what form the German administration should ultimately take. Proposals pertaining to autonomy for the Caucasus nationalities were better received from the army than from Rosenberg, to which Hitler only demanded that specific promises of national independence be deleted from any official army proclamations so as not to make any binding promises. At the request of the army, Hitler authorized the German forces to give individual ethnic groups of the Caucasus measure of self-administration still short of national independence in a Führer order dated 8 September 1942, as Rosenberg had also proposed. The troops were instructed to treat the native people as friends, and forced labour was only to be recruited from Russians and Ukrainians. Rosenberg eventually suggested that the post of the Commissar/Resident should go to his long-time friend and a fellow Baltic German, Stabsleiter , an official at Rosenberg's ministry. He also recommended Hermann Göring, as the Plenipotentiary of the Four Year Plan, to appoint a head of an "oil commission" to work alongside the Commissar. Dr Hermann Neubacher, the former mayor of Vienna and then a special envoy to the puppet Hellenic State, was to function alongside Schickedanz on the region's economic matters. Schickedanz reportedly spent considerable time examining sketches of his future palace in Tbilisi and discussing the number of gates it would need. Planners theorised about a possible advance to western Kazakhstan to secure the eastern frontiers. German plans to capture western Kazakhstan certainly existed as railway nets and territories in west Central Asian countries lay along lines of advance to the Middle East in order to aid the Afrika Korps in the African Campaign, with the additional purpose of seizing Persia. Linked to these plans, the German Army planners conceived some operations to project Operation Barbarossa on a greater scale, extending to the Caucasus area, and other extensions of Barbarossa including Turkey, Iraq and Persia. Also, during General Von Kleist's Invasion (Operation Blue) of the Caucasus, there were German units (including certain Arabs, Caucasians and Central Asian SS volunteer groups) whose goal was to occupy the Caucasus region and Central Asia, enlarging General Erwin Rommel's forces in Alexandria via the Middle East. In relation to a German Persian invasion, a tripartite military pact was signed on January 18, 1942, where the three Axis Powers agreed to draw an operational line of demarcation at 70° east longitude (west of Bombay), which also was the frontier of