Erich Koch States: The Ukrainians Were "Niggers" and "I Will Pump Every Last Thing Out of This Country"

In the Ukraine there was Erich Koch, a devoted follower of Hitler. “I will pump every last thing out of this country,” Koch said. “I did not come here to spread bliss but to help the Führer.” The Ukrainians were “niggers” and their attempts at political assertion met with Koch’s contempt.

At the start of the occupation, the farmers in the Ukraine had hailed the Germans as liberators. Had Hitler agreed to privatize the collective farms as Rosenberg and his advisers urged, agricultural output might well have risen instead of dropping. But he did not, and the great granary of Europe never fulfilled its promise. Famine spread across the Ukraine and eastern Galicia in the winter of 1941.... Rosenberg believed his underling Koch had “ruined a great political opportunity.”

--Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 153-154.