Herbert Friedrich Wilhelm Backe was a German politician and SS Senior group leader (SS-Obergruppenführer) in Nazi Germany who served as State Secretary and Minister in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture. He was a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time associate of Richard Walther Darré and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. He developed and implemented the Operation Hunger that envisioned death by starvation of millions of Slavic and Jewish "useless eaters" following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.

Richard Walther Darré was one of the leading Nazi "blood and soil" ideologists and served as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. As the National leader for agricultural policy, he was a high-ranking functionary in the Nazi Party and as a Senior group leader in the SS, he was the seventh most senior commander in that organisation. He was tried and found guilty on three counts at the Ministries Trial.