From the very start, the capture of Baku and the other Caucasian oil fields was central to Hitler’s concept of his Russian campaign. “In the economic field,” one historian has written, “Hitler’s obsession was oil.” To Hitler, it was the vital commodity of the industrial age and for economic power. He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world’s oil fields. If the oil of the Caucasus—along with the “black earth,” the farmlands of the Ukraine—could be brought into the German empire, then Hitler’s New Order would have within its borders the resources to make it
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