Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (33 page)

Within the Wehrmacht the army quartermaster was in internal competition with the army’s economy offices for a disappointingly small amount of food. The latter began to transport food back to Germany in order to build up reserves for the troops it was expecting to return to the Reich once victory had been achieved. The consequence of this was that once victory proved elusive much of the army’s reserve food supplies were in the wrong place.
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Meanwhile, the civil administration in the Ukraine was concentrating on fulfilling its food quotas for German civilians. The civil administration refused to give the Wehrmacht accurate figures for the food it had and what it expected to collect. Although it was obliged to give the Wehrmacht first refusal on all foodstuffs, it employed a tactic of offering the army quantities of grain which it knew the army would be unable to store. When the Wehrmacht refused the deliveries they were quickly sent back to Germany. In November and December the army was in the ridiculous position of watching five trains of livestock per day leave for the Reich while it did not have enough fresh meat to fill the ration for the troops at the front. It took the army weeks of protest finally to secure half of the storage space at the train stations which then enabled it to buy part of these supplies, and it was only in January that it was able to secure trains of cattle for the southern quartermaster.
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Even when the Wehrmacht had the foodstuffs in its possession, it
lacked the means to take the food to the front. The increasingly powerful resistance by the Red Army meant that more and more supply trains were needed to bring munitions up to the front. The shortage of rolling stock became acute as trains broke down or were destroyed. This reduced even further the means to transport food. The occupying powers were simply not sufficiently well supplied with manpower, rolling stock and equipment to fully exploit what food there was in the occupied territories. In the end single lorries kept up a daily trickle of supply.
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Throughout the summer Hitler, Göring, Backe and Quartermaster-General Wagner were disappointed by the amount of food the army was managing to extract from the occupied areas. The army had too few men behind the lines to stamp out the partisans or punish passive resistance on the part of the civilians, which hampered the efficiency of centralized collection efforts. The unauthorized collection of food on the part of the troops made matters worse. The Wehrmacht’s supply problems were becoming acute by September 1941 when Backe intensified the pressure by presenting Hitler with a new food plan which made it clear that the only way to avoid reducing rations within Germany was for the Wehrmacht to take more food out of the occupied Soviet areas. In the paper he explicitly refused to supply the army with grain and meat from German farms.
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The department of the quartermaster, food officers and the military commanders and commandants on the ground responded to the problem of the disappointing food deliveries by calling for the removal of Jewish mouths from the Soviet food chain. It is difficult to build up a precise picture of the plans for the annihilation of the Soviet Jews as the National Socialists took care not to leave incriminating written records. It is certain that ‘pre-invasion there were no orders given and no written plan to wipe out
all
the Soviet Jews’.
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It was assumed that the majority of the Soviet Jewish population would die from undernourishment along with the rest of the inhabitants of the western towns in which they were concentrated.
⁴⁴
As the Wehrmacht stormed across the Soviet Union it was followed by the
Einsatzgruppen
, who were ordered to murder all adult men identified as potential political leaders and resistance organizers. Some of their victims were Bolsheviks but most of them were Jewish. In the summer the campaign was stepped
up and the SS and the police began systematically to murder
all
Soviet Jews, including women and children. The quartermaster-general reported that he expected the annihilation of the Jews in central Lithuania, which began in August, to significantly alleviate the food supply problems for Army Group North. In August, 15,000 Jews were shot in Polesje (Prijetsümpfe). Task forces moved through northern Ukraine massacring the inhabitants of village after village. Particular targets were Jews in urban areas where the civilian population was starving, especially in the towns where food and shelter were a problem for troops moving up to the front.
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In Kharkov 15,000 Jews were murdered that winter, supposedly in order to alleviate the food situation. In Kiev the German authorities claimed that a systematic massacre of Jews on 29 and 30 September had alleviated the food and housing conditions for the rest of the civilian population.
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By the end of 1941 there were virtually no Jews left in eastern Belorussia, northern and eastern Ukraine or any other parts of the occupied Soviet Union. Over a period of six months a total of 800,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered.
⁴⁷

IMPLEMENTING THE HUNGER PLAN

In the summer of 1941 the shortcomings of Backe’s starvation policy became apparent. The designation ‘plan’ gives an entirely false impression that the implementation of the strategy was well thought through and organized. In fact, the bureaucrats on the ground were given no precise instructions as to how the Hunger Plan should be implemented.
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The attack on the Soviet Union was supposed to end in victory sometime towards the end of September. This would free up plenty of troops, whom Hitler, Göring and Backe then intended to deploy in enforcing the starvation of the towns.
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There was no contingency plan in place for the eventuality that a military campaign would be taking place while the inhabitants of the hinterland behind the front were supposed to be starving to death. For example, it was predicted in the document that livestock rearing would cease in Belorussia due to a lack of imported feed.
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This was all very well as long as there were no longer troops at the front line relying on local food supplies.

In the first few weeks of the military campaign the principles of the Hunger Plan were followed and Soviet civilians received no food handouts and no provision was made to introduce rationing in the towns and cities. However, the army relied on the urban areas as transport and support centres for the troops. Given the small numbers of security forces, the prospect of civilian unrest in these towns was most unwelcome. In the Ukraine the Wehrmacht used the towns not only as food supply bases for the soldiers at the front but also as centres for small-scale repair workshops and armaments factories, even though this was in direct conflict with an alternative plan to shut down all eastern industry and ship the labour back to the Reich. Instead of going to work in their factories the industrial workforce spent long days trawling the countryside for food. The armaments inspector for the Ukraine, Major-General Hans Leykauf, complained in frustration, ‘if we shoot dead all the Jews, allow the prisoners of war to die, dish out famine to the majority of the urban population, and in the coming year will lose a proportion of the rural population to hunger, the question remains unanswered:
Who will actually produce economic goods?
’
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As the realities sank in of the difficulty of controlling vast swathes of eastern territory filled with starving towns and cities, the military administration in the Ukraine changed its mind about the Hunger Plan. A local military administrator commented in October that ‘ever more frequently there has been mention of the civilian food supply … 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?’
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Orders were sent out by the field commanders for the peasants to bring food into the towns.
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It was proving impossible to close off entire towns from the countryside, and the black market was flourishing as civilians streamed into the rural areas to barter for food.
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Once the civil administration took over the government of the occupied areas from the military, the agricultural organization was put under the control of Backe and the hard line of the Hunger Plan was re-imposed. Exceptions were made for those sections of the population that were useful to the Germans. Railway workers, wagon drivers and
colonies of road-builders were fed on the lowest ration scale of the army.
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But the rest of the people were allocated no rations. The brutal policy swelled the ranks of the partisans and the rural population was augmented by townspeople fleeing the hunger. The military appealed for a change of policy. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch suggested a new feeding hierarchy which prioritized the German army, but which placed the indigenous civilian population second in line, before German civilians in the Reich. Lieutenant-General Erich Friderici supported such a scheme, pointing out, ‘This is not a humanitarian concern but a purely practical consideration in German interests.’
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Göring remained implacable, and doggedly repeated to military sceptics his mantra that the German administration must expect ‘the greatest death rate since the Thirty Years War’.
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Despite the Wehr-macht troops’ reputation for brutality there were evidently plenty who found this too much to stomach. Not only did the quartermaster-general have to issue repeated warnings to the troops that they must not plunder indiscriminately, he also had continually to issue commands that troops were not to feed Russian civilians from the mess. Evidently, in the contradictory chaos that was the occupied Soviet Union, both were frequent occurrences. The quartermaster-general noted that the ordinary soldiers were often ‘very kind’ to the civilians, even though they were repeatedly told, ‘every gram of bread or food that I give out of generosity to the people in the occupied territories, I take away from the German people, and my family’.
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Towards the end of the year, the Commander-in-Chief of the 9th Army made the bitter observation that ‘if the Russian attack had been a Blitzkrieg, then we would not have needed to take the civilian population into account. But an end [to the fighting] is not foreseeable … in these circumstances it is not sensible to follow a course which makes the civilian population 100 per cent into an enemy.’
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On 4 November 1941 the civil administration bowed to the reality that some townspeople were already receiving food and set a maximum ration scale for the towns in the occupied territories. However, the allocation of food simply modified the principles of the Hunger Plan and targeted more specific groups. It was stipulated that those who worked for the Germans could receive up to 1,200 calories a day, their dependants 850 calories, but the number of people receiving this ration was not
to amount to more than 20 per cent of the total population. Children under fourteen and Jews were allocated the impossibly tiny amount of 420 calories, which amounts to about 500 grams of potatoes. Jews were banned from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat or fruit, from dealing with farmers directly or from going to the food markets. This was a death sentence by hunger rather than by shooting. Over the winter of 1941–42 tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children died of starvation.
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They were joined by at least 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, deliberately left to starve in the holding camps, and millions of Soviets who lived in cities which were deprived of a food supply.

In the autumn of 1941, in the area controlled by Army Group Centre and in the General Government, about 9,000 Soviet prisoners of war were dying in the German camps each month.
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This equals the total number of British and American soldiers who died in German and Italian captivity during the entire five and a half years of the war.
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At a meeting with the Wehrmacht, Göring clarified the National Socialist attitude to the Soviets: ‘When it comes to the care of the Bolshevik prisoners, we are not, in contrast with other prisoners of war, bound by any international agreement to look after them. Their care can only be determined by their ability to work for us.’
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The conditions in which Soviet prisoners of war were held were appalling. The camps were nothing more than fields surrounded by fences. There were frequently no buildings, nor even tents. There was little water, the distribution of food was minimal; the Ministry of Food allocated them a ration of 1,561 calories a day but transport problems meant that supplies were erratic. While the prisoners still had some fat reserves and bodily resistance there were only one or two deaths a day in each camp. But as autumn approached and the weather conditions worsened they began to die in droves. A German officer described how anyone following a column of prisoners ‘can see that all the leaves and the discarded stalks of sugar beet have been picked up from the fields with wild greed and consumed … In the fields if a group of prisoners approaches, the women throw sugar beet on the path and they are gathered by the prisoners as quickly as possible. It is to be expected that the sight of these weakened prisoners whose hunger stares out of their eyes, damages the reputation of the Germans in the eyes of the
population.’
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But comments such as this were not welcome. Those uneasy about the policy were told, in the language of the Hunger Plan, that they ‘must realise that every unjustified or surplus amount of food that the prisoners receive, must be removed from the civilians at home or the German soldiers’.
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By September 1941 the prisoners were so desperate with hunger they began to beg the guards to shoot them.
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