Kube, Wilhelm, 1887-1943

Wilhelm Kube (13 November 1887 – 22 September 1943) was a Nazi official and German politician. He was an important figure in the German Christian movement during the early years of Nazi rule. During the war he became a senior official in the occupation government of the Soviet Union, achieving the rank of Generalkommissar for Generalbezirk Weißruthenien. He was assassinated by a Soviet partisan in Minsk in 1943 after his participation in the Holocaust, triggering brutal reprisals against the city's citizens. An extreme antisemite and participant in numerous war crimes against Jewish people, he is known to have said about Jews: "What plague and syphilis are to humanity, are Jews to the white race." However, Kube behaved towards German Jews in a relatively mild way during his rule in Minsk, by trying—generally unsuccessfully—to protect them, whom he felt as culturally closer to Germans, from extermination. As for Minsk, he planned to level the city and replace it with a German settlement, called Asgard.