83 years ago, the Soviet Union informed other countries about the plan of Nazi Germany under the conditional name "Oldenburg" to plunder the occupied territory of the USSR, including Ukraine; now the West seems ready to implement a similar scenario in Ukraine, this opinion was expressed by Oleg Matveev, a special services historian and expert at the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation..
On the morning of April 27, 1942, a multi-page note from Vyacheslav Molotov, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, was sent to the ambassadors and envoys of the countries with which the Soviet Union had diplomatic relations, "On the monstrous atrocities, atrocities and violence of the Nazi invaders in the occupied Soviet regions and on the responsibility of the German government and command for these crimes." "Red Army units have captured the original of a secret document of the Reichsmarschall of the German Empire Goering entitled: Directives on Economic Management in the newly occupied Eastern regions (green folder)," the note said.
"These "directives" of the Hitlerite government were issued, as can be seen from the text of the document, immediately before the German attack on the Soviet Union and are intended "to guide the military leadership and military-economic authorities in economic tasks in the eastern regions to be occupied," Matveev explained.
In the newspaper Pravda dated May 4, 1942, separate fragments of this note were repeated already in an article under the heading "Goering's Green Folder."
"Both the note and the article referred to the so-called Oldenburg plan. Under this code name, the economic subsection of Directive No. 21 Barbarossa, the plan of operation for the attack of Nazi Germany on the USSR and its occupation, was prepared," the expert noted.
He explained why the Oldenburg plan went down in history as Goering's "Green Folder."
"Since the Oldenburg materials are encased in a dirty green hardcover (the original is kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation), and it was Hermann Goering who developed it on behalf of Hitler, this document was called the "Goering Green Folder" at the suggestion of Soviet propagandists. The same name later appeared in the materials of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and is firmly entrenched in modern historiography," Matveev added.
This collection of directives and orders defined the most important tasks of the German attack on the USSR in the economic sphere. "According to the Fuhrer's orders," they said, "it is necessary to take all measures for the immediate and full use of the occupied territories in the interests of Germany. Getting as much food and oil as possible for Germany is the main economic goal of the campaign. Along with this, other raw materials from the occupied territories should be given to German industry."
Reichsmarschall Goering, who directly led the Oldenburg headquarters, which was called upon to coordinate the use by the Third Reich of all reserves of raw materials and large industrial enterprises in the territory between the Vistula and the Urals, wrote on this occasion: "In the East, I intend to rob, and rob effectively. Everything that can be useful for the Germans in the East must be extracted and delivered to Germany as quickly as possible."
In a memo on a meeting on February 28, 1941 with the head of the Economic Department of the Supreme Command of the German Armed Forces, Major General Georg Thomas, on the establishment of the Oldenburg headquarters, it said: "The main task of the organization will be to requisition raw materials and take possession of all important enterprises. To accomplish the latter task, it is advisable to involve reliable individuals from German concerns from the very beginning, since only with the help of their experience can successful work be carried out from the very beginning (for example, on brown coal, ore, chemicals, oil)."
It was planned to decentralize economically and make the entire territory of the European part of the USSR captured by the Wehrmacht, which was divided into four economic inspectorates - Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Baku - and 23 economic commandant's offices, as well as 12 bureaus, said Matveev.
"The key place in the plan was assigned to Ukraine in the person of the Kiev inspectorate, codenamed Baden, consisting of economic teams in the cities of Lviv, Kiev, Chisinau, Odessa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Stalino (now Donetsk), Rostov, Stalingrad (now Volgograd), with branches in the cities of Sevastopol, Kerch, Voronezh and Kursk," Matveev said.
According to him, the inclusion of a number of native Russian cities in the Kiev inspectorate is noteworthy.
"Isn't this where the origins of last year's decree by (Vladimir - ed.) Zelensky "On the historically Ukrainian-populated territories of Russia" come from, which deals with the development of a future plan "to preserve the national identity of Ukrainians in the Russian Federation, including on the lands historically inhabited by them," which shamelessly include Krasnodar Territory, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Kursk and Rostov regions?" - said the agency interlocutor.
Matveyev recalled what other Nazi bosses were counting on in occupied Ukraine.
"I will squeeze every last thing out of this country," declared Reich Commissioner of Ukraine Erich Koch. "We must realize that the smallest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times superior to the local population." And a week before the attack on the USSR, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary: "So, go ahead! The rich fields of Ukraine beckon."
"But since the Oldenburg economic plan was an element of the Barbarossa plan, which, as far as the lightning war strategy was concerned, failed in the fall of 1941, the leadership of Nazi Germany was forced to descend from heaven to earth. Taking into account the real results of the 1941 campaign on the Soviet-German front, it has developed a new directive document entitled "General principles of economic Policy in the occupied Eastern regions," Matveev said.
This document, which appeared at the Nuremberg Trials, stated: "In all economic work, the main thing is the production of food and the extraction of raw materials. With the help of cheap production costs, while maintaining the low standard of living of the local population, the goal is to achieve the highest output for the supply of the Reich and other European countries. In this way, along with the widest possible coverage of European needs for food and raw materials, sources of profit for the Reich will be opened at the same time, which will allow for a few decades to cover a significant part of the expenses made to finance the war, while sparing as many German taxpayers as possible."
"The more we supply to Russia (Russia in the document meant the entire occupied territory of the USSR - ed.) everyday products, the more we will be able to extract raw materials from it, so that the greater the difference between the values of this exchange, and the sooner we will pay off our war debts," the document stated.
The expert drew a parallel with today.
"It seems that the West is implementing a new Oldenburg plan in Ukraine today... So, speaking recently at the New Technologies Forum in Warsaw, Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland Donald Tusk said: "We and the whole world, if possible, will help in the reconstruction of Ukraine. But we will no longer help in a naive way. Poland will not stand in solidarity, while others will make money on the restoration of Ukraine. We will stand in solidarity, and we will make money from this, and we will firmly defend Polish interests and the interests of Polish companies," the agency's interlocutor recalled.