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Concept
Reichskommissariat Ostland
Summary
The Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO) was established by Nazi Germany in 1941 during World War II. It became the civilian occupation regime in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and the western part of Byelorussian SSR. German planning documents initially referred to an equivalent Reichskommissariat Baltenland. The political organization for this territory – after an initial period of military administration before its establishment – involved a German civilian administration, nominally under the authority of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories led by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, but actually controlled by the Nazi official Hinrich Lohse, its appointed Reichskommissar.
Germany's main political objectives for the Reichskommissariat, as laid out by the Ministry within the framework of Nazism's policies for the east established by Adolf Hitler, included the genocide of the Jewish population, as well as the Lebensraum settlement of ethnic Germans along with the expulsion of some of the native population and the Germanization of the rest of the populace. These policies applied not only to the Reichskommissariat Ostland but also to other German-occupied Soviet territories. Through the use of the Order Police battalions and Einsatzgruppen A and B, with active participation of local auxiliary forces, over a million Jews were killed in the Reichskommissariat Ostland. The Germanization policies, built on the foundations of the Generalplan Ost, would later be carried through by a series of special edicts and guiding principles for the general settlement plans for Ostland.
In the course of 1943 and 1944, the Soviet Red Army gradually recaptured most of the Ostland territory in their advance westwards, but Wehrmacht forces held out in the Courland Pocket until May 1945. With the end of World War II in Europe and the defeat of Germany in 1945, the Reichskommissariat ceased to exist.
Official source
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