Hansjoachim Riecke

Personal

Vocation

German Nazi politician and Gruppenführer in the SS. During World War II Riecke was Permanent Secretary (Staatssekretär) to Herbert Backe in the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture and Backe's accomplice in planning and implementing the Hunger Plan. The Hunger Plan was developed by Nazi Germany during World War II to seize food from the Soviet Union and give it to German soldiers and civilians; the plan entailed the death by starvation of millions of so-called "racially inferior" Slavs following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Riecke was arrested on 23 May 1945 and interned until March 1949. At the Nuremberg trials he testified in April 1946 at the trial of Alfred Rosenberg as a defence witness in favour of the accused. During the Ministries Trial (Wilhelmstraßen-Prozess), one of the subsequent Nuremberg Trials, he appeared in February 1948 as a witness for the prosecution against Richard Walther Darré. From 1952 to 1970 Riecke was an official and head of the Economics Department of the Alfred C. Toepfer Company, which operated, among other areas, in global trade in agricultural products, particularly grain. After that, Riecke was vice executive until 1976 of the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S., which also provided substantial financial support to the Toepfer company, and from 1976 to his death in 1986 an honorary member of this Foundation. Hans-Joachim Riecke died on 11 August 1986, aged 87, in Hamburg. Link to Wikipedia biography