I found one of the most famous churches of Kiev a heap of rubble. A Soviet powder magazine had blown up inside it, I was told. Later. I learned from Goebbels that the church had been blown up deliberately on orders of Erich Koch, Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine; the idea had been to destroy this symbol of Ukrainian national pride. Goebbels told the story with displeasure; he was horrified by the brutal course being pursued in occupied sectors of the Soviet Union. In fact the Ukraine at that time was still so peaceable that I could drive through the extensive forests without an escort. Half a year later, thanks to the twisted policy of the eastern commissioners, the whole area was infested with partisans.

Rosenberg met Hitler on 16 July 1941 at the Fuhrer's headquarters in East Prussia, the Wolf's Lair, and voiced his view that the nationalist sentiments of the Ukrainians should be encouraged. Hitler did not object. At a later conference Hitler even hinted that the Ukraine might one day be considered independent within the German Empire. But these were simply words to keep the loyal but misguided Rosenberg happy. On 19 September Hitler revealed his true feelings to a more ideologically sympathetic Nazi. Notes survive of a meeting between Hitler and Erich Koch, the Nazi Gauleiter of East Prussia and recently appointed Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine. "Both the Fuhrer and the Reichskommissar Koch reject an independent Ukraine.. .Besides, hardly anything will be left standing in Kiev (the capital). The Fuhrer's inclination to destroy Russia's large cities as a prerequisite for the permanence of our power in Russia will be further consolidated by the Reichskommissar's smashing of Ukrainian industry, in order to drive the proletariat back to the land.''

What pleasure it must have given Hitler, in a meeting with a Nazi hardliner like Koch, to state that it was his "inclination to destroy Russia's large cities". Here he could be honest. With Rosenberg, technically Koch's superior in the Nazi hierarchy, for long periods he was more opaque. Such behaviour seems curious at first, since it was Hitler himself who appointed Rosenberg. But Hitler's behaviour is explicable, consistent as it is with the methods he generally used to control and manipulate the Nazi state.

In the first place, Nazi hierarchies were not what they seemed. Koch had a very large degree of autonomy in how he decided to run the Ukraine and he was able to report directly to Hitler, should he wish it, through the automatic access guaranteed by his other position as Gauleiter of East Prussia, so Rosenberg could be bypassed whenever necessary. Second, Hitler was always loyal to those, like Rosenberg, who had stuck by him in the times of "struggle" before the Nazis came to power - and here was a grand-sounding job as a reward for his loyalty. Third, the appointment of Rosenberg allowed Hitler to play off Koch against him if he wanted to.

In-fighting amongst leading Nazis preserved the Führer's role as the final arbiter within the system. Finally, Hitler disliked issuing written orders to the likes of Rosenberg and Koch, so the presence of this conflict between them allowed him "deniability" if anything went catastrophically wrong. As Hitler acknowledged when he spoke to the commanding generals of the German Army Groups in the summer of 1942, he was prepared to say whatever he felt any situation demanded: "Were it not for the psychological effect, I would go as far as I could; I would say, "Let's set up a fully independent Ukraine." I would say it without blinking and then not do it anyway. That I could do as a politician, but (since I must say it publicly) I can't tell every German soldier just as publicly: "It isn't true; what I've just said is only tactics."

We are the Master Race and must govern hard but just... I will draw the very last out of this country. I did not come to spread bliss... The population must work, work, and work again... We definitely did not come here to give our manna. We have come here to create the basis for victory. We are a master race, which must remember that the lowliest German worker is racially and biologically a thousand times more valuable than the population here.

Erich Koch, a Nazi war criminal who was accused of the death of millions while serving as governor of East Prussia and commissar for the Soviet Ukraine during World War II, has died in a Polish prison, the official news agency PAP reported Friday. He was 90.

A lieutenant general in the SS, Hitler's dreaded security service, Koch, who died Wednesday, was the only Nazi war criminal held by Poland and one of the Third Reich's most senior imprisoned leaders. He was the most senior Nazi remaining in captivity after Adolf Hitler's deputy, Rudolph Hess, now 92, who is still serving a life sentence in West Berlin's Spandau Prison.

Regarded as one of the cruelest of Hitler's Nazi administrators, Koch was sentenced to death by a Polish court on March 9, 1959, for killing 72,000 Poles and sending about 200,000 others to labor camps.

His death sentence was never carried out because of his poor health. Under Polish law, condemned criminals cannot be executed if they are in bad health.

In the Soviet Union, Koch was alleged to have been responsible for the deaths of 4 million Russians and Jews and sending 2 million people into forced labor.

Koch's cruelty was matched by that of his wife, Ilsa, the notorious "Bitch of Buchenwald," the concentration camp that was for a time commanded by her husband. She was feared for her sadistic treatment of prisoners and for having selected camp inmates murdered so that lamp shades could be made from their tattooed skin.

In 1951, a West German court sentenced her to life imprisonment for murder. She committed suicide in a Bavarian prison in 1967.

Many German civilians living in East Prussia blamed Koch for delaying their evacuation during the German military collapse and held him responsible for the death from starvation and exhaustion of as many as 500,000 of them.

An unrepentant Nazi to the last, Koch spent his last 27 years in a book-lined solitary cell in the village of Barczewo in northeastern Poland, the territory he once controlled. He was described as being keenly interested in politics and economics, reading in both German and English, and also was said to speak good Polish.

People who saw Koch in prison said he exercised and described him as having gray hair combed flat to one side and a small mustache similar to Hitler's.

He was turned over to Poland by Britain in 1950 after his capture near Hamburg, West Germany, where he lived under the name Rolf Berger.

He was governor of East Prussia beginning in 1939 and administrator of the Ukraine in 1942, according to Jacek Wilczur, member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland.

"He was an old, sick man, and he simply died," Wilczur said in a telephone interview. "This is the last of the (Nazi) criminals serving their sentences here in Poland."

Koch allegedly amassed a personal fortune from Nazi plunder, partly from his reported responsibility for overseeing transport of artwork and material from Warsaw to Germany after the defeat of Polish fighters in the 1944 Warsaw uprising.

His brazen plundering and use of concentration camp inmates for his private benefit offended even the Nazi authorities, and he was tried before a Nazi SS court on charges of corruption in 1944. He was sentenced to death but was reprieved and restored to favor.

He was long rumored to have knowledge of the whereabouts of the "Amber Chamber," a room said to be lined with the yellow fossilized coal resin of the East Prussian Baltic coast.

However, Czeslaw Pilichowski, the former head of the Polish Nazi war crimes commission, said in an interview with the Associated Press in 1984 that the rumors were untrue.

The superbly carved amber panels that lined the room were made in the 18th Century in Gdansk, formerly Danzig, at the request of a Prussian king. The king's son presented them to the Russian czar who installed them at Tsarskoie Selo, a summer house near Leningrad.

The Nazis took the panels during the war, claiming rights to Prussian heritage, and they vanished without a trace.