Alfred Rosenberg, the Minister of the East, has come to identify Russia with the Soviet Union, and Russia in turn with Asia. In contrast to his hostility towards the "Asiatic" Russians, Rosenberg had great hopes of using the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union to raise new armies to replace the Wehrmacht's heavy losses on the Eastern Front. Rosenberg favored an approach he called "political warfare", under which Germany would support the independence of the non-Russian peoples to undermine the Soviet Union.
