page_title: Reichskommissariat Ukraine
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Reichskommissariat Ukraine / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Nazi propaganda poster made for the Reichskommissariat Ukraine with the portrait of Hitler and the inscription reading in Ukrainian language "HITLER THE LIBERATOR" Українська: Плакат нацистської пропаганди зроблний для Рейхскомісаріату України з портретом Гітлера і написом українською мовою "Гітлер Визволитель"
context_page_description: During World War II, Reichskommissariat Ukraine was the civilian occupation regime of much of Nazi German-occupied Ukraine. It was governed by the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories headed by Alfred Rosenberg. Between September 1941 and August 1944, the Reichskommissariat was administered by Erich Koch as the Reichskommissar. The administration's tasks included the pacification of the region and the exploitation, for German benefit, of its resources and people. Adolf Hitler issued a Führer Decree defining the administration of the newly occupied Eastern territories on 17 July 1941.
  Before the German invasion, Ukraine was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, inhabited by Ukrainians with Russian, Polish, Jewish, Belarusian, German, Romani and Crimean Tatar minorities. It was a key subject of Nazi planning for the post-war expansion of the German state.
context_section_description: Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 in breach of the mutual Treaty of Non-aggression. The German invasion resulted in the collapse of the western elements of the Soviet Red Army in the former territories of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union. On July 16, 1941, Hitler appointed the Nazi gauleiter Erich Koch as the Reichskommissar for the planned "Reichskommissariat Ukraine", which was created by the Führer's decree on September 1, 1941. Originally subject to Alfred Rosenberg's Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, it became a separate German civil entity. The first transfer of Soviet 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.
  In the mind of Adolf Hitler and other German expansionists, the destruction of the USSR, dubbed a "Judeo-Bolshevist" state, would remove a threat from Germany's eastern borders and allow for the colonization of the vast territories of Eastern Europe under the banner of "Lebensraum" (living space) for the fulfilment of the material needs of the Germanic people. Ideological declarations about the German Herrenvolk (master race) having a right to expand their territory especially in the East were widely spread among the German public and Nazi officials of various ranks. Later on, in 1943, Erich Koch said about his mission: "We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here."
  On 14 December 1941, Rosenberg discussed with Hitler various administrative issues regarding the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. These included a dispute over Koch's status and access to Hitler, manpower shortages over gathering the harvest, Hitler's insistence that the Crimea and much of Southern Ukraine was to be "cleaned out" (i.e., unwanted nationalities to be removed), and directly attached to the Reich as a district called Gotenland ("Land of the Goths") the renaming of cities such as Simferopol to "Gotenburg" and Sevastopol to "Theodorichshafen" (after the ancient Gothic King Theodoric the Great) and an adjustment to the border with Romanian-controlled Transnistria to remove overlooking of the shipyards at Mykolaiv.
  Hitler decreed the creation of the Nazi Party organization Arbeitsbereich Osten der NSDAP for the new eastern occupied territories on April 1, 1942. This move had been bitterly resisted by both Rosenberg, who rightly feared that the transformation of the administration of the eastern territories from a state to a party bureaucracy would spell the effective end of the authority of his ministry (which was a state organ), and Heinrich Himmler, who rightly feared that an arbeitsbereich's establishment would be accompanied by the commissars becoming RVKs (commissars for war) and thus enormously empowered at the expense of the SS, which had already been steadily losing ground since late September the previous year, when the commissariat government began establishing itself with local commissars asserting control over the police in their territories, hitherto controlled by the SS. Himmler and Rosenberg's rearguard resistance soon collapsed in the face of pressure from Martin Bormann in Berlin, and Koch and Lohse in the field. Rosenberg at least managed to be appointed Reichsleiter ("Reich leader") of the new arbeitsbereich. Rosenberg later attempted to take such political power into the political section of the ministry to keep all party issues in his control, and prohibited the creation of organizations and any political activity in the East without his express authorization. Needless to say, he was entirely disobeyed.
  Hoping that by joining forces they might regain some influence, Himmler and Rosenberg decided upon the appointment of Gottlob Berger, Himmler's power-political hatchet man and the SS's head of personnel, as Rosenb
caption: Nazi propaganda poster in Ukrainian that says "Hitler the Liberator"
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