Bloodlands (33 page)

Hitler’s henchman Göring in September 1941 behaved strikingly like Stalin’s henchman Kaganovich had in December 1932. Both men laid down instructions for a food policy that guaranteed death for millions of people in the months that followed. Both also treated the starvation their policies brought not as a human tragedy but as enemy agitation. Just as Kaganovich had done, Göring instructed his subordinates that hunger was a weapon of the enemy, meant to elicit sympathy where harshness was needed. Stalin and Kaganovich had placed the Ukrainian party between themselves and the Ukrainian population in 1932 and 1933, forcing Ukrainian communists to bear the responsibility for grain collection, and to take the blame if targets were not met. Hitler and Göring placed the Wehrmacht between themselves and the hungry Soviet population in 1941 and 1942. During the summer of 1941, some German soldiers had shared their rations with hungry Soviet civilians. A few German officers had tried to ensure that Soviet prisoners of war were fed. In autumn this would have to cease. If German soldiers wanted to eat, they were told, they would have to starve the surrounding population. They should imagine that any food that entered the mouth of a Soviet citizen was taken from the mouth of a German child.
³⁰

German commanders would have to continue the war, which meant feeding soldiers, which meant starving others. This was the political logic, and the moral trap. For the soldiers and the lower-level officers, there was no escape but insubordination or surrender to the enemy, prospects as unthinkable for German troops in 1941 as they had been for Ukrainian communists in 1932.
³¹

 

In September 1941, the three Wehrmacht Army Groups, North, Center, and South, greeted the new food policy from rather different positions. Army Group
North, tasked to conquer the Baltic States and northwestern Russia, had laid siege to Leningrad in September. Army Group Center raced through Belarus in August. After a long pause, in which some of its forces assisted Army Group South in the battle for Kiev, it advanced again toward Moscow in early October. Army Group South meanwhile made its way through Ukraine toward the Caucasus, much more slowly than anticipated. Platoons of German soldiers resembled the communist brigades of a decade before, taking as much food as they could as quickly as possible.

Army Group South starved Kharkiv and Kiev, the two cities that had served as capitals of Soviet Ukraine. Kiev was taken on 19 September 1941, much later than planned, and after much debate about what to do with the city. Consistent with Generalplan Ost, Hitler wanted the city to be demolished. The commanders on site, however, needed the bridge over the river Dnipro to continue their advance east. So in the end German soldiers stormed the city. On 30 September the occupiers banned the supply of food to Kiev. The logic was that the food in the countryside was to remain there, to be collected by the army and then later by a German civilian occupation authority. Yet the peasants around Kiev found their way into the city, and even ran markets. The Germans were unable to seal the city as the Soviets had done in 1933.
³²

The Wehrmacht was not implementing the original Hunger Plan but rather starving where it seemed useful to do so. The Wehrmacht never intended to starve the entire population of Kiev, only to ensure that its own needs were met. Yet this was nevertheless a policy of indifference to human life as such, and it killed perhaps as many as fifty thousand people. As one Kievan recorded in December 1941, the Germans were celebrating Christmas, but the locals “all move like shadows, there is total famine.” In Kharkiv a similar policy killed perhaps twenty thousand people. Among them were 273 children in the city orphanage in 1942. It was near Kharkiv that starving peasant children in 1933 had eaten each other alive in a makeshift orphanage. Now city children, albeit in far smaller numbers, suffered the same kind of horrible death.
³³

 

Hitler’s plans for Leningrad, the old capital of imperial Russia, exceeded even Stalin’s darkest fears. Leningrad lay on the Baltic Sea, closer to the Finnish capital Helsinki and the Estonian capital Tallinn than to Moscow. During the Great Terror, Stalin had made sure that Finns were targeted for one of the deadliest of the national actions, believing that Finland might one day lay claim to Leningrad. In November 1939 Stalin had ensured for himself the enmity of the Finns by attacking Finland, which was within his area of influence according to the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In this Winter War, the Finns inflicted heavy losses and damaged the reputation of the Red Army. They finally had to concede about a tenth of their territory in March 1940, giving Stalin a buffer zone around Leningrad. So in June 1941 Hitler had a Finnish ally, since the Finns naturally wanted to retake land and take revenge in what they would
call the “Continuation War.” But Hitler did not want to take Leningrad and give it to the Finns. He wanted to remove it from the face of the earth. Hitler wanted the population of Leningrad exterminated, the city razed to the ground, and then its territory handed over to the Finns.
³⁴

In September 1941, the Finnish Army cut off Leningrad from the north, as the Army Group North began a campaign of siege and bombardment of the city from the south. Though German commanders had not all known about Hitler’s most radical plans for Soviet cities, they agreed that Leningrad had to be starved. Eduard Wagner, the quartermaster general of the German army, wrote to his wife that the inhabitants of Leningrad, all 3.5 million of them, would have to be left to their fate. They were simply too much for the army’s “provision packet,” and “sentimentality would be out of place.” Mines were laid around the city to prevent escapes. The surrender of the city was not forthcoming, but had it come it would not have been accepted. The German goal was to starve Leningrad out of existence. At the very beginning of the siege of Leningrad, on 8 September 1941, German shells destroyed the city’s food warehouses and oil tanks. In October 1941 perhaps 2,500 people died of starvation and associated diseases. In November the number reached 5,500; in December, 50,000. By the end of the siege in 1944, about one million people had lost their lives.
³⁵

Leningrad was not starved completely because local Soviet authority functioned within the city and distributed what bread there was, and because the Soviet leadership took risks to provision the population. Once the ice froze over Lake Ladoga, there was an escape and supply route. That winter the temperature would fall to forty below, and the city would face the cold without food stockpiles, heat, or running water. Yet Soviet power within the city did not collapse. The NKVD continued to arrest, interrogate, and imprison. Prisoners were also dispatched across Lake Ladoga; Leningraders were among the 2.5 million or so people whom the NKVD transported to the Gulag during the war. The police and fire departments performed their duties. Dmitrii Shostakovich was a volunteer for a fire brigade when he wrote the third movement of his Seventh Symphony. Libraries remained open, books were read, doctoral dissertations written and defended.
³⁶

Within the great city Russians (and others) faced the same dilemmas that Ukrainians and Kazakhs (and others) had faced ten years before, during the collectivization famines. Wanda Zvierieva, a girl in Leningrad during the siege,
later remembered her mother with great love and admiration. She “was a beautiful woman. I would compare her face to the Mona Lisa.” Her father was a physicist with artistic inclinations who would carve wooden sculptures of Greek goddesses with his pocketknife. Late in 1941, as the family was starving, her father went to his office, in the hope of finding a ration card that would allow the family to procure food. He stayed away for several days. One night Wanda awakened to see her mother standing over her with a sickle. She struggled with and overcame her mother, or “the shadow that was left of her.” She gave her mother’s actions the charitable interpretation: that her mother wished to spare her the suffering of starvation by killing her quickly. Her father returned with food the following day, but it was too late for her mother, who died a few hours later. The family sewed her in blankets and left her in the kitchen until the ground was soft enough to bury her. It was so cold in the apartment that her body did not decompose. That spring Wanda’s father died of pneumonia.
³⁷

In the Leningrad of the day, such stories could be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times. Vera Kostrovitskaia was one of many Leningrad intellectuals who kept diaries to record the horrors. Of Polish origin, she had lost her husband a few years earlier in the Great Terror. Now she watched as her Russian neighbors starved. In April 1942 she recorded the fate of a stranger she saw every day: “With his back to the post, a man sits on the snow, tall, wrapped in rags, over his shoulders a knapsack. He is all huddled up against the post. Apparently he was on his way to the Finland Station, got tired, and sat down. For two weeks while I was going back and forth to the hospital, he ‘sat’:

The best-recalled Leningrad diary of a girl is that of eleven-year-old Tania Savicheva, which reads in its entirety as follows:

Tania Savicheva died in 1944.

 

The greater the control the Wehrmacht exercised over a population, the more likely that population was to starve. The one place where the Wehrmacht controlled the population completely, the prisoner-of-war camps, was the site of death on an unprecedented scale. It was in these camps where something very much like the original Hunger Plan was implemented.

Never in modern warfare had so many prisoners been taken so quickly. In one engagement, the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Center took 348,000 prisoners near Smolensk; in another, Army Group South took 665,000 near Kiev. In those two September victories alone, more than a million men (and some women) were taken prisoner. By the end of 1941, the Germans had taken about three million Soviet soldiers prisoner. This was no surprise to the Germans. The three German Army Groups were expected to move even faster than they did, and thus even more prisoners could have been expected. Simulations had predicted what would happen. Yet the Germans did not prepare for prisoners of war, at least not in the conventional sense. In the customary law of war, prisoners of war are given food, shelter, and medical attention, if only to ensure that the enemy does the same.
⁴⁰

Hitler wished to reverse the traditional logic. By treating Soviet soldiers horribly, he wished to ensure that German soldiers would fear the same from the Soviets, and so fight desperately to prevent themselves from falling into the hands of the enemy. It seems that he could not bear the idea of soldiers of the master race surrendering to the subhumans of the Red Army. Stalin took much the same view: that Red Army soldiers should not allow themselves to be taken alive. He could not counsel the possibility that Soviet soldiers would retreat and surrender. They were supposed to advance and kill and die. Stalin announced in August 1941 that Soviet prisoners of war would be treated as deserters, and their families arrested. When Stalin’s son was taken prisoner by
the Germans, he had his own daughter-in-law arrested. This tyranny of the offensive in Soviet planning caused Soviet soldiers to be captured. Soviet commanders were fearful of ordering withdrawals, lest they be personally blamed (purged, and executed). Thus their soldiers held positions for too long, and were encircled and taken prisoner. The policies of Hitler and Stalin conspired to turn Soviet soldiers into prisoners of war and then prisoners of war into non-people.
⁴¹

Once they had surrendered, Soviet prisoners were shocked by the savagery of their German captors. Captured Red Army soldiers were marched in long columns, beaten horribly along the way, from the field of battle to the camps. The soldiers captured at Kiev, for example, marched over four hundred kilometers in the open air. As one of them remembered, if an exhausted prisoner sat down by the side of the road, a German escort “would approach on his horse and lash with his whip. The person would continue to sit, with his head down. Then the escort would take a carbine from the saddle or a pistol from the holster.” Prisoners who were wounded, sick, or tired were shot on the spot, their bodies left for Soviet citizens to find and clean and bury.
⁴²

When the Wehrmacht transported Soviet prisoners by train, it used open freight cars, with no protection from the weather. When the trains reached their destinations, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of frozen corpses would tumble from the opened doors. Death rates during transport were as high as seventy percent. Perhaps two hundred thousand prisoners died in these death marches and these death transports. All of the prisoners who arrived in the eighty or so prisoner-of-war camps established in the occupied Soviet Union were tired and hungry, and many were wounded or ill.
⁴³