People of the Revolution and the USSR

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1893–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945

Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1897–1945 ✕ Suicide

Nazi Party propaganda chief and minister who promoted antisemitism and dictatorship.

Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi Party propaganda leader who headed the party organization in Berlin from 1926 and became its propaganda chief in 1930. Appointed minister of propaganda by Hitler in 1933, he brought the press, film, radio, and cultural life under Nazi ideological control and promoted antisemitism and persecution of Jews. He was a chief instigator of the November 1938 pogrom and later campaigned for total war.

Fascists and Nazis 1901–1978 ○ Died in Graz, Austria

Estonian Vaps politician who headed the collaborationist Estonian Self-Administration under German occupation in 1941–1944

Born at Tuhala in Harju County, he studied in Berlin, Vienna, Innsbruck and Graz and took doctorates in geophysics (1927) and constitutional law (1930). After standing twice for parliament he joined the Vaps movement as its propaganda chief; sentenced in 1935 to twenty years’ hard labour, he was amnestied in 1938, went to Germany and took German citizenship. In May 1941 he founded the Estonian Liberation Committee in Helsinki, and returning with the German army that year he headed the Estonian Self-Administration from 1941 to 1944. In 1944 he fled to Austria, where the Western Allies cleared him of Nazi crimes and he later advised the Austrian government. In the 1990s Estonia’s International Commission named him among the Estonians chiefly responsible for crimes committed by Estonian police and SS units.