land owners with more than 100 hectares were expropriated of the land in excess of that. Their property was distributed to the peasants, who each received 6 hectares. Hektardörfer, or hectare-towns sprang up on the free land. Approximately 150 German settlements resulted during the presence of the Germans in Bessarabia between 1814 and 1940. Departure from Bessarabia A treaty of Nonaggression between the Soviet Union and Germany, also known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop were the foreign ministers of their respective countries)—was a ten-year non-aggression pact, signed on August 23, 1939, promising that neither country would attack the other. It effectively divided Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union. By a secret protocol to this treaty, the two parties agreed to partition Poland. Germany would have a free hand in western Poland. The Soviet Union would have in its sphere of influence eastern Poland, which the Soviets called western Ukraine and western White Russia; Finland and the three Baltic states; and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. For the Germans living in farming settlements in Bessarabia, the German–Soviet Pact was very bad news. They had lived through the Bolshevik Revolution and the early years of the Soviet regime, before their countries of residence were detached from the Soviet Union and given to Romania. Although they did not want to leave their homes and farms, they had absolutely no desire to be Soviet subjects again. This compelled Nazi Germany to take action and relocate these ethnic Germans. By a further amendment to the treaty, dated September 28, 1939, agreement was reached between Germany and the Soviet Union for a population exchange. Hitler entrusted Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS (Schutzstaffel, Nazi party paramilitary security service) and police, with the task of their resettlement to territories of western Poland, recently occupied by the Wehrmacht (German Army), and in the process of incorporation into the Reich. The Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle (often shortened to VoMi), a department of the SS, carried out the relocation and settlement of the ethnic Germans, known in German as Volksdeutsche. In return, any Russian, White Russian, or Ukrainian living in German-occupied Poland had the right to be resettled in the Soviet Union. As this was a voluntary movement, it was all in one westward direction. Resettlement implementation was carried out by teams made up of SS officers and their Soviet counterparts,