Reichskommissariat - Former Soviet Territories

Former Soviet Territories

In summer 1941, German Nazi-ideologist Alfred Rosenberg suggested that to facilitate the break-up of the Soviet Union and Russia as a geographical entity, conquered Soviet territory should be administered in the following five Reichskommissariate:

• Reichskommissariat Ostland (RKO) (The Baltic countries and Belarus, extended eastward by including some parts of Western Russia) 1941–1944/45.
• Reichskommissariat Ukraine (RKU) (Ukraine minus East Galicia, Romanian Transnistria and the Crimea, but extended eastward up to the Volga); 1941–1944.
• Reichskommissariat Moskowien (RKM) (Moscow metropolitan area and the rest of European Russia minus Karelia and the Kola peninsula, promised to Finland); never fully established. German military advance halted in 1941/42.
• Reichskommissariat Kaukasus (RKK) (Southern Russia and the Caucasus area); never fully established. German military advance halted in 1942/43.
• Reichskommissariat Turkestan (RKT) (Central Asian republics and territories); never established.

At Hitler's request the Turkestan project was shelved by Rosenberg for the immediate future, who was instead ordered to focus on Europe for the time-being. Central Asia was determined to be a future target for German expansion, as soon as its armies would be ready to move further east after the consolidation of present victories in Soviet Russia. The interest in part of the area of Germany's major Axis partner, the Empire of Japan (see Axis power negotiations on the division of Asia during World War II), could have become a topic of discussion regarding their own contemporaneous establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Additional units that were under discussion at different points in time include Reichskommissariat Don-Wolga, as well as a Reichskommissariat Ural for the central and southern Ural region.