Dönitz avoided including prominent Nazi leaders in his cabinet other than Speer, but included several serving officers in the SS and others who had been closely involved in formulating and prosecuting the genocidal policies of the former regime. Herbert Backe had been the author of the Hunger Plan of 1941, a deliberate strategy for mass elimination by starvation of Soviet prisoners of war and 'surplus' Soviet urban populations. Speer's deputy in the Economics and Production Ministry was Otto Ohlendorf, who had personally directed the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Communists in occupied Soviet territory. Wilhelm Stuckart had been a participant at the Wannsee Conference of January 1942, when the administrative responsibilities for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem" had been agreed. Otto Ohlendorf had transferred across directly from directing Himmler's office as Reichsführer-SS; and overall, of 350 staff working in the offices of the Flensburg government, 230 had been members of the SS or other security services. Dönitz's cabinet picks were clearly circumscribed by who was available. Otherwise, and in spite of his subsequent claim that his government was 'unpolitical', the most consistent characteristic of those chosen was a virulent opposition to Bolshevism, and a determination to ensure that the revolutionary events in Germany attending the Armistice of 1918 would not be repeated in 1945. As Dönitz did not then intend any surrender to the Soviets or Poles and continued to identify "Jews and profiteers" as enemies of the German people, he had little compunction over including in his cabinet men with blood on their hands, so long as that blood was Russian, Eastern European or Jewish.