Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (33 page)

The German occupiers never had the ability to starve when and where they chose. For the Hunger Plan to be implemented, German forces would have had to secure every collective farm, observe the harvest everywhere, and make sure that no food was hidden or went unrecorded. The Wehrmacht was able to maintain and control the collective farms, as were the SS and local assistants, but never so effectively as the Soviets had done. Germans did not know the local people, the local harvest, or the local hiding places. They could apply terror, but less systematically than the Soviets had done; they lacked the party and the fear and faith that it could arouse. They lacked the personnel to seal off cities from the countryside. And as the war continued longer than planned, German officers worried that organized starvation would create a resistance movement behind the lines.
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Operation Barbarossa was supposed to be quick and decisive, bringing a “lightning victory” within three months at the latest. Yet while the Red Army fell back, it did not collapse. Two weeks into the fighting, the Germans had taken all of what had been Lithuania, Latvia, and eastern Poland, as well as most of Soviet Belarus and some of Soviet Ukraine. Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German army, confided to his diary on 3 July 1941 that he believed that the war had been won. By the end of August, the Germans had added Estonia, a bit more of Soviet Ukraine, and the rest of Soviet Belarus. Yet the pace was all wrong, and the fundamental objectives were not achieved. The Soviet leadership remained in Moscow. As one German corps commander noted pithily on 5 September 1941: “no victorious Blitzkrieg, no destruction of the Russian army, no disintegration of the Soviet Union.”
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Germany starved Soviet citizens anyway, less from political dominion than political desperation. Though the Hunger Plan was based upon false political assumptions, it still provided the moral premises for the war in the East. In autumn 1941, the Germans starved not to remake a conquered Soviet Union but to continue their war without imposing any costs on their own civilian population. In September Göring had to take stock of the new situation, so disastrously different from Nazi expectations. Dreams of a shattered Soviet Union yielding its riches to triumphant Germans had to be abandoned. The classic dilemma of political economy, guns or butter, was supposed to have been resolved in a miraculous way: guns would make butter. But now, three months into the war, the men carrying the guns very much needed the butter. As the war continued beyond the planned twelve weeks, German soldiers were competing with German civilians for limited food supplies. The invasion itself had halted the supply of grain from the Soviet Union. Now three million German soldiers simply had to be fed, without reducing food rations within Germany itself.
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The Germans lacked contingency plans for failure. The troops had a sense that something was wrong; after all, no one had given them any winter coats, and their night watches were getting cold. But how could the German population be told that the invasion had failed, when the Wehrmacht still seemed to be pushing forward and Hitler still had moments of euphoria? But if the Nazi leadership could not admit that the war was going badly, then German civilians would have to be spared any negative consequences of the invasion. Grumbling of stomachs might lead to the grumbling of citizens. Germans could not be allowed to make a sacrifice for the troops on the front, at least not too much, and not too soon. A change in domestic food policy might allow them to see the truth: that the war, at least as their leaders had conceived of it, was already lost. Backe, Göring’s food specialist, was sure about what had to be done: the Soviets would have to be deprived of food so that Germans could eat their fill.
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It was Göring’s task to spare the German economy while supplying the German war machine. His original scheme to starve the Soviet Union after a clear victory now gave way to an improvisation: German soldiers should take whatever food they needed as they continued to fight a war that was already supposed to be over. On 16 September 1941, just as the timeline for the original “lightning victory” was exceeded, Göring ordered German troops to live “off the land.” A local commanding general was more specific: Germans must feed themselves “as in the colonial wars.” Food from the Soviet Union was to be allocated first to German soldiers, then to Germans in Germany, then to Soviet citizens, and then to Soviet prisoners of war. As the Wehrmacht fought on, in the shorter days and longer nights, as solid roads gave way to the mud and muck of autumn rains, its soldiers had to fend for themselves. Göring’s order allowed their misconceived war to continue, at the price of the starvation of millions of Soviet citizens, and of course the deaths of millions of German and Soviet and other soldiers.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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