The attack against the Soviet Union was ideologically motivated, but the timing owed a great deal to military and economic considerations. German hopes largely focused on Ukraine, which was expected to be both a giant breadbasket and a reservoir of essential minerals. But plans for the economic exploitation of Ukraine were flawed from the beginning and remained inconsistent throughout the war. Substantial reconstruction efforts only began belatedly and were accompanied by brute force that combined economic logic with ideological zeal. The Nazi policies of racist repression and mass murder were, then, both a means of and an obstacle to exploitation of the East. Yet, they were also successful: without the raw materials obtained from Ukraine, the Nazi war machine would have likely ground to a halt well before 1945. The cost of sustaining the German war effort was consequently borne, to a large extent, by the local population, which labored under appalling conditions both in the Reich and in Ukraine itself.

On the morning of October 21, 1941, the custodian of Odessa's Museum of Western Civilization summoned twenty-three-year-old Eugenie Anissimoff and her middle-aged mother to lead an unusual and most demanding tour group. Having fled the besieged metropolis weeks earlier to their former residence in suburban Odessa, the two women had returned to their bombed-out apartment in the recently occupied city. Homeless, the pair had sought refuge with the museum's caretaker, an old family friend. Unable to communicate with the delegation of SS and Wehrmacht officers who queued for admission, the Russian-speaking janitor hoped that the two Volksdeutsche women would help to disarm the menacing visitors by granting them a German-language tour. Although ostensibly to inspect the building for booby traps, the visit's true purpose became clear as the Germans began loading paintings, rugs, and even a golden saddle into their vehicles. At the conclusion of the tour-cum-robbery, the group's leader, SS-Obersturmführer Dr. Klaus Siebert, thanked the two women and complimented their excellent German. Hearing of their dire situation, Siebert advised Anissimoff and her mother to register for support at the local SS-run Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic German Liaison Office (hereafter VoMi), bureau in a former music conservatory on Novovlaskaia Street.

Historians divide over the question of how far “classic” European colonial experience in overseas empires provided the model for the Nazi empire in eastern Europe. Missing from arguments on either side of the debate have been the colonialists themselves. The Ukraine Project to enlist Dutch plantation companies for occupied Ukraine shows what happened when efforts were made to transfer traditional colonial expertise into the Nazi East. From the perspective of the project's proponents, there was indeed continuity between the two imperialisms. However, the company at the center of the project, the Deli Maatschappij, the ruling and tone-setting firm on Sumatra, saw no connection with its East Indies history and spurned all efforts to take it into Ukraine. Thus the Ukraine Project, despite its short-lived and failed history, complicates arguments from both perspectives and offers a trans-imperial history of a different sort than we are accustomed to encountering.