The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  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.96 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’.97 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)’.98

  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.99 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.100

  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.’101 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.102 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.103 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).104 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.105 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’.106

  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 lat
er 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.108 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’.109 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.110

  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.111 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’.112 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.113

  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.114 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.’115 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’.116 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.’117 He was horrified by the way in which people who had been relatively prosperous farmers had become ‘beggars in one hour’.118

  In the autumn of 1940 there were 530,000 ethnic Germans living in miserable conditions in SS-run transit camps.119 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.120 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.121 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.122 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.123 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’.124 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.125 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.’126

  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.127 Klukowski observed that many of the new Vo
lksdeutschen 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.128 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’.129 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.130

  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.131 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.132 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.