Russian population would wither away through the use of contraception, abortion and sterilization. The Jews would be exterminated.”