births
May 1, 1896
Herbert Backe, German agronomist and politician (died 1947)
Herbert Backe
Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe was a German politician and SS-Obergruppenführer who served as State Secretary and Reichsminister in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture. He was a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time associate of Richard Walther Darré and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. He developed and implemented the Hunger Plan that envisioned death by starvation of tens of millions of Slavic and Jewish "useless eaters" following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.