In 1963, Ernst Nolte characterized the German-Soviet War as “the most monstrous war of conquest, enslavement, and annihilation” in European history. Fifty years of further research has not only confirmed Nolte's assessment, but indeed has also amplified his contention. The ruthless ideological war waged by the Nazi state against the Soviet Union manifested itself in a myriad of ways, from the German army's murder of Red Army commissars and Soviet Roma, to its vicious treatment of partisans, both real and imagined, and, most horrifically, in the extermination of millions of Jews by the SS and other German institutions. During the 1980s and 1990s, this emphasis on ideology drove the historiography of German aims and actions during the war with the Soviet Union; such an approach found its most prominent and controversial expression in the Hamburg Institute for Social Research's travelling exhibition Verbrechen der Wehrmacht.

Recent research has begun to shift the focus from ideology to economics as the fundamental underlying basis of the war. This research, however, has tended to emphasize either the prewar planning for such economic exploitation or how the process worked in the rear areas. This chapter will examine a relatively neglected aspect of the German economic exploitation of the Soviet Union: how two of the primary institutions of German aggression—the army and the Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Wi Stab Ost or Economic Staff East)—carried out their dual missions of military conquest and economic exploitation during Operation Barbarossa and the subsequent Winter Crisis of 1941/42 by focusing on the German occupation of Pavlovsk, located outside of Leningrad.