Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (9 page)

The first eastern territory to be cleared of its inhabitants was the annexed part of Poland, known as the Warthegau. The plan was to Germanize the region by replacing the Poles with ethnic Germans (
Volksdeutsche
). In the eighteenth century thousands of Germans had emigrated east, repopulating lands that had formerly been occupied by the Ottoman Empire. German minority communities were dotted throughout the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, and there were a few German communities in Russia itself. No matter how long they had been settled in the east the National Socialists regarded these people as racially German. Under the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression they were encouraged to return to Germany and, fearful of oppression under the Soviet regime and hopeful that they would find a better life in the new greater German Reich, many did so.
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The intention was that these settlers would establish a thriving agricultural community in the Warthegau,
which Hitler and Göring planned would produce ‘grain, grain and again grain’, in fact become ‘a grain factory’.
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Ehlich’s ambitious plans to deport 600,000 Jews and 3.4 million Poles from the Warthegau to the eastern half of Poland, known as the General Government, had to be scaled down once it became clear that it would be undesirable to create a sink state of the dispossessed between Germany and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, throughout 1939–40, 365,000 Poles (one-third Jews) were rounded up, put on trains and deposited in the General Government.
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Zygmunt Klukowski, a doctor in charge of the hospital in the town of Szczebrzeszyn in the General Government treated some of these evacuees. A member of the Polish resistance, he kept a diary in which he recorded the criminal actions of the German occupiers. The story the evacuees told him was always the same. The Germans arrived in the village at night and gave the population less than an hour, often only fifteen minutes, to pack up a few necessities before they were rounded up, and loaded on to unheated railway cars for the journey east.
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As time went by the conditions became increasingly harsh. The first evacuees to arrive in Szczebrzeszyn in December 1939 were allowed to bring 200 zloty with them, by July 1940 all money was confiscated. The group that Klukowski met in July 1940 were small farmers from Gostyn. ‘They had been forced to leave their homes where their families had lived for hundreds of years. They were herded like cattle, pushed and beaten on the road from their villages to the railroad station. People who were too slow were shot.’
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They were kept for one week in Lodz where the young teenagers and able-bodied men and women were selected out and sent to labour camps in Germany. The rest, a motley crowd of women, old men and small children, arrived in Szczebrzeszyn after another week on a train. They lay on the straw in their temporary accommodation, some too weak to sit up, virtually all the children suffering from diarrhoea, all of them ‘pale, tired, and dirty, and … full of hatred toward Germany and the Germans’.
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Klukowski wondered what was to become of them. The Germans had ordered that they should be relocated to the surrounding villages but here their welcome was uncertain. ‘Our own farmers do not have enough even to feed themselves and many times have refused help.’
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He was horrified by the way in which people who
had been relatively prosperous farmers had become ‘beggars in one hour’.
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In the autumn of 1940 there were 530,000 ethnic Germans living in miserable conditions in SS-run transit camps.
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Something had to be done with them. Each of the planners in the four districts of the Warthegau was asked to choose a typical area where the ideas for the General Plan for the East could be tested. Saybusch (Zywiec), on the southern border with Slovakia, was eventually chosen. Between September and December 1940 17,000 Poles were deported from the area. Most ended up in concentration camps in the General Government. Fit young men were sent to the Reich as forced labourers. By the end of the year the Germans had seized 9.2 million hectares of land from Polish farmers in the Warthegau and 180,000 ethnic Germans from Galicia had taken over their farms.
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However, the violence and dispossession did nothing to improve food production in annexed Poland. The farms lacked machines, fertilizer and labour, and the following year’s harvest was jeopardized as those Poles who had not been evicted from their farms often did not plant crops as they feared they would be deported before the harvest.
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Hitler’s and Göring’s vision of mountains of grain never became a reality.

In the autumn of 1942 German policy towards the General Government changed. It was no longer seen as an area in which to deposit the dispossessed and was redesignated for Germanization. The district of Zamosc in the eastern corner of the General Government was chosen as the first area where the General Plan for the East would be realized. Centred on Lublin, this was an important area for the SS. Here they had factories and concentration camps, and a magazine for SS troops. The area was fertile and it was hoped that the new German farms would be bountiful.
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On 27 November the SS began rounding up Poles. They were given only minutes to collect together a few belongings. The town of Szczebrzeszyn, where Zygmunt Klukowski ran his hospital, was not far from Zamosc and on 2 December 1942 he noted in his diary that he could hear horse-drawn wagons rumbling through the town, carrying villagers who were fleeing their homes before the Germans arrived.
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By the summer of 1943, over 100,000 Poles had been driven out of about 300 villages. Klukowski visited some of the evicted villagers in a nearby camp. They were ‘barely moving, looking
terrible’. In the camp hospital sick children lay ‘like skeletons’.
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Tens of thousands were sent to Germany as forced labourers, more than 4,000 children were chosen for Germanization in the Reich, where they would have been placed with childless families, 18,000 faced the horrors of the extermination camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz.
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The operation backfired because the area became one of the most active for partisans. In December 1942 Klukowski reported that fighting units were forming in the forests around Zamosc. ‘They are very well armed. Some try to burn down and completely destroy evacuated villages before the new owners, mostly German settlers from eastern Europe, take possession of them.’
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The empty farms were taken over by about 9,000 ethnic Germans and 4,000 Germans from the Reich. But Germanization was not the success the agronomists expected. The new farmers had little experience with the climate and soil conditions they found in Poland, and productivity on the seized land declined.
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Klukowski observed that many of the new
Volksdeutschen
settlers from Bessarabia fled the villages for the safety of the towns, fearful of the vengeful return of escaped evacuees who sometimes returned to burn down their old houses and kill the new occupants.
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Frieda Hagen, a twenty-nine-year-old agricultural teacher from Thuringia arrived in Zamosc in May 1943 to set up a school to train German women as village advisers. Their job was to refashion the ethnic German women into fine, upstanding examples of the Aryan race. They would go out to the settlers’ villages and teach them the German arts of housekeeping, childcare and hygiene. They also ran German-language classes, schools and kindergartens. But Frieda found disappointment and disillusion among the settlers. They were depressed by the primitive conditions. Frieda was shocked to find that some of the clothes they had been given were ‘dreadful, often still dirty, bloodstained from the ghetto and originating from Jews’.
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Most of all they were resentful of their treatment as second-class citizens by the Reich Germans and angry that they were not given better protection from the vengeful partisans.
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Within Germany the majority of farmers rejected the idea of resettle-ment in the east. They did not want to move to a place which had been presented to them as cold and primitive. When anti-German farmers from Luxembourg were forcibly resettled in the General Government,
resettlement became strongly associated with punishment. The 4,500 farmers who did apply to move in the first two and a half years of the war fell far short of the 40,000 who were expected according to the documents of the General Plan for the East.
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Once it became clear there would not be enough German settlers the planners turned to Holland and Denmark for recruits. Hermann Roloff, a former eastern planner, now in charge of space in Holland and Belgium, began preparing figures for how many Dutch could be resettled. Again the figures were ambitious. He came up with a figure of 3 million but only 600 Dutch farmers went east between November 1941 and June 1942. Those who did not fall victim to partisans returned bitterly disappointed.
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Those willing to move were certainly too few to create the ‘blood wall’, a swathe of territory settled by the racially pure, which Konrad Meyer envisioned.

Despite these difficulties on the ground, the experts in their offices lost none of their enthusiasm. In 1943 one of the scientists working on the plan wrote excitedly, ‘the conquest of the east has brought into our possession those territories which will be of decisive importance for the future nutrition of the German people’.
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Nor did lack of enthusiasm among German farmers have any impact on the planned number of deportations. However, the chaos which followed in the wake of the operation in Zamosc led the SS to speak of improving their methods, and the genocidal aspect of the plan began to be discussed more openly. In fact, the partisan activity in the area of Zamosc made the SS reconsider their intention of extending the operation into the district of Galicia. In January 1943, 5,000 Polish and Ukrainian families were expelled from the Rawa Ruska area and replaced by 1,500 Volhynian ethnic Germans and 200 Bosnians. But the massive operation which had been planned was never undertaken.
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While lack of planning and the chaotic German administration of the eastern occupied territories prevented the full implementation of the Hunger Plan, the full realization of the General Plan for the East was thwarted by the turning tide of the war. By 1943 those ethnic Germans who were arriving in Poland were coming from the Volga, Caucasus and Donetz regions. They were no longer arriving in order to re-settle Polish farms but to escape the advancing Red Army.
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The extent of the agrarian radicalism of the Nazis is rarely fully appreciated because much of what they were planning remained on paper. There should be no doubt, however, that if the Germans had succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union they would have conducted a far more extensive and terrible genocide than that which they were able to carry out under the limitations of occupation while they were still fighting the war.
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The full significance of the Nazi plans was certainly not realized by the lawyers at the Nuremberg trials. This is unsurprising given that it has taken many decades in the archives for historians to unravel the Nazi agrarian plans and their horrific implications.

Walther Darré was tried and found guilty of ‘plunder, spoliation, enserfment and the expropriation’ of land from Polish and Jewish farmers, as well as of depriving Jews of basic foods through ration cuts. He was imprisoned for five years but released three years before his death in September 1953.
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Herbert Backe hung himself in his cell in April 1947, afraid that he might be sent to the Soviet Union for trial.
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But many of the bureaucrats and officials involved in the projected programme of agrarian violence were overlooked. Given what we now know of the extent of Hans Ehlich’s involvement in the genocidal aspect of the plan, his sentence of one year and nine months was uncomfortably lenient. He then moved to Brunswick, where he worked as a physician. He died in 1991.
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Konrad Meyer’s position in the SS Race and Settlement Office meant that he was captured and tried. However, by referring to one of the least incendiary early versions of the General Plan, and arguing that this was simply an academic study, not a plan which he expected to be implemented, Meyer successfully diverted the attention of the American prosecutors. He was set free in 1948, having already served his sentence of two years and ten months while awaiting trial.
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Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, Himmler’s special representative for questions concerning landscape formation, having served as a defence witness for Meyer, suffered no ill effects from his association with the murderous plan and became professor for horticulture and land culture at Backe’s old university, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover. He was joined by Meyer in 1956, who took up a chair in land cultivation and land planning. Chillingly, Meyer turned his attention to the problem of Third World food supply and
global over-population. In a 1953 publication he revealed that his thinking had changed little since his days in the Race and Settlement Office by suggesting that the strain on the world food balance could be relieved by redistributing people into what he sinisterly termed catchment areas. Wiepking-Jürgensmann was acclaimed as a conservationist and in 1952 the culture minister for Lower Saxony asked him to design a memorial for Bergen-Belsen.
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