Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe (1 May 1896 – 6 April 1947) was a German politician and SS Senior group leader (SS-Obergruppenführer) in Nazi Germany who served as State Secretary and Minister in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture.

[2] "Backe's thesis was in fact a manifesto for racial imperialism", where an upper class of German occupiers would fight against the local, 'ethnically inferior', population for the control of their foodstuff.

After the Nazi seizure of power, Backe became the State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture on 27 October 1933,[7] and in the same month he joined the SS.

[8] Backe became a member of the Prussian State Council and, in October 1936, he was made the agricultural representative to Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan.

[7] When the minister of Food and Agriculture Richard Walther Darré was placed on an extended leave of absence on 23 May 1942, Backe was charged with carrying out his responsibilities, though nominally remaining State Secretary.

According to the historian Timothy Snyder, as a result of Backe's plan, "4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) were starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944".

[13] Backe was retained as Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture in Hitler's will and he remained in this position until 23 May 1945 in the short-lived Flensburg Government led by Grossadmiral Karl Dönitz.

[15] In a letter to his wife on 31 January 1946, he defended Nazism as one of the "greatest ideas of all times", which "found its strongest blow in the National Socialist agricultural policy".