Adam Tooze

Chartbook 453

Today marks the 85th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa – the opening of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

Twenty years ago I published the following passage on the first months of that unprecedentedly bloody campaign, in Wages of Destruction:

On 22 June 1941, the Third Reich launched not only the most massive campaign in military history, it also unleashed an equally unprecedented campaign of genocidal violence. The concentrated focus on the destruction of the Jewish population has come to be seen as the truly defining aspect of this campaign. However, in Eastern Europe, the epi-centre of the Holocaust, the Judeocide was not an isolated act of murder. The German invasion of the Soviet Union is far better understood as the last great land grab in the long and bloody history of European colonialism.

Destroying the Jewish population was the first step towards rooting out the Bolshevik state. What was to follow was a gigantic campaign of land clearance and colonization. This involved not only the extermination of the Jewish population, but also the “clearance” of the vast majority of the Slav population and the settlement of millions of hectares of Eastern Lebensraum with German colonists. Complementing this long-term programme of demographic engineering, was a short-term strategy of exploitation motivated by the “practical” need to secure the food balance of the German Grossraum. The attainment of this entirely “pragmatic” objective required nothing less than the murder, by organized famine, of the entire urban population of the Western Soviet Union. As Hans Frank and Herbert Backe had already demonstrated in the General Government, Hitler and his regime were determined that in this World War, it would not be the Germans who were starved into defeat.

I

From the moment that Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the genocidal impulses of Nazi ideology towards both the Jews and the Slavs had taken on concrete form in an extraordinary programme of population displacement and colonial settlement.[3] The architects of this programme were Heinrich Himmler and his technical staffs in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and the Reichskommissar fuer die Festigung deutschen Volktums. The practical success of this early programme, was limited. But it was crucial in establishing the close connection in SS thinking between the removal of the Jews and the wider project of racial reorganization and Germanic settlement.

As we have seen, the idea of colonial settlement in the East had long been central to radical German nationalism. In 1939, this was compounded by two more immediate impulses. The incorporation of a large part of Polish territory into the Reich, faced Germany with the question of what to do with millions of new, non-German inhabitants. On the other hand, agreements reached with the Soviet Union and Italy in September and October 1939 meant that Germany had to accommodate the “return” to the Reich of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from the Baltic and South Tirol. To make room for this influx the SS prepared to remove both the entire Jewish population and the vast majority of the Polish inhabitants from the Polish territory now annexed to the Reich.[4] One early version of the so-called Generalplan specified the goal of deporting 1 million Jews and 3.4 million Poles.[5] The only native inhabitants who were to remain were the small minority judged fit for incorporation into the German racial community, plus an ample supply of forced labour. This proved wildly over-ambitious. In early 1940, Himmler and Heydrich hoped to drive 600,000 people out of the newly annexed territory and into the General Government (GG).

To do so, however, would have produced chaos. By April 1940 “only” 261,517 people had been displaced, half Jews, half Polish peasants. By the end of 1940, the total had risen to 305,000. Instead of removing the Jews, the German administrators resorted to concentrating them in large urban ghettos, the largest at Lodz. Millions of Poles, meanwhile, were conscripted for work in Germany or for forced labour on formerly Polish soil. By the end of 1940, 180,000 ethnic Germans had been settled on Polish farms, a process accompanied by brutal evictions and much publicity. However, the numerical imbalance was frustrating. By January 1941, more than 530,000 ethnic Germans had been repatriated to the Reich, having left behind farms and other property in their original homeland valued at no less than 3.315 billion Reichsmarks.[6] But instead of taking over prime agricultural settlements, the majority of the returnees found themselves languishing in SS-run transit camps.

The practical failure, however, did not deflate the enthusiasm of Heydrich and the SS. As of September 1940, the process of racial sifting began in earnest with the introduction of the so-called Volksliste. Of 8.53 million Poles within Germany’s borders, only 1 million were deemed worthy of inclusion in this list. They were ranked into four classes according to the speed with which the SS “racial scientists” believed that they could be assimilated into the German fold. The fate of the 7 million other Poles was left uncertain. Their legal status was reduced to that of “dependants of the Reich with limited domestic rights” (Schutzangehoerige des deutschen Reiches mit beschraenkten Inlaenderrechten). By the end of 1940, the Reich’s Agricultural Ministry reported that the majority of Polish peasants in the new German territories were refusing to plant their fields for the new season, because they did not expect to be in possession of their farms come harvest time.[7] Given what Heydrich had in mind this was only realistic. In January 1941, Heydrich had initiated a new round of planning, both for a “final solution” to the Jewish problem, which in 1941 was still predominantly a Polish-Jewish problem, and for a massive displacement of native Poles. His most immediate objective was to resolve the problem of the ethnic Germans queuing in Poland by displacing 770,000 Poles into the General Government at the earliest possible opportunity. This, however, ran foul of conditions in the General Government and the transport needs of the German Army in advance of Barbarossa. Instead of the 250,000 people that Heydrich had hoped to move by May 1941, the SS in fact managed to displace only 25,000.

These, however, were merely short-term difficulties. The news of Germany’s impending attack on the Soviet Union, unleashed euphoria amongst the SS staffs. The Soviet Union offered the chance to solve the problems of territory and population on a scale unimaginable in the confines of Poland. Unwanted bodies could be swallowed up in the wastelands of the East, huge tracts could be allocated for German settlement. Here finally was the stage on which to resolve the problems of population and space in a truly radical fashion. On 30 January 1941 Hitler repeated to the ecstatic crowds in the Sportpalast the threat he had made two years earlier.[8] In a speech directed above all towards asserting the futility of Britain’s continued war against Germany, Hitler ended by restating his ‘prophecy’ that ‘if Jewry were to plunge the world into war, the role of Jewry would be finished in Europe.’ And unlike in 1939, this was no longer a conditional threat. It was a firm intention. The agitation of America against Germany was after all an established fact. Whether or not Germany was involved in an open world war, it was fighting a global coalition and would soon face the full flood of Lend-Lease. In early 1941 Hitler could therefore assert with some confidence: ‘The coming months and year will prove that I prophesied rightly in this case too.’ A few weeks earlier Heydrich had received his first order to prepare for a truly comprehensive solution for the European Jewish problem.[9] Jews from all over Europe, from the Reich and Poland would be sent to their deaths on marshy construction sites in the desolated territory of the East, stripped bear by the German occupying forces.

In March the Wehrmacht and the SS drafted guidelines calling for the liquidation of all elements who could be dangerous to German authority in the newly conquered territories, a category that Goering defined for Heydrich as including the ‘GPU-organization, the political commissars, Jews etc’.[10] By 6 June this had been formalized by the Army High Command as the notorious Commissar Order, which called for indiscriminate and immediate execution of all political representatives of the Soviet State. Those left behind by the Wehrmacht would be dealt with by the Einsatzgruppen – 3000 police and SS men who, since the second half of May had been undergoing ideological training at the Border Police School at Pretzsch near Leipzig. Though they were to direct themselves against the organs of the Soviet state in the first instance, Heydrich in his repeated meetings with the Einsatzgruppen leaders reiterated the role of Jewry in instigating Bolshevism and demanded with ominous redundancy the liquidation of all Jews in the service of the Party and state.[11] Within days of the invasion the balance between these two categories was to shift dramatically.

Meanwhile, the impending attack on the Soviet Union also energized the broader programme of racial rearrangement that had been initiated in Poland. In the middle of June 1941, German planning offices began to consider the possibility of removing not only the Polish population of the German annexed territories, but the population of the General Government as well.[12] They began, in other words, to consider a genocide against the entire Polish population. On 21 June 1941, Himmler instructed the staff of the RKF to prepare an outline plan for the demographic reorganization of the entire Eastern territory that was expected to fall under German control.[13] A few weeks earlier Himmler had requested additional funds to establish an independent Construction Administration of the SS. Over the following twelve months, the evolution of policy towards the Jews and the development of long-term planning for the settlement of Eastern Europe was pushed forward in constant interchange between the offices of the RSHA, the RKF and the SS economic adminstration.[14] The first sketch of the so-called Generalplan Ost was finished in a matter of weeks by the RKF’s settlement expert, Professor for agronomy Konrad Meyer. It was presented to Himmler as early as 15 July 1941.

In the autumn of 1941, the order was given to construct a number of base camps in Poland from which slave labour columns would begin the enormous construction programme called for by Meyer’s Generalplan. Meanwhile, Reinhard Heydrich’s RSHA worked both on the outline plan for the Final Solution and a second draft of the Generalplan. A general statement on the outline of the Final Solution to embrace not only the millions of Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union but also the far smaller communities of Western Europe, was ready by December 1941.[15] The meeting had to be postponed until January, but when the Secretaries of State met at Wannsee in January 1942, Heydrich’s proposal received no criticism. By contrast, the second rough draft of the Generalplan Ost, which addressed itself not to the Jewish minority but to the far larger non-Jewish populations of Poland and the Soviet Union, was subject to such fierce attacks from within the Reich’s administration that the task of preparing the plan was transferred back from the RSHA to Professor Meyer of the RKF.[16] Meyer completed his final draft in May 1942 and after consultation with Hitler, it was approved by Himmler in July 1942 as the outline for future SS settlement activity in the East.[17] It provides what is effectively a blue-print for the kind of social order that the SS leadership hoped to create in Eastern Europe.

The first and most fundamental assumption in all SS territorial planning from 1939 onwards was the assumption that the integration of Eastern European territory as German Lebensraum required the removal of the vast majority of the native population. Meyer’s Generalplan did not speak specifically of the Jews, but their removal was clearly taken for granted. Only in Poland and the Ukraine did the Jews constitute a minority large enough for their removal to significantly alter the population balance. Meyer addressed himself primarily to the majority Slav population. For Poland he foresaw the removal of 80-85 percent of the native population. This was to be followed by the expulsion of 64 percent of the population of the Ukraine and 75 percent of the White Russian population.[18] The Russian territory around Leningrad was to be completely depopulated. The various drafts of the Generalplan differed in their estimates as to the actual numbers involved, but the lowest figure was 31 million displaced people, not including the Jewish minority. More realistic estimates, which allowed for the natural rate of population increase over the period in which the programme would be implemented, put the number of victims at closer to 45 million people.[19] There was still no absolute clarity about the final destination of the displaced populations. But what cannot have been in doubt is that the process of “evacuation” would involve mass death on an epic scale. Only those capable of work were of any interest to the Germans. By the end of 1942, the talk was of the possible “physical annihilation” of entire populations, not only the Jewish minority, but the Poles and Ukrainians as well.[20] Any moral consideration had long ago been set aside. The question was one of practicalities.

The genocidal implications of the Generalplan Ost were clearly revealed by a “trial run” organized in the summer of 1942. On 18-19 July 1942 at the same time as Himmler communicated the definitive order for the killing of the Jews in the General Government, he also issued instructions to Odilo Globonic, to carry out an experimental “evacuation” of the entire Polish population of the Zamosc region.[21] This was intended as the first step towards widening the process of Germanization beyond the borders of the Reich. After completing the ‘evacuation’ of the entire Jewish population, Odilo Globocnic began a second round of “Selektionen”, which split the Polish population into four groups, by age, sex and political dangerousness. Men and women capable of work were divided into two segregated groups, exactly as Heydrich had demanded for the Jews at the Wannsee meeting. Polish children were separated from their families and allocated at random to men and women over the age of 60. These ill-matched “family groups” were then despatched to so-called “retirement villages”, which were in fact the settlements left vacant by the gassing of their Jewish inhabitants. The fourth group of Poles, those judged most dangerous by the German authorities, were despatched directly to Auschwitz and Majdanek, where they were executed or worked to death.[22] In practice, the Zamosc evacuation was not a success. The efforts by the SS to round up the inhabitants met with intense armed resistance and required the mobilization of thousands of German police, troops and auxiliaries. Tens of thousands of Poles escaped into the forests.[23] By the summer of 1943, Globocnic was forced to abandon the experiment. Compared to the outright murder of the Jewish population of the General Government, the Zamosc experiment was small in scale. However, it was highly significant in indicating the full extent of the Third Reich’s genocidal ambition. The Generalplan Ost set a timetable for the extinction of the entire population of Eastern Europe. It should be taken no less seriously than the programme outlined by Heydrich at the Wannsee conference.

Given the scale of the horror that the SS was contemplating, it may seem grotesque to consider the “constructive” plan they had in mind for the territory vacated by the tens of millions of people they were planning to murder and uproot. However, it is necessary to do so, if we are to understand the way in which the perpetrators rationalized their programme of murder and the meaning that they gave to the concept of Lebensraum. Into the enormous space cleared by the Generalplan Ost, Himmler and his staff foresaw, over a period of 20-30 years, the settlement of at least 10 million Germans. The ethnic boundary of the German race was to be forced 1000 kilometres to the East.[24] The SS planners involved in these discussions were only too aware that by conjuring up images of the Teutonic knights they were in danger of appearing outlandishly archaic. In their self-understanding, however, they were anything but. Not that Konrad Meyer and his staffers distanced themselves from the tradition of German settlement in the East. But to understand this as an archaic attachment was to miss the point. As one official in Frank’s General Government explained, the Third Reich was resuming a historic mission of modernization. “In reality the Masters of the German Order and above all the leaders of the settlement (Lokatoren), who built up and settled the villages and farms on a commercial basis, were … anything but Romantics. They were cool calculators and stemmed in considerable numbers from the commercial classes.“[25] Nor was the project, impractical or ‚merely ideological‘ in its intent. The East would offer a prosperous future for the hard pressed peasantry. For Konrad Meyer, the architect of the Generalplan Ost, it was the chance of a new beginning beyond the overcrowded confines of Germany. As he put it in a programmatic article: “… the land folk of tomorrow will be a different people from that of yesterday … For our rural population the dawning of this new age means a fundamental change of character … The choice between traditional or progressive, primitive or modern, can only be resolved in favour of a healthy, communally conscious idea of progress and performance. This implies a clear decision in favour of struggle as opposed to those … who see the salvation of the peasantry in the protection of a nature reserve. There can be no return to the “good old days”. It is therefore best to give up complaining about the fact that the “old peasantry” is gone and to affirm the new peasantry of the Third Reich and to fight for it.”[26]

The vision that inspired the German colonial project in the East had more in common with the American ideologies of the frontier than it did with the middle ages. In the autumn of 1941, Hitler returned repeatedly to the American example in discussing Germany’s future in the East. The Volga, he declared, would be Germany’s Mississippi. And the bloody conquest of the American West provided Germany with the historical warrant it needed to justify the clearance of the Slav population. „Here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.“ A “superior” settler population would displace an “inferior” native population opening the way towards a new era of economic possibility. “Europe – and not America – will be the land of unlimited possibilities.”[27]

The Generalplan Ost envisioned not a return to the past, but a new and expansive phase of German economic development. It belongs in the company of the German Labour Front’s enormous housing programme announced in the autumn of 1940 and the prewar VW scheme. In the East, a new abundance of natural resources would be combined with German know how and capital to enable a dramatic increase in the standard of living. The most succinct expression of this objective was population density, as measured by population per square kilometer. In the initial planning for Poland this was set at 100 people per square kilometer. Once the territory of the Soviet Union was incorporated into the Generalplan Ost, the target was reduced to 80 people per square kilometre. This target was significantly lower than the density in Germany in 1939, at 133 people per square kilometer. But it was higher than that prevailing in France at the time.[28] Nor were the agronomists working for the SS under any illusion about the standard of living that could be expected in a society consisting entirely of peasant farmers. Instead, Meyer’s ideal was the population structure of Bavaria or Hannover, which in the 1930s sustained an uncluttered balance of agriculture, industry and services.[29] The Generalplan projected an agricultural share in the workforce of no more than one third, with a similar share employed in industry, crafts, commerce and public services. Placed in relation to the long-run development of the German occupational structure, the SS vision involved turning the clock back not to the middle-ages, but to 1900.

In light of the problems in the Reich, achieving the correct distribution of land was clearly a key question in Germany’s colonization in the East. The majority of German settlers would be provided with self-sufficient homesteads (known as Hufen), of at least 20 hectares. As we have seen, farms of 20-30 hectares were the mainstay of the Erbhoefe in the Reich.[30] In those areas where the quality of land required farms of more than 30 hectares, the family farm was not a viable unit. These territories would be given over to larger estates run by veterans of the SS, employing gangs of Slavs as farm hands. The initial planning for Poland provided that two thirds of the land was to be divided between 150,000 Hufen, each supporting a German peasant family. One third of the land was to be given over to 12,000 large Wehrbauernhoefe, to be reserved for SS officers. The goal of complete Germanization, however, would never be achieved if German farmers were forced to rely on native Slavs to do the bulk of the fieldwork. So land was also allocated to provide allotments for a substantial population of German farm labourers.

The settlement in the East was directly coupled with the efforts of the RNS to bring about the wholesale rationalization of agriculture within Germany, announced by Darre at the end of 1940.[31] In the words of an early planning document, it was assumed that “the constructive effort in the East will … permit the final reconstruction of the areas of partible inheritance in the old Reich. From Wuerttemberg and Baden alone 100,000 peasant and craftsmen families will be made available.“[32] From the summer of 1940 onwards teams of experts from the Reichsnaehrstand, under the direction of the ubiquitous Professor Meyer, undertook a comprehensive inventory of rural Germany.[33] In painstaking local enquiries they evaluated a sample of 4500 German villages with a combined population of 5 million inhabitants. In every village, every farm was graded according to its viability. In future no farm would be acceptable in Germany that did not yield a money income of at least 3000 Reichsmark per annum, placing the farming family comfortably above the median point in the national income distribution. In practice this meant that farms would need to have a minimum size of 18 hectares, in some regions closer to 30. In areas of partible inheritance such as the Rhineland, upwards of 30 percent of all farms were designated for consolidation or liquidation. If it had been possible to disregard local sensibilities altogether, the rate of consolidation would have been closer to 50 percent. And Meyer’s teams graded not only the farms but also the farming population. Hard-working farmers who lacked land were to be assisted by the consolidation of smaller holdings taken from part-time farmers or less adequate cultivators. Young families of good German stock would be encouraged to take up the opportunities for settlement in the East. The final version of the Generalplan completed by Meyer in 1942 called for no less than 220,000 families to be drawn from the overpopulated rural areas of the Reich. In addition, the SS hoped to be able to attract 220,000 young couples starting life in agriculture and at least 2 million colonists from the urban areas of Germany.[34]

But, the agrarian planners did not merely intend to seize land and redistribute population. The goal of creating a “high intensity Lebensraum” (hochintensiven Lebensraum) could only be achieved by substantial investment.[35] An enormous flow of German capital would have to follow the German settlers into the East. The farms would need to be well-equipped with livestock and machinery. But most important of all was the need to improve the transport infrastructure. Modern agriculture could not prosper without links to the towns and the cities. Meyer’s initial costing for the Generalplan Ost came to 40 billion Reichsmarks, which was soon inflated, on Himmler’s insistence, to 67 billion Reichsmark.[36] This was as much as Germany had spent on rearmament between 1930 and 1939. It was more than the combined total of all investment in the German economy between 1933 and 1938. It was approximately two thirds of Germany’s GDP in 1941.[37] Half a million marks was to be sunk into every square kilometer of Germany’s vast new Eastern Empire. Assuming the territory was populated at the density originally envisioned, of 80 persons per square kilometer, this implied an investment of 6,250 Reichsmark per inhabitant.

Here too there is no trace of the backward looking nostalgia. On the plans endorsed both by Himmler and Hitler land remediation and agriculture would claim only 36 percent of Germany’s investment in the East. The rest was ear-marked for investments in transport infrastructure, industry and urban settlement.[38] And this was only the state-funded element in Eastern economic development. Huge sums were also expected to flow from private industry. The Reich it was hoped would provide at least 15.67 billion Reichsmarks from the national budget. 4.29 billion would come from a special fund at the disposal of Heinrich Himmler as Reichskommissar. German local government was expected to provide 3.04 billion. These public funds would be concentrated above all on forestry, infrastructure, road building and agricultural amelioration. The Reichsbahn was expected to contribute at lest 1.5 billion towards expanding the railway infrastructure. Finally in excess of 20 billion Reichsmarks was expected to be raised on a more or less commercial terms for industrial and urban development. If the Generalplan Ost had ever been carried out, it would have involved a massive reallocation of German national capital towards the East.[39]

It was through the issue of costing and the consequent decision to rely heavily on forced labour forms that the Generalplan was linked directly to the Final Solution.[40] As Himmler put it to a meeting of senior SS leaders in the summer of 1942: “… if we do not fill our camps with slaves – in this room I mean to say things very firmly and very clearly – with worker slaves, who will build our cities, our villages, our farms without regard to any losses, then even after years of war we will not have enough money to be able to equip the settlements in such a manner that real germanic people can live their and take root in the first generation.“[41] Planners such as Konrad Meyer and the SS building chief Kammler expressed themselves in less drastic language, but their intent was no less clear.[42] The total labour demands of the Generalplan Ost were estimated to be in the order of 400,000-800,000 for the first phase. At a minimum, the number of forced labourers was set at 175,000 – “Jews, Poles and Soviet Prisonners of War”.[43] On average, Meyer estimated that employing slave labour would reduce the cost of construction by 40 percent in cash terms. Half of this saving, however, would be offset by the cost of maintaining the workforce with food and clothing, a debit item that Meyer added almost as an after thought.

For the future of the SS concentration camp system, these figures had important implications.[44] In the first half of 1941 the population of the camps numbered no more than 60,000. Clearly there needed to be a dramatic expansion. To provide for the needs of the Generalplan, the SS building staff on 27 September 1941 ordered the construction of two new camps, each to house 50,000 inmates. One was to be cited in the Lublin – Majdanek. The other was to be built at Birkenau, a hamlet adjacent to the existing concentration camp at Auschwitz.[45] By the end of the year, the SS had raised its targets to envision camp populations of 125,000 at Majdanek and 150,000 at Auschwitz. Both facilities were originally intended to house Soviet POWs, but for reasons that will soon become apparent, the vast majority of the billets at Auschwitz ended up being occupied by Jews. In any case, the instrumentalization of the concentration camps as a source of forced labour was well under way in the last week of January 1942 when Himmler wrote to the SS office in charge of camp administration to inform them that: “Since Russian POWs can no longer be expected in the near future, I intend to send to the camps a large number of Jews and Jewesses who are being emigrated (sic) out of Germany. Please get ready to receive in the concentration camps in the next four weeks 100,000 male Jews and up to 50,000 Jewish women. Major economic tasks will be addressed to the concentration camps in the coming weeks.“[46] A week earlier, Heydrich had hosted the meeting at the Wannsee conference centre, at which a key group of civil servants was inducted into the SS vision of the Final Solution. At the Wannsee meeting Heydrich referred neither to gassing or shooting as means of disposing of the Jewish populations of Poland or Western Europe. Instead he proposed that they should be evacuated eastwards in giant construction columns: “Under suitable command, Jews are now to be deployed for labour in the East as part of the final solution. In large labour columns, under separation of the sexes, Jews capable of labour are to be led road-building into the territory, in the process of which, without doubt, a large part will drop out due to natural attrition.“[47] As we have seen, Meyer‘s Generalplan had specified new roads as the first requirement. 1.2 billion Reichsmarks had been ear marked for their construction.

II

The full extent of the SS’s genocidal colonialism is staggering and for obvious reasons it has held the historical centre stage. However, what is less widely appreciated is that the Wehrmacht entered the Soviet Union intent upon not one, but two programmes of mass murder.[48] Whereas the Final Solution and the Generalplan Ost were secrets closely guarded by the SS, for fear, amongst other things, of antagonizing the local population. The second programme, which openly envisioned the killing of tens of millions of people within the first twelve months of the German occupation was agreed between the Wehrmacht, all the key civilian Ministries and the Nazi political leadership as early as the spring of 1941. Nor can the so-called ‘Hunger Plan’ be described as secret. It was referred to in official instructions issued to thousands of subordinates. And, perhaps most importantly, no effort was made to hide the wider rationale of the individual acts of brutality that the programme required, on the contrary. All German soldiers and occupation administrators in Soviet territory were enjoined to understand and to commit themselves to its strategic logic. This genocidal plan commanded such wide-ranging support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, following Germany’s experience in World War I, was obvious to all: the need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary at the expense of the population of the Soviet Union.

As we have discussed, the “bread basket of the Ukraine” played a key role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-1941.[49] For Hitler, it was the key priority, which had to be achieved prior to any other military consideration. And this priority was only reinforced by the alarming decline in the German grain stocks. By December 1940, the entire military and political leadership of the Third Reich, was convinced that this was the last year in which they could approach the food question with any confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western European territories, which had fallen under German domination in 1940, had substantial net grain deficits. Unless additional sources of feed grain could be secured, the only solution was a mass slaughter of Europe’s animal herds reminiscent of the famous “pig massacre” of 1916. Given the isolation imposed on the European continent by the British blockade, only the Ukraine could provide Western Europe with the millions of tons of grain it needed to sustain its animal populations. Not surprisingly, therefore, when Hitler gave the definitive order in early December 1940 to begin preparing for an attack on the Soviet Union, State Secretary Herbert Backe in the Agricultural Ministry reacted with alacrity.

For Backe this was a moment of considerable personal significance. Ever since the 1920s he had been fixated on the conquest of Russian territory as the ultimate solution to the problems of the “people without space” (Volk ohne Raum).[50] Now, the first requirement was that Germany’s Eastern Army (Ostheer) – numbering 3 million men and 600,000 horses – should be fed from the territory of the Soviet Union. As Backe well understood, however, the Ukraine was not the limitless granary of imperialist cliché. The Ukraine, in fact, produced only a small net surplus of grain for export outside the Soviet Union. This was due, on the one hand, to the backwardness of Russian agronomy and on the other hand to the extraordinarily rapid growth in the Soviet urban population. Since 1928, Stalin had stamped an urban civilization of 30 million inhabitants out of the ground. The food for this vast new urban proletariat came from the Ukraine. To conventional economic analysts in Berlin this implied that even if the Ukraine were successful conquered, Germany could expect little immediate benefit.[51] It would, after all, take years before productivity could be substantially increased. Herbert Backe, however, drew radically different conclusions. To enable the grain surplus of the Ukraine to be directed immediately towards German needs, it was necessary, simply to cut the Soviet cities out of the food chain. After ten years of Stalinist urbanization, the urban population of the Western Soviet Union was now to be starved to death.

That such a scheme should come from the pen of Herbert Backe can come as no surprise. He was a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time associate of Walther Darre and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. As we have seen, he had already demonstrated his willingness to use food as a means of genocide in his collaboration with Governor General Hans Frank in the first year of the war. What is perhaps more surprising is the alacrity with which Backe’s breath-taking suggestion was taken up by the rest of the ministerial bureaucracy in Berlin, above all by the chief economic expert of the Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW), General Thomas. At times, as we have seen, Thomas had toyed with opposition to Hitler’s war. But at heart, the General was a ruthless pragmatist. Germany’s future as a great power was Thomas’s only real concern. The raison d’être of his office in the OKW was to prevent the kind of domestic crisis that had crippled the German war effort in World War I. Thomas, was fully appraised of the precariousness of Germany’s food situation and saw no reason to quibble with Backe’s calculations. Furthermore, Hitler’s mind was clearly made up on the issue. He had his heart set on the Ukraine. And to clinch the argument, Thomas also had specifically military reasons for supporting Backe’s proposal. In early 1941, the German Army was increasingly concerned with the logistical preparations for Barbarossa. The map exercises conducted by the quarter master’s staff, revealed a glaring discrepancy between the supply needs of the German Army and the limited transport capacity running eastward into the Soviet Union. Even under the most optimistic assumptions it was hard to see how sufficient food, fuel and ammunition could be pushed through this bottleneck. If, on the other hand, the Wehrmacht could satisfy its demand for food and animal fodder from local sources, then this would allow all available transport capacity to be conentrated on the Wehrmacht’s chief priorities, which were fuel and ammunition.

On 2 May 1941, the State Secretaries representing all the major Ministerial agencies met in conference with General Thomas to draft plans for the occupation. The result is one of the most extraordinary bureaucratic records in the history of the Nazi regime. In far more unvarnished language than was ever used in relation to the Jewish question, all of the major agencies of the German state agreed to a programme of mass murder, which dwarfed that which Heydrich was to propose to the Wannsee meeting nine months later. According to General Thomas’s Secreteriat the meeting concluded as follows:

• 
  “1.) The war can only be continued, if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
• 2.) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many millions of people will die of starvation.
• 3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake and only then the removal of grain.”[52]

The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans intended to starve. However, Backe’s imprint on the discussion is unmistakable.[53] Backe himself put the figure for the “surplus population” of the Soviet Union at between 20 to 30 million. And over the following months these numbers established themselves as a common reference point. In mid-June, a week before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Himmler addressed SS Gruppenfuehrer at the Wewelsburg on the forthcoming “race war” (Volkstumskampf). It would, he opined by a fight to the death in the course of which “through military actions and the food problems 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will die.”[54] In November, Goering boasted to Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, that the starvation of 20-30 million Soviet citizens was an essential element of Germany’s occupation policy. Following Backe’s thinking to the letter, the guidelines issued by OKW for the management of agriculture in the occupied Eastern territories – the so-called Green Book – called for all of the industrial and urban centres of Western Russia, including the wooded region between Moscow and Leningrad, to be cut off from their food sources.[55] As a result, the German occupation authorities were instructed to prepare themselves for a human catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. “Many tens of millions of people in this area will become surplus to requirements and will die or will be forced to emigrate to Siberia.“[56] In case the occupying authorities should be moved to alleviate the situation, the guidelines reaffirmed the essential connection between mass starvation and the continuation of the German war effort: “Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this … A claim by the (local) population on the German administration … is rejected right from the start.“[57]

III

After months of talk, on 22 June 1941 the invasion of the Soviet Union began. Never, before or since, has battle been joined with such ferocity by so many men, on such an extended battlefront. As the German spearheads plunged deep into the Western Soviet Union, immediately behind the line of the Wehrmacht’s advance the Einsatzgruppen of the SS began their work of murder. In total the four Einsatzgruppen (A Baltic, B Belorusse & Central Russia, C Ukraine, D Rumania & Crimea) numbered only 3,000-3,200 men. But the SS rapidly gathered around them tens of thousands of local militia.[58] In addition, from the autumn of 1941 the Einsatzgruppen were supported by fresh contingents of German personnel – Waffen SS and numerous battalions of armed German police. The rate at which the Einsatzgruppen killed depended on the speed at which “their” Army Group advanced and the density of Jewish population that they encountered. Einsatzgruppe A was certainly the most devastating. It was responsible for the destruction of the great Jewish communities of Lithuania and Latvia, starting on 25-26 June with a horrific pogrom at Kaunas. By the spring of 1942, Einsatzgruppe A had claimed more than 270,000 victims, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish, more than half the total killed by all four Einsatzgruppen. Like the other SS teams, Einsatzgruppe A murdered by hand, using rifles, pistols and machine-guns. Local helpers sometimes resorted to clubs and pick-axes. Amongst a defenceless and largely docile population this was enough to wreak havoc.

The Judeocide thus rapidly took on an awful and concrete reality. Indeed, so intense was this experience that it set in motion a learning process, which by the end of 1941 was leading to the first experiments with gas vans, a method considered more adequate to the humanity of the perpetrators. However, the vans never caught on. They were improvised and slow-working contraptions and were subject to the same limitations encountered by the rest of the Wehrmacht’s motorized transport in Russia. As a means of killing, asphixiation by carbon monoxide was simply too slow. Whilst experiments began in Poland with more efficient stationary gassing facilities, execution by hand remained the favoured practice in the Soviet Union even in the second sweeps in 1942, which claimed the lives of at least another 360,000 Jews in the Ukraine and Belorusse. In Galicia, where it is estimated that as many as 500,000 Jews were killed in the course of the German occupation, shooting and gassing was combined, as Heydrich had intended, with “destruction through labour” (Vernichtung durch arbeit”).[59] The opportunity for the latter was provided by the construction of a major strategic highway necessary to secure the supply lines for Army Group South.

By contrast with the immediacy of the Einsatzgruppen, Backe’s Hunger Plan had a more abstract quality. The German authorities seem to have imagined that millionfold starvation could be induced simply by requisitioning all available grain and shutting off the cities. In practice, this vision of mass starvation as a result of systematic inaction turned out to be naïve.[60] The Soviet population did not wait to be starved. The only large groups that it proved possible to kill simply by not feeding them, were recognizable minorities within the urban population and people confined in captivity: in other words, the urban Jewish population and Soviet Prisoners of War. Immediately after the arrival of the German troops, those Jews who were not executed by the Einsatzgruppen were banned from food markets or from dealing directly with farmers. They were also banned from purchasing the scarcer forms of food such as eggs, butter, milk, meat or fruit. In Belorusse within the sector of Army Group Centre, the “ration” allocated to Jewish inhabitants of Minsk and other cities was no more than 420 calories per day.[61] In most places less was available. Over the winter of 1941-1942, tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children succumbed to hunger and hunger-related illnesses.

But, it was the Soviet Prisoners of War from whom the Hunger Plan exacted the heaviest toll.[62] In the first phase of Barbarossa no less than 3.3 million Red Army soldiers fell into the hands of the German Army. The Wehrmacht could not claim that it lacked experience in dealing with POWs. On the Western Front it had coped quite adequately with 2 million men taken in the space of only two months. But, in advance of the Barbarossa campaign an order was given to exempt Soviet POWs from the normally accepted standards of the Geneva Convention. Special guidelines were laid down for the isolation and execution of those judged to be politically dangerous. The prisoners were to be separated into distinct ethnic categories. No adequate preparations were made for housing them over the winter months. Insofar as any thought was given to the matter, the assumption seems to have been that they would dig mud dugouts. Special rations were prescribed providing far less nutrition than for any other category of POW. Even well-managed POW camps are not healthy places. Many Red Army soldiers were in a poor condition when they were captured. Many were wounded or suffering from shock and exhaustion. Many had not eaten for days. To add to their misery they were forced to march out of the combat zone in treks stretching over hundreds of kilometres. Given normal mortality rates, one would have expected tens of thousands of deaths. But the statistics leave no doubt that aside from this “normal attrition”, the Wehrmacht was systematically starving its prisoners to death. By the end of December 1941, according to the Wehrmacht’s own records it had taken 3.35 million prisoners.[63] Of these only 1.1 million were still alive at the end of the year and only 400,000 were in sufficiently good physical state to be capable of work. Of the 2.25 million that had died, at least 600,000 had been shot, falling victim to the Kommissarbefehl, which gave the German Army and the SS Einsatzgruppen the license to execute any Soviet citizens thought to be politically dangerous. The rest died of “natural” causes. 600,000 between December 1941 and February 1942 alone. If the clock had been stopped in early 1942, this programme of mass murder would have stood as the greatest single crime committed by Hitler’s regime.

Destroying the urban population of occupied Russia turned out to be far more difficult. To have completely shut off Minsk, Kiev or Kharkov from their agricultural hinterland would have required a security operation of very substantial proportions.[64] With severe fighting continuing on all fronts, the Wehrmacht lacked the necessary manpower. Furthermore, harassed occupation officials could see no logic in unnecessarily antagonizing the civilian population by implementing an immediate programme of genocide. It was necessary to make at least a show of feeding the population. Though the Germans always avoided any talk of official rations, for fear that this would imply a degree of entitlement, food did begin to be distributed. The result was a messy compromise, recorded with astonishing sang froid by one local Wehrmacht administrator: “In the last months for the first time and then ever more frequently there has been mention of the civilian food supply in the course the working day. That the Russians are still here too, we never really considered. No, that is not quite right. Following the official instructions we were … not supposed to consider them. But the war has taken a different turn … Under these circumstances we cannot afford not to consider the population in food terms. But where are we supposed to get anything from?“[65]

This question was never satisfactorily answered. The urban population of Western Russia survived by resort to the black market and increasingly by abandoning the cities, returning to live with family members who were still resident in the countryside. The Wehrmacht for its part did its best to feed itself from the land. Within weeks of the invasion, the principal task of large parts of the German Army was the requisitioning of food.[66] The troops plundered huge quantities of grain, livestock and dairy produce. Nevertheless, the German Armies were not able to sustain themselves at the levels they expected. Especially, in Belorusse, where Army Group Centre was concentrated, local sources proved inadequate in every respect. Large quantities of extra food had to be shipped eastwards from Germany.[67] But, given the inadequacy of the transport infrastructure even this was not enough. Army Group Centre never suffered hunger to compare with that which haunted the Soviet forces opposing them. But, during the winter of 1940-1941 with the transport system in disarray, many German soldiers did go without rations for days and sometimes weeks on end.[68]

Fundamentally, however, the Hunger Plan was never implemented in its full horror, because the German zone of occupation never included the two largest urban concentrations of the Soviet Union, Moscow and Leningrad. Though they were key targets in the planning of Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht never captured either city. This fulfilled the objectives of the Hunger Plan, but only indirectly. The frontline severed millions of Soviet citizens from their main sources of food, thereby freeing the Ukrainian harvest for German use. The Soviets were forced to feed their war effort from what little remained of Soviet agriculture. The result, behind the Soviet lines, was ever-present hunger and in many cases, outright starvation, a situation exemplified most dramatically by the besieged city of Leningrad.[69] The German and Finnish pincers closed around Leningrad in early October 1941. 2.5 million civilians and soldiers were trapped in a giant encirclement. Uncertain about the situation of the Soviet defenders, the German 18th Army, which had responsibility for the siege, began canvassing options for dealing with the population.[70] The Army’s staff proposed three possibilities: encircle the city and “starve the lot” (alles verhungert); evacuate the civilians westwards into the German zone of occupation; or, arrange for their evacuation behind Soviet lines. The memo presented no decision, but set out the advantages and disadvantages of each option with frank brutality. Starving the population of Leningrad to death would eliminate a large number of Communists and would relieve the Germans of the burden of feeding millions of people.

The only real disadvantage was propagandistic. The foreign media would have a field day. In addition, 18th Army feared the psychological impact on its soldiers of watching at close quarters as 4 million civilians starved to death. Evacuating the civilian population westward, into the German controlled rear areas, would deprive the Allies of their “horror story”. But, it would force the Germans to find food for 4 million extra people and there could be no illusions on that score: “A large part of the people coming out of Petersburg will starve in any case.”[71] This too would upset the troops. Finally, there was the possibility of arranging with the Soviet for them to accept the evacuees. This would have propaganda advantages, but the Wehrmacht was concerned that the exodus from Leningrad might degenerate into a public relations disaster. Tens of thousands of civilians would clearly die en route to the Soviet lines. The one option that was never even considered was the possibility of feeding the Soviet population from German stores. By December 1941 Leningrad was in the grips of a severe famine. Over the Christmas period and into January 1942 men, women and children died at the rate of nearly 4000 per day.[72] According to the best available evidence 653,000 Leningraders died in the first 11 months of the siege.[73] By 1944 hunger and hunger-related disease may have claimed as many as 700,000 civilian lives.

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