Waldemar of Poletika

Waldemar von Poletika (also Wladimir von Poletika , also Polétika ; born December 16, 1888 in St. Petersburg , Russian Empire , † June 25, 1981 in Bonn ) was a German-Russian geographer and agricultural scientist. During the Second World War he worked out agricultural policy documents for hunger policy in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union .

Life

Poletika studied geography and agricultural science. From 1919 to 1923 he was a professor at the University of Petrograd and a member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society . After organizing a resistance against the communists at the university there, he emigrated to Germany. He accepted a professorship at the Russian Scientific Institute in Berlin. In 1934 he became an associate professor, then from 1940 a full professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin .

According to studies by historians Christian Gerlach and Michael Fahlbusch , Poletika was a political advisor to several institutions of the Nazi state. On the one hand, he was an expert on Russian agriculture in the Reichsnährstand. On the other hand, as a member of the Eastern Economic Staff , he worked out agricultural policy documents for the hunger plan of the Nazi State Secretary and head of the nutrition business group in Hermann Göring's four-year plan authority, Herbert Backe . Various inspection trips to the conquered territories of the Soviet Union served this purpose in 1941, which he carried out with the rank of major of the Economic Armaments Office. After recovering from an illness in November 1941, he became an employee of the Publication Center East , which was created in 1942 from the so-called Georg Leibbrandt Collection , and head of the Department of Agriculture and Climatology within the Turkestan Working Group in Dresden, which was subordinate to the Reich Security Main Office (VI G) and - so Michael Fahlbusch - acted together with the Publikationsstelle Ost as "Think Thank [...] for the connection of the areas east of Stalingrad".

Poletika was one of the agronomists who wanted to secure food security for the German population through radical exploitation of the food resources of the areas to be occupied by diverting the food surpluses of the south, especially the Ukraine, to Central Europe. For this purpose, the subsidy areas in central and northern Russia, especially the industrial areas and large cities, which were previously supplied from these surplus areas, should be cut off from their food base, taking into account the deaths of millions of people. Even before the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Poletika commented drastically on the analysis of the forest scientist Eugen von Engelhardt "The Food and Agriculture of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic". So on Engelhardt's proposed per capita supply of 200 kg of grain per year: “Nonsense! Have never had so much to eat! ”And on Engelhardt's finding that a significant grain surplus cannot be generated in Belarus:“ The surplus is the difference between harvest and hunger. ”Poletika's“ text booklet ”in March 1941 of the“ Portfolio E . Belarus "for the" military geographic information about European Russia "of the General Staff of the Army followed the assumption of the occupiers that the war must feed itself from the war. In various statements, Poletika favored a radical hunger policy in Belarus, which should be given preference over the option of having to recruit and feed the locals as forced laborers. He reckoned with the starvation of more than half of the approximately ten million people in Belarus.

After the war, Poletika stated that she had been dismissed from military service because of “opposition to [...] the basic agricultural policy line prescribed by the party”. In an affidavit in the context of his reparation proceedings from 1954, the former head of Heinrich Himmler's planning office for the consolidation of German nationality and author of the General Plan East , Konrad Meyer , testified in favor of Poletikas. After "the outbreak of the Russian campaign [...] as a war administrator and Russia expert at the Eastern Economic Staff, he openly and clearly disapproved of the administrative measures in the occupied eastern territories". Therefore, according to Konrad Meyer, "[he] was discharged from the armed forces and returned to the faculty". Poletika retired from the University of Berlin in 1952. From 1950 he was visiting professor at the University of Bonn and for many years was head of the Agricultural Research Center for the Eastern States, which was founded in the same year.

Fonts

• Vladimir von Poletika: Russia as an agrarian state . In: Zeitschrift für Politik 19 (1930), pp. 107-22 ( content )
• (With Boris Brutzkus and Aleksandr Ugrimov): The grain industry in the arid regions of Russia. Stand and prospects . Parey. Berlin 1932
• General Staff of the Army, Military Geographical Information on European Russia Folder E / Belarus (maps, plans, text and picture booklet) , Berlin 1941 ( digital library )
• The cultural-geographic lines of force of Old Russia . In: Universitas 1947
• The history of colonization of Russia . In: Universitas 1948
• The agricultural geography of Russia . In: Universitas 1949
• The Mongols and Russia . In: Universitas 1950
• The Russian Agricultural Psyche . In: Cologne Journal of Sociology, 5th year 1952/53, issue 1

literature

• Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 .
• Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika. In: Michael Fahlbusch / Ingo Haar (ed.): Handbook of the völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations . Saur, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-598-11778-7 , pp. 482-484
• Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar . De Gruyter Berlin 1954, p. 1803; 1966, p. 1877; 1980, p. 2966 and 1983, p. 4842 (Nekrolog)
• Polétika, Waldemar von . In: Otto Wenig (Ed.): Directory of professors and lecturers at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn 1818–1968. Bouvier, Bonn 1968, ISBN 3-41-600495-7 , p. 229f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholar Calendar . De Gruyter Berlin 1983, p. 4842 (Nekrolog); then the exact dates of birth and death.
2. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika. In: Michael Fahlbusch / Ingo Haar (ed.): Handbook of the völkischen Wissenschaften. People - institutions - research programs - foundations . Saur, Munich 2008, 482f.
3. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika, p. 483.
4. ↑ Rolf-Dieter Müller : From the economic alliance to the colonial war of exploitation . In: The German Reich and the Second World War . Edited by Military History Research Office. Vol. 4. The attack on the Soviet Union . German publishing company. Stuttgart 1983. ISBN 3-421-06098-3 , pp. 98-189, here p. 148.
5. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and annihilation policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999 p. 56ff. (Quotations p. 57).
6. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika, p. 483.
7. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999 p. 58 u. P. 1147.
8. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika, p. 483.
9. ↑ Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika, p. 483f.
10. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholar Calendar . De Gruyter Berlin 1980, p. 2966
11. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus 1941 to 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999 p. 58; Michael Fahlbusch: Waldemar von Poletika, p. 484.
12. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholar Calendar . De Gruyter Berlin 1954, p. 1803; there also further magazine articles by Poletikas.