"Unless we get the Baku oil, the war is lost."

It was Hitler's word that saw the Wehrmacht march on the Azerbaijani oil fields, and with it, the shining jewel of the Caspian Sea was swallowed beneath jackboot as well, the culmination of a centuries-old story of one of the Caucasus' most affluent cities.

Azeri folklore describes the origin of the name 'Baku' from the Persion name Bādkube, meaning 'city where the wind blows', a distinction that has come to define the fate of the Azeri ancestral city for hundreds of years. From Achaemenid Persia and Alexander's Greeks, to Ancient Roman and the Byzantines, to the Ottoman and Russian Empires, all the way to the war of the Soviet Union and Hitler's Germany. Sitting on a historic byway between Europe, the Islamic world and western Asia, Baku has played host to the conquering armies half the world over.

With the advent of the world's growing reliance on petroleum following the First World War, it did not take long for Baku's importance to Azerbaijan's vast Oil extraction industry to become visible to those who lived in it, nevermind to those who lived without. Therefore, when the armies of Germany marched into Bukarin's Russia, toppled the Azerbaijan SSR and integrated the Azeri lands into the Reichskommissariat Kaukasien, Baku soon became a hub for the Third Reich's resource extraction machine, playing off Germany's reputation as the liberator of the Caucasus so long as the Oil in Baku keeps flowing.

Like a number of places in Germany's southernmost lebensraum, Baku purchases it's peace in black gold, where the limited autonomy granted by the Germans to Azeri has proven 'workable' for the civilian population in the city. An unease looms over the city, however, for the sight of Wehrmacht Halftracks parading beneath the Palace of the Shirvanshahs makes some wonder if the future holds something grim in the grand city's near future...