It was the civilian occupation regime of much of German-occupied Ukraine (it also included adjacent areas of the Byelorussian SSR, Russian SFSR, and pre-war Poland).

[2] Before the German invasion, Ukraine was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union, inhabited by Ukrainians, Russians, Jewish, Belarusian, Romanian, Polish, and Roma/Gypsy minorities.

Later on, in 1943, Erich Koch said about his mission: "We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.

It extended in the west from the Volhynia region around Lutsk, to a line from Vinnytsia to Mykolaiv along the Southern Bug river in the south, to the areas surrounding Kiev, Poltava and Zaporozhye in the east.

Conquered territories further to the east, including the rest of Ukraine (Crimea, Chernigov, Kharkov, and the Donets Basin), were under military governance until the German withdrawal 1943–44.

[citation needed] It also encompassed several southern parts of today's Belarus, including Polesia, a large area to the north of the Pripyat River with forests and marshes, as well as the city of Brest-Litovsk, and the towns of Pinsk and Mozyr.

At the same time at a smaller scale, the local Municipalities were administered by native "Bailiffs" and "Mayors", accompanied by respective German political advisers if needed.

[citation needed] The six general districts were (English names and administrative centres in parentheses): Scheduled for incorporation into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine but never transferred to civil administration were the Generalkommissariate Tschernigow (Chernigov), Charkow (Kharkov), Stalino (Donetsk), Woronezh (Voronezh), Rostow (Rostov-on-Don), Stalingrad, and Saratow (Saratov), which would have brought the boundary of the province to the western border of Kazakhstan.

Koch was greatly angered by Fraunfeld's insubordination (a comparable situation also existed in the administrative relationship between the Estonian general commissariat and Reichskommissariat Ostland).

[citation needed] The German Reichsführer-SS and chief of German Police, Heinrich Himmler, initially had direct authority over any SS formations in Ukraine to order "Security Operations", but soon lost it – especially after the summer of 1942 when he tried to regain control over policing in Ukraine by gaining authority for the collection of the harvest, and failed miserably, in large part because Koch withheld cooperation.

In Ukraine, Himmler soon became the voice of relative moderation, hoping that an improvement in the Ukrainians' living conditions would encourage greater numbers of them to join the Waffen-SS's foreign divisions.

In this matter Koch had the support of Hitler, who remained skeptical when not hostile to the idea of recruiting Slavs in general and Soviet nationals in particular into the Wehrmacht.

[citation needed] In the civil administration of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories numerous technical staff worked under Georg Leibbrandt, former chief of the east section of the foreign political office in the Nazi Party, now chief of the political section in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Additionally the replacement of Russian[clarification needed] Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes, by their own "Gemeindwirtschaften" (German Communal Farms), the installation of state enterprise "Landbewirstschaftungsgessellschaft Ukraine M.b.H."

Ukraine was the furthest eastern settlement of the migrating ancient Goths between the 2nd and 4th centuries and subsequently, according to Hitler, "Only German should be spoken here".

[26] Because the German military lacked sufficient material for this operation it wasn't carried out, after which the Nazi planners instead decided to starve the city's inhabitants.