Through the use of the Order Police battalions and Einsatzgruppen A and B, with active participation of local auxiliary forces, over a million Jews were killed in the Reichskommissariat Ostland.

[2] The Germanization policies, built on the foundations of the Generalplan Ost, would later be carried through by a series of special edicts and guiding principles for the general settlement plans for Ostland.

[3] In the course of 1943 and 1944, the Soviet Red Army gradually recaptured most of the Ostland territory in their advance westwards, but Wehrmacht forces held out in the Courland Pocket until May 1945.

The first reason was that many of the practicalities were determined elsewhere: the Wehrmacht and the Schutzstaffel managed the military and security aspects, Fritz Sauckel as Reich Director of Labour had control over manpower and working areas, Hermann Göring and Albert Speer had total management of economic aspects in the territories and the Reich Postal Service administered the Eastern territories' postal services.

In the process they also displaced all other actors including notably the SS, except in Central Belarus where HSSPF Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski had a special command encompassing both military and civil administration territories and engaged in Nazi security warfare.

The Baltic lands, which were to be joined together with Belarus (to serve as a spacious hinterland of the coastal areas), would be organised as one Germanized protectorate prior to union with Germany itself in the near future.

Rosenberg said that these lands had a fundamentally "European" character, resulting from 700 years of history under Swedish, Danish, and German rule, and should therefore provide Germany with "Lebensraum", an opinion shared by Hitler and other leading Nazis.

[7] Rosenberg suggested that Belarus would be in the future an appropriate reception area of various undesirable population elements from the Baltic part of Ostland and German-occupied Poland.

[9] Historical German and Germanic-sounding placenames were also retained (or introduced) for many Baltic cities, such as Reval (Tallinn), Kauen (Kaunas), and Dünaburg (Daugavpils), among many others.

The Reichskommissariat Ostland was sub-divided into four "General Regions" (Generalbezirke), namely Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and White Ruthenia (Belarus), headed by a Generalkommissar.

Generalkommissar: Wilhelm Kube (1941–1943); Curt von Gottberg (1943–1944) SS and Police Leader: Jakob Sporrenberg (1941); Carl Zenner (1941–1942); Karl Schäfer (1942); Curt von Gottberg (1942–1943); Erich Ehrlinger (1943–1944) Subdivided into eleven Kreisgebiete: In March 1943, Wilhelm Kube succeeded in installing the Belarusian Central Council (a collaborationist puppet regime), which existed concurrently with the German civil administration.

These commanders were : Upon taking control, Hinrich Lohse proclaimed the official decree ("Verkündungsblatt für das Ostland") on November 15, 1941, whereby all Soviet state and party properties in the Baltic area and Belarus were confiscated and transferred to the German administration.

In towns and cities, small workshops, industries and businesses were returned to their former owners, subject to promises to pay taxes and quotas to the authorities.

Ostgesellschaften (state monopolies) and so-called Patenfirmen, private industrial companies representing the German government, were quickly appointed to manage confiscated enterprises.

The Hermann Göring Workshops, Mannesmann, IG Farben and Siemens assumed control of all former Soviet state enterprises in Ostland and Ukraine.

In Belarus, the German authorities lamented the "Jewish-Bolshevik" policies that had allegedly denied the people knowledge of the basic concepts of property, ownership, or personal initiative.

Unlike the Baltic area, where the authorities saw that "during the war and the occupation's first stages, the population gave examples of sincere collaboration, a way for possibly giving some liberty to autonomous administration".

The Soviet Red Army reported the discovery of Vilna and Kauen extermination centres as apparently part of the Nazi "Final Solution".