Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (8 page)

Backe’s plan provided Hitler with a solution to the problem of a war of attrition with Britain and America by arguing that the Soviet Union could be transformed into a huge resource base
if
the needs of its inhabitants were ignored. In a vague way Hitler had for years been expounding the idea that ‘the occupation of the Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry’.
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Already in 1939 he had told League of Nations High Commissioner for the city of Danzig, Carl
J. Burckhardt, ‘I need the Ukraine, so that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.’
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But most of Hitler’s advisers were under no illusions about the difficulties involved in exploiting Soviet resources. Virtually all of the Ukraine’s grain went to feed the vastly expanded cities of the Soviet Union. The process of collectivizing the farms had changed the social structure of Soviet society, creating an industrial proletariat out of peasants driven off the land. Whereas four-fifths of Soviets lived in the countryside in 1926, only one-half were still peasants in 1939. Officials in the German Food and Agriculture Ministry calculated that during the twentieth century more than 30 million people had moved into the Soviet Union’s cities. While in the early years of the twentieth century Russia had produced a surplus of 11 million tons of grain, most of this was now disappearing into the stomachs of Russia’s rapidly expanding urban population. This left only a small surplus which could be siphoned off to feed Germany.
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The memorandum outlining the Hunger Plan acknowledged this problem and the additional difficulties that the Soviet scorched earth policy, normal war damage and the emergence of a black market would cause. But the solution, it suggested, was simple. The memo spoke euphemistically of suppressing Russian consumption but what was actually intended was to shut down the flow of food from the Ukraine to the towns and cities of northern and central Russia. The food would be diverted on to the plates of German troops and civilians in the Reich. As a consequence, the document acknowledged, ‘unbelievable hunger’ would rule in northern Russia and the industrial areas, which would ‘die out, so to speak’.
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The meeting casually concluded that ‘umpteen millions of people will be starved to death’.
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The actual figure that Backe had in mind was 30 million, precisely the number by which his administrators calculated the Soviet Union’s urban centres had grown in the past few decades. Those charged with implementing the plan were warned that any sympathy they might feel for the starving Soviets would be misplaced as ‘the war can only be continued if the
entire
Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war’.
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Given the nature of the events that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union, much historical work understandably focuses on the racial and ideological motivation for the attack. It is only with the recent
work of historians such as Christian Gerlach, Adam Tooze and Alex Kay that the centrality of food as an engine of the Second World War has become apparent. ‘As hard as it may be for us to credit, agrarian ideology is crucial if we are to understand, not the archaism of Hitler’s regime, but its extraordinary militancy.’
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Hitler had always intended to wipe out Bolshevism and colonize the east. Backe’s sinister plan now gave him a sound economic reason to set alongside the ideological reasons to launch an attack.
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Securing the nation’s food supply was a primary war aim in Hitler’s mind and the central importance of food was clear to the men charged with planning and executing Barbarossa. Germany was later to suffer from crippling fuel shortages and one might expect planners to have focused on capturing sources of mineral oil. But even General Thomas, who was assigned the task of assessing ‘the military-economic consequences of invasion in the East’, began his memorandum of that title with several pages on agricultural production. When he argued that the capture of the oil region of the Caucasus would be essential, he referred to the needs of agriculture, not to Germany’s petrol shortage. Ukrainian farming was, he argued, highly mechanized, using 60 per cent of the Soviet Union’s oil supplies, and it would be essential to secure the supply in order to ensure a plentiful grain harvest.
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When Göring met with Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, Bormann and Hitler at military headquarters on 16 July 1941, he reiterated ‘we must first of all think about the securing of our sustenance, everything else can be dealt with only much later’.
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Once the attack began, the commander of Security Division 403, General-Major Wolfgang von Ditfurth, complained that the wild plunder of the eastern peasants’ farms indicated that it did not seem to be universally understood among the troops and their officers ‘that the war against Russia is not exclusively caused by a world view, but rather is supposed to simultaneously secure our supply zones, for greater Germany … that we must possess during the final conflict with England (USA)’.
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The Hunger Plan was never fully implemented but this was not because it was the pet project of an unimportant agrarian official. The scheme involved all levels of the regime from Hitler, to Göring and the officials of the Four Year Plan, to Rosenberg and the administrators in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Even the
Wehrmacht, which preferred to be seen to distance itself from the more gruesome of the regime’s plans, accepted it with alacrity because it solved seemingly insuperable logistical problems. If food could be taken directly from the occupied territories this would relieve pressure on overburdened supply lines. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, commander for the army in central Russia, coldly calculated that at least 20 million people would starve in his area.
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The plan foundered and, as will be seen in a later chapter, was only implemented in a piecemeal, chaotic fashion. This was because co-ordination between the different organizations charged with administering the eastern territories was lacking and, despite the involvement of an array of political and economic bureaucrats in its conceptualization, the practical details of exactly how it was to be realized on the ground were never properly worked out.
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The attack on the Soviet Union has rightly been characterized as a war of annihilation. The exceptional brutality of the fighting on the eastern front, as well as the introduction of
Einsatzgruppen
(mobile task forces), which followed behind the army murdering Bolsheviks, the intelligentsia and Jews, have gained it this reputation. But if the Hunger Plan had been successfully executed then these acts of annihilation would have been overshadowed by the implementation of mass murder on an even larger scale. When he heard of the plan Franz Six, leader of one of the
Einsatzgruppen
, excitedly told a friend in the military that as the front pushed forwards along a line stretching from Baku to Stalingrad to Moscow to Leningrad, ‘all life would be extinguished. In this strip of land about thirty million Russians would be decimated by hunger … all those who took part in this action would be forbidden on pain of death to give a Russian even a piece of bread. The large cities of Leningrad and Moscow would be flattened.’
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It was with these plans for utter devastation in mind that the German army invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

GENOCIDE IN THE EAST

By the end of 1941 the Wehrmacht had taken the Baltic states and had reached Leningrad in the north, in the centre Belorussia had fallen and they were just a few kilometres from Moscow. In the south they occupied
the Ukraine and then pushed into the Crimea, reaching the Caucasus by 1942. As soon as the attack started Himmler began making his own plans for the future of Germany’s new empire in the east. He commissioned what has become known as the General Plan for the East from the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race. The plans which these academics and bureaucrats produced, and the initial implementation of the scheme in Poland, demonstrate the way in which food and agrarian issues generated militancy within the National Socialist regime and resulted in murderous acts of aggression on the ground.

The architect of the General Plan for the East was the plant geneticist Konrad Meyer. Typically for the National Socialist power structure, he held a multitude of positions, as head of an office for environmental planning, as director of an academic agricultural institute, a position at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and he was also head of an SS planning department for settlement in the east. He was responsible for co-ordinating teams of German academics and agrarian experts, who worked on the details of the plan. A mass migration of Germans into the east was expected, one-third being designated to work in agriculture, made efficient by the application of modern technological advances, especially in plant and gene technology.
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The rest would provide a support network of craftsmen and commercial and public servants. They would live in agricultural towns in German-style houses, surrounded by German plants and trees. Even the herbs and flowers growing in the cottage gardens were to be German, and the rubbish dumps were to be beautified.
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This attention to seemingly innocent detail distracts from the fact that the General Plan for the East was one of the most atrocious plans hatched by the National Socialists. The idyllic new towns and ideal agricultural communities were to be built in a country which would have been subjected to a programme of terror and violence.

The academics who worked under Meyer were enthused by the task they had been given. On the clean slate of the east they could try out ideas without any of the limitations and intractable problems that faced them within the old Reich. Echoing Hitler’s thoughts in his ‘Second Book’, an SS brochure outlining the planned agricultural reform described the east as a potential paradise, a ‘European California’ that
had been left as a desert by the ruling system of the Slav sub-humans (
Untermenschen
).
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The use of this term betrays the sinister attitudes underlying the misleadingly idyllic vision. The plans spoke euphemistically of ‘resettlement’, ‘evacuation’ and ‘Germanization’ of the indigenous population. Despite post-war denials, it was common knowledge among the hundreds of bureaucrats, officials, scientists and academics who worked on the plans that this would mean the death by extermination of millions. Indeed, the planners themselves urged the complete destruction of existing towns and villages as this would provide them with a truly blank canvas.
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The justification for such brutal actions was provided by Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, a professor at the Institute for Landscape Design at the University of Berlin, and Himmler’s special representative for questions concerning landscape formation. In his
Landscape Primer
of 1942 he described the Slavs as a quasi-ecological obstacle to the proper cultivation of the eastern landscape. If the environment was an expression of a people, their abilities and spirit, then, he argued, the murderous cruelty of the Slavs was written in their countryside. His book was filled with photographs of scruffy, poverty-stricken peasant huts to demonstrate his point. The Slavs had to be removed for the good of the land. The SS brochure took up the theme, arguing that the Germans would finally bring order and harmony to the ‘impenetrable thickets of the steppes’.
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The General Plan for the East makes plain the fact that the Jews, together with the Soviet population in the cities who were the targets of the Hunger Plan, were to be only the first in a long line of peoples whom the Nazis intended to annihilate. It was decided that a few of the indigenous inhabitants in the eastern areas could be integrated into German society and another 14 million would be used as slaves; the rest would be deported.
¹⁰⁷
In a secret speech in Prague about the plan Reinhard Heydrich, head of the powerful Reich Security Head Office, and later one of the architects of the Holocaust, outlined how, as soon as the war was won, un-Germanizable elements throughout eastern Europe and Russia would be sent to the Soviet Arctic zone to join the 11 million European Jews who it was anticipated would already be there. Indeed, the idea was that as the Jews died from overwork they would be replaced by waves of deported Slavs.
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At the end of December 1942 the plan calculated that this would mean deporting 70 million
people. It was expected that, like the Jews, the Slavs would also eventually die as a result of their labours. Once the regime acquired a taste for mass annihilation there was some discussion about whether it would be simpler just to execute them. Hitler extended the comparison of Germany’s bid for the eastern territories to the western expansion of America by likening the fate of the Slavs to that of America’s ‘Red Indians’.
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It is the genocidal intent that sets the German plans for colonial settlement apart from the Italian and Japanese plans for Libya and Manchuria.

Some of the most violent and brutal men in the east made the General Plan for the East their own. Hans Ehlich, a surgeon and racial eugenicist, was head of special security service groups in Poland charged with co-ordinating deportation, immigration and settlement. He trained a band of officials, all of whom believed in the project, who were then posted across German-occupied western and eastern Europe from France to the Crimea. Ehlich was impatient for the plan to be put into action even before the war was over and suggested that deportations should immediately begin of racially undesirable elements in the occupied territories to an unspecified area in the east. In October 1941, the equally impatient Heydrich argued that they should begin the work of categorizing the Czech population into those who could be Germanized and those who would be deported.
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