Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (32 page)

Throughout the first half of 1941 the concerns of Backe at the Ministry of Food, Conti at the Ministry of Health, the reports of the
Sicherheitsdienst
and nutritionists working for the Institute for the Physiology of Work all created a powerful sense that Germany was building towards a food crisis. But Hitler, Göring and Backe were all confident that the attack on the Soviet Union would solve the problem: ‘On the endless fields of the East surge waves of wheat, enough and more than enough to feed our people and the whole of Europe … This is our war aim.’
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The military and political leadership expected to defeat Russia within two or three months and Hitler, Göring and Backe thought that by September 1941 Germany would begin reaping the spoils of war and transports of Ukrainian grain would start to arrive in the Reich.

There were many within the regime who did not share their optimism. On the basis of Germany’s and Austria’s disappointing experience in the Ukraine in 1918 there were plenty of sceptics who thought that Russia might feed the occupying troops, but were doubtful whether the Soviet Union would provide the German Reich with useful resources, let alone food. Gebhardt von Walther, a German official in the Moscow embassy, wrote to Hasso von Etzdorf, representative of the Foreign Office in the Army High Command, warning that agricultural production would almost certainly decline. Etzdorf handed the report on to Chief of the Army General Staff, General Franz Halder.
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Halder was himself pessimistic, judging that the army could hardly be expected soon to reach the oilfields in the Caucasus, let alone exploit them. His
advisers thought, as it turned out correctly, that the Soviet Union would marshal its resources beyond the Urals, out of the Germans’ reach, while the overpopulated and impoverished Ukraine would prove a disappointment.
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The Finance Minister Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk and Foreign Office official Ernst Freiherr von Weizsäcker wrote letters to Göring and the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop respectively, warning that it was folly to expect to be able to import agricultural goods from an invaded Soviet Union.
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Hitler and Göring remained adamant that if sufficient ruthlessness was applied in the extermination of the Soviet urban population Russia’s food supply would prove bountiful.

They were to be disappointed. The Ukrainian harvest of 1941 was far lower than expected. The Hunger Plan proved difficult to implement and an administrative muddle developed in the east with the army in conflict with the occupying administration over the exploitation of Soviet food supplies. In the winter of 1941 the Wehrmacht became bogged down on the eastern front, unable to capture Moscow. The troops were hungry, as were the industrial workers in the Reich. Backe warned that there would have to be further ration cuts. Throughout its existence the National Socialist state can be described as being in a process of ‘cumulative radicalisation’.
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The National Socialist food system developed along just such a trajectory of progressive instability and extremism. Beginning in the winter of 1941 and continuing throughout the spring and summer of 1942 the regime was faced with a food crisis which pushed it towards ever more extreme acts of aggression and culminated in the massacre of the Soviet, Polish and European Jewish population.

Hitler’s role in this process is obscure. It is often argued that Hitler was as afraid of a repeat of the turnip winter as the rest of the German population, but when the
Sicherheitsdienst
warned him of the disastrous impact on morale of the ration cuts in the spring of 1942 he is said to have ‘insisted that the people had hidden reserves of strength which were unaffected by temporary hardships’.
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At this stage in the war he still believed in the German people. On the other hand, he was outraged on their behalf and seriously concerned that food shortages might impact on the war effort. He was determined to take draconian measures to solve the problem. It was in the spring of 1942 that Hitler
pronounced that other peoples should starve before the Germans. The response within his administration was to begin a campaign to exterminate ‘useless eaters’, primarily the Polish Jews. No paper evidence has ever been found which proves that Hitler ordered the extermination of the Jews to begin. However, Hitler always intended to rid Europe of its Jewish population, as he declared in a speech to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939.
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The food problem provided his administration with a rationale for beginning a process of systematic extermination.

LIVING OFF THE LAND

It was the Wehrmacht’s policy to live off the land in occupied territory but in June 1941 the unusual decision was taken to implement the policy from the very beginning of the invasion, while the fighting was still under way. Wehrmacht commanders were aware that supply lines to the eastern front would be stretched to breaking point and the few arterial roads running east would be of little use. Stalin had deliberately failed to upgrade the road system as a form of defence against attack and many of the main roads petered out into gravel tracks. The rail network offered a more viable solution for bringing in supplies of fuel and ammunition but this too had few routes running east–west and the Soviet rail gauge was (again deliberately) wider than the German. The Soviets were also expected to inflict heavy damage on the rail lines as they retreated.
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In order to relieve the inevitable congestion on the railways the decision was taken that virtually no food should be brought in from the Reich. Army Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner noted that ‘extensive exploitation of the land’ would have to be immediately implemented.
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Commanding officers were duly instructed to obtain as much of their food as possible from local sources. Early on in the campaign, the supply officer of the 286 security division reported that sufficient quantities of food to provide the men with the full ration had been ‘extracted from the civilian population without misgivings’. He did complain, however, that the local ‘flour, noodles and bread were of an unfamiliar consistency and bad quality’.
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‘We live well,’ another foot-soldier reassured his family in a letter written in July, ‘even though
we are sometimes cut off from the supply lines. We supply ourselves, sometimes chickens, sometimes geese, sometimes pork cutlets.’
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However, it quickly became evident to the German supply officers that the policy of living off the land was getting out of hand. It was never the quartermaster-general’s intention that army units should routinely plunder the villages. At the planning stage he emphasized that ‘the capture [of Soviet food supplies] must be tightly controlled. The country’s stocks are not to be utilized through indiscriminate pillaging. But rather through seizure and collection according to a well thought out plan.’
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But the German infantry went into action with the Barbarossa decree ringing in their ears, instructing the men to execute all Red Army political officers and energetically punish any signs of resistance on the part of the civilians.
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In effect it gave them carte blanche to participate in atrocities against the civilian population. In all areas of the eastern front the infantry shot ‘useless’ villagers out of hand, stole their possessions or drove them from their homes. As part of the frenzy of killing, troops sometimes indulged in the senseless slaughter of livestock.

The quartermaster-general’s office repeatedly stipulated that the collection of food should be planned and organized and that individual acts of plunder were forbidden, but the men demonstrated themselves incapable of understanding the distinction between plunder organized by the German authorities and plunder as part of the general destruction of Soviet society which the troops had been encouraged to undertake.
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Florian Geyer of an SS cavalry brigade described in a letter home how the soldiers simply needed to shoot in the air as they entered the villages and the inhabitants would appear with eggs. An artillery man gloated over his night patrol’s booty of seven sheep and numerous geese: ‘Yummy, yummy say I – like in the old days.’
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Only a few weeks into the campaign, at the end of July 1941, the 18th Panzer Division reported that the ‘last remaining food reserves and livestock’ had already been taken from the villagers in its area. In November the front-line troops were warned that ‘the livestock population in the occupied parts of Russia has already been so frightfully reduced, that if the unsparing taking of cattle from the land by the troops continues … it will result in starvation among the inhabitants and cause severe problems for the German army due to the approach of winter.’
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The Wehrmacht was never able to extract sufficient quantities of
food to cover all the food needs of the Army Groups North and Centre. Belorussia, which was the base for Army Group Centre, was expected to find lavish quantities of food to support between 1 and 1.5 million troops at the front, large numbers of troops in transit, and an occupying force in the rear of just under half a million.
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The soldiers at the front alone ate 120 tons of meat each day and their numerous draught horses chomped through vast quantities of fodder.
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These were not rich agricultural areas and the already backward farms now had to contend with a lack of tractors, fuel, draught animals, fertilizer and labour as forced labour requisitions for the Reich denuded the area of all able-bodied men and women. The only incentive to meet the excessively high demands placed on the collective farms was the fear of the dreadful punishments inflicted on those who failed to meet their quotas. The area was soon denuded of fodder crops and this was reflected in the slaughter weight of livestock, which fell by half. The Wehrmacht eventually moved on to eating the peasants’ draught animals, three-quarters of which ended up on the plates of the German soldiers, leaving the peasant women with no alternative other than to yoke themselves to the ploughs.
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Between September 1941 and August 1942 Belorussia provided Army Group Centre with 60 per cent of its bread grain, 90 per cent of its potatoes, 65 per cent of its meat and 10 per cent of its fat. But by January 1943 the strain on the agricultural system was beginning to show and its contribution to the army’s needs had fallen and accounted for only 17 per cent of its grain and 11 per cent of its meat.
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The deficits had to be made up by transports of food from the Ukraine or the Reich.

It was expected that Army Group South, based in the Ukraine, would not only be able to cover all its own food requirements but transport food to Army Groups North and Centre. As the Wehrmacht entered the Ukraine many of the ragged peasants welcomed the Germans as liberators, come to free them from the tyranny of Soviet rule, and took them into their homes, gave them lodging and treated the wounded. In the early 1930s Stalin had imposed collectivization on the Ukraine, abolishing the private ownership of land and forcing the peasants to work on state-run farms formed out of the consolidation of their private plots. Seven million Ukrainians had died in the famine which accompanied this process. Many took the opportunity of the German
invasion to indulge in an orgy of destruction, breaking apart combine harvesters and tractors in a Luddite frenzy of rage against enforced collectivization.
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The
Sicherheitsdienst
was astonished by the Ukrainians’ faith in the German occupiers and later a leading Ukrainian nationalist Andrij Melnyk complained that Germany had missed a valuable opportunity. He asserted that the Ukrainians had been ‘ready to bear even a heavy burden, if they had been certain that their right to life and national development … would have been respected’.
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Most peasants were hoping the Germans would dismantle the detested collectives and reintroduce private ownership of farmland.

Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, was in favour of appeasing the peasantry and dissolving the collectives. He envisaged the Ukraine as a satellite state where the majority of peasants could be won over to German rule and persuaded to co-operate in producing as much food as possible for the Reich. In this he was supported by Otto Bräutigam, deputy head of the Eastern Ministry’s Main Political Department and a specialist in Soviet agriculture. Early on in the occupation Bräutigam warned that the seizure of millions of tons of food would ‘cause anxiety and hatred of Germany among the people of the occupied territories … it cannot be good for German long-term interests’.
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But Rosenberg and his officials were in complete disagreement with Erich Koch, Reich Commissar of the Ukraine, with Göring and with Backe. This group wanted to keep the collective farms as the most effective means of quickly implementing colonial exploitation. The military were also in favour of maintaining the collectives as they simply wanted to get as much food as quickly as possible and state-run farms seemed the best way to achieve this in the short term.
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However, in the summer of 1941, as the Germans took possession of the country, agriculture descended into confusion. Peasants who went into the fields to bring in the harvest were first strafed by German planes as they attacked, and then by Soviet aircraft, trying to prevent the Germans profiting from Ukrainian bounty. In many parts of the Ukraine the harvest began far too late and the results were mixed. On the west bank of the Dnieper the peasants were hit by the loss of machinery, although when the Germans offered a generous payment of one in three sheaves, which was more than they were accustomed to under the Soviets, they worked hard to bring in the crop by hand.
The Germans arrived late in the countryside north of Kiev and the peasants had already hidden away their bumper crop in attics and cellars. On the eastern bank of the Dnieper the Soviet evacuation of crops, livestock and equipment meant that there was very little left to eat and as the Germans moved in the hungry peasants were already setting to work sowing a winter crop.
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By November the collective farms had only delivered a disappointing 1 million tons of grain, far less than the 5 million the German agricultural planners had expected, and a quarter of which had already been eaten by the Wehrmacht. A drive to bring in the rest of the crop before the winter set in was hampered by the fact that the troops supervising the harvest were called away to the front, allowing much of what was harvested to disappear into secret Ukrainian stores. A lack of sacks held up the transport and milling of the grain, and damp, mice-infested stores led to the damage of yet more of the precious harvest.
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