Just before Kyiv was captured in September, Hermann Göring, the Reich Minister of the Economy, held a meeting with Backe. The two agreed that the city’s population should not be allowed to “devour” food: “Even if one wanted to feed all the inhabitants of the newly conquered territory, one would be unable to do so.” A few days later Heinrich Himmler of the SS told Hitler that the inhabitants of Kyiv were racially inferior and could be discarded: “One could easily do without eighty to ninety percent of them.”16
