Herbert Backe was born in Batumi, Georgia, the son of a retired Prussian lieutenant turned trader. His mother was a Caucasus German, whose family had emigrated from Württemberg to Russia in the early 19th century. He studied at the Tbilisi gymnasium from 1905 and was interned on the outbreak of World War I as an enemy alien because he was a citizen of Prussia. This experience of being imprisoned for being German and witnessing the beginning of the Russian Revolution made Backe an anti-communist. Backe moved to Germany during the Russian Civil War with the help of the Swedish Red Cross. In Germany, he initially worked as a labourer, and enrolled to study Agronomy at the University of Göttingen in 1920. After completing his degree 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, titled The Russian Cereals Economy as the Basis of Russian Agriculture and the Russian Economy, to the University of Göttingen, but it was not accepted. Later, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Backe self-published his dissertation with a print run of 10,000 copies. Backe joined the SA in 1922 and in 1925 in Hanover the Nazi Party. After the dissolution of the regional political unit for South-Hanover Backe let his membership expire. . In 1927 Backe was inspector and administrator on a big farm in Pommern. 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. Finally, he joined the SS in October 1933. He undertook various duties in the administration of Nazi Germany, succeeding Richard Walther Darré as Minister of Food in May 1942 and becoming Minister of Agriculture in April 1944. Backe was a prominent member of the younger generation of Nazi technocrats 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 and Wilhelm Ohnesorge in the Reichspostministry, Backe was the de facto Minister of Agriculture under Darré, even before his promotion to that post.
Hunger Plan
Backe was personally nominated by the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, as the Secretary of State of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine where he could implement his strategic policy, the Hunger Plan. The objective of the Hunger Plan was to inflict deliberate mass starvation on the Slavic civilian populations under German occupation by directing all food supplies to the German home population and the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front. The most important accomplice of Herbert Backe was Hans-Joachim Riecke, who headed the agricultural section of the Economic Staff East. According to the historian Timothy Snyder, as a result of Backe's plan, “4.2 million Soviet citizens were starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944.” From April to May 1945, Backe continued as Minister of Food in the short-lived post-Hitler Flensburg Government led by GrossadmiralKarl Dönitz.
Arrest and suicide
After the German Instrument of Surrender, Backe was ordered by the allies, together with Dorpmüller, to fly to Eisenhower's headquarters in Reims. He was surprised to be arrested; he thought the Americans would need him as an expert to avoid hunger problems. Backe prepared himself for an expected conversation with General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In a letter to his wife on 31 January 1946, he defended national socialism as one of the "greatest ideas of all times", which "found its strongest blow in the national socialist agricultural policy". In allied captivity, Backe was interrogated during the Nuremberg trials of 21 February and 14 March 1947. In his prison cell in the Nuremberg war criminals' prison, Backe wrote two treatises: a so-called big report about his life and his work on National Socialism, and also on 31 January 1946, a testament outline for his wife Ursula and his four children. Because of his fear that he was to be delivered to the Soviet Union, he committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell on 6 April 1947.
