Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (37 page)

Göring’s policy of exporting hunger sealed the fate of the surviving Jews in the General Government. The page recording the discussion of the fate of the Jews in the occupied territories was removed from the minutes of the 6 August meeting. The only indication of what was said is Hinrich Lohse’s revealing response to a question from Göring: ‘I can respond to that as well. Only a small fraction of the Jews are still alive; many thousands are gone.’
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It seems certain that Göring reiterated that the Jews must be eradicated in order to free up as much food as possible.

In ten weeks during August and September 1942, 750,000 Jews were killed in Belzec and Treblinka. On 8 August the trains, which had been expected in May, finally arrived in Szczebrzeszyn, and the Jews were rounded up and loaded on to them. The Germans claimed they were
being taken to the Ukraine to work. Klukowski retorted that ‘no one believes that the Jews will be moved to the Ukraine. They will all be killed. After today’s events it is difficult to gain control of myself.’
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And on 10 August he noted sadly that the trains had indeed taken the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn to Belzec. ‘They have probably been killed by now.’
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The killing was on such a scale that the gas chambers at Treblinka broke down on 28 August. The waiting deportees were left to suffer and die in the cattle wagons on the trains. In September ten more gas chambers were built at Treblinka, six more in Sobibor. By the end of 1942 another 400,000 Jews had died in the gas chambers of Belzec and Treblinka. Only 297,914 Jews were still alive in the General Government, the number that the Food and Agriculture head office had calculated would be allowed to survive as workers.
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In the Ukraine there were still about 330,000 Jews living in the area between the rivers Pripjet in the north and Dnjestr in the south.
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Erich Koch returned to his capital, Rowno, after the 6 August meeting with Göring, and gathered his officials together. They were told that ‘the food situation in Germany is serious … The raising of the bread ration is a political necessity, in order to drive the war on to victory. The missing amounts of grain must be obtained from the Ukraine … The feeding of the [Ukrainian] civilian population is irrelevant in view of this situation.’
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The regional commissars were instructed to accelerate the Jewish extermination and given five weeks to complete the process. By the end of October it was over. At least a quarter of a million people had been shot.

Once areas were cleared of Jews, administrators claimed that the black market had died down. This was wishful thinking. In fact, the black market continued to thrive in Poland for the simple reason that the rations were ridiculously inadequate. As long as the black market continued to be essential for survival it would remain a feature of Polish life. The food which would have been eaten by the Jews if they had still been alive did not suddenly become available to the German administration. It stayed within the black market and was eaten instead by the starving Poles. However, it is unlikely that even the Poles were desperate enough to take up the consumption of the spare cattle rectums that would have become available after the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, the General Government was nevertheless able to
supply the Reich with the food that Göring had demanded. More than half the rye, oats and potatoes and more than a quarter of the barley eaten that year in Germany came from the General Government.
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This was achieved not by the murder of millions of Jews but through the efforts of the peasantry, who brought in a surprisingly good harvest that year. This at least meant that the urban population were spared any further cuts in their absurdly small rations.
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FOOD CONFISCATION IN THE UKRAINE

The acceleration of the extermination of the Jews was accompanied by the reinforcement of the blockade of Ukrainian cities. Determined to prevent the harvest from disappearing into Soviet stomachs the German administration banned peasants and the inhabitants from bringing food into Kiev and Kharkov. In Kiev people had been allowed to bring in from the countryside one chicken, ten eggs or a litre of milk, and ten kilograms of potatoes. If a person was found to be carrying more than this the police confiscated the surplus. In the summer of 1942 they began confiscating everything. No food was allowed into the city. Anatoli Kutsnetsov described how he and his grandfather walked for half a day to Pushcha-Vodytsia, where they bought corn, beans and flour. Only three minutes away from home, staggering along under the weight of their purchases, having lost the feeling in their feet and shoulders, they were stopped by the police. ‘My grandfather was ready to fall on his knees. The police paid no attention to him, but simply took our sacks and put them down by the post where there were several others lying already. They appeared to have set up a new checkpoint here … I dragged Grandpa along by the sleeve … he was quite beside himself.’
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L. Nartova, an unemployed teacher, recorded in her diary the comments of the people around her: ‘First they finished off the Yids, but they … exterminate us every day by the dozens, they’re destroying us in a slow death.’
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The
Sicherheitsdienst
recorded that people were commenting: ‘We’re supposed to die of starvation, to make place for the Germans.’
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By October 1943 Kiev’s population had fallen by 315,000, many of the dead having been killed by starvation.
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The situation in Kharkov was no better. By February 1943
approximately 70 per cent of the pre-war population had succumbed to hunger.
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People ‘moved like automatons, quietly appearing and disappearing as if waiting for something. They waited for a piece of horseflesh or a cup of blood from the city slaughter-houses. They sat near ovens for hours drinking hot boiled water.’
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In conjunction with the blockade of the cities, an intensive food confiscation campaign was begun in the villages. The German and Ukrainian police went from village to village searching houses, backyards, sheds, gardens and mills, confiscating every sack of grain they could find. Peasants were forced to thresh any grain they had in their stores. Those who simply could not deliver the food demanded of them were relieved of their cows or other livestock.
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The supplies of grain, meat and fat extracted from the Soviet Union increased from 3.5 million tons to 8.78 million tons. Although most of this was eaten on the spot by the Wehrmacht, large transports of food were sent to the Reich from the Ukraine in the autumn of 1942. By the end of the year the Food and Agriculture department in the Ukraine reported with satisfaction that they had collected the entire harvest: the peasants had nothing more to give.
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Fritz Sauckel, in charge of the recruitment of forced labour, was amazed that 10–20 million people had not died of hunger in the Ukraine over the winter of 1941–42, as the experts had predicted.
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But when in June 1941 Backe had drafted twelve commandments to guide future administrators in the east, the eleventh was that no ‘false sympathy’ was needed for the Russian, as he ‘has already endured poverty, hunger and frugality for centuries. His stomach is elastic.’
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This pronouncement had come back to haunt him. The Soviets’ ability to survive was remarkable (it was equally astonishing in the unoccupied Soviet Union). Many of those alive in the winter of 1941–42 had survived the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 and had acquired useful survival skills. For example, the Germans were sickened to discover that the civilians would dig up and eat dead horses. The
Sicherheitsdienst
reported that the Ukrainians ‘got food by begging from the army; in part they had also gathered well hidden and carefully looked after reserves, and on top of this, they seem used to putting up with famine in a manner which is quite unbelievable from the German perspective and can hold on to life by making do with the most inferior food substitutes’.
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In the cities people found ways around the police checks. Vasyl Iablonsky, a factory worker, would often slip on to the cargo trains to nearby towns where more food was available. Announcements were made in three languages warning that anyone caught without a permit would be shot, but, ‘You don’t scare people like us. We hopped on and off we went. What’s the difference how you’re done for, you gotta eat.’
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The rural population was saved by the inefficiency of the German civil administration. The German farmers who were put in place to administer the collective farms were too few and too under-qualified to be effective.
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On average they were only able to visit each of the farms under their supervision once a week. This gave the Ukrainian farmers a large amount of room for manoeuvre. It allowed the peasants to indulge in petty acts of resistance, such as working slowly and frequent absenteeism. They used the time they took off from working on the collective farm to grow their own food in their garden plots. One day Oskana Iatsenko decided to stay at home to weed her garden but was filled with terror when she realized that her village chief had come to look for her, accompanied by ‘the German’. ‘I looked and died of fear.
I thought I had died.
’ She hid among some plum trees and although they did not find her she thought: ‘
They will kill me, they will kill me
.’
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A peasant caught breaking the rules might be shot or hung on the spot, receive a brutal beating or be sent to a labour camp. The harshness of German punishments was balanced by the fact that the German administrators were far less likely to find out about mis-demeanours than the Soviets. The mutual surveillance, which worked as a powerful force for conformity under the Bolsheviks, evaporated in the face of the hostility felt towards the Germans.

The Ukrainian farmers used the freedom they gained in a variety of ways. Farm and brigade leaders would siphon off large amounts of produce on to the black market. Others used their new-found powers for good. Hryhorii Kariak Sova, the head of the land administration in the Novi Sanzhary district, persuaded the collective farm administrators to prepare fake records which undervalued the harvest. A second secret set of records then ensured that each peasant received more grain than they had received under the Soviet system.
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Indeed, when Sauckel complained that the Ukrainians were eating better than the normal consumer in Germany this may not have been an exaggeration.
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In
the less fertile areas such as Polissia the peasants teetered on the verge of famine, and in the areas where the partisans were active the German reprisals left the peasants without homes or fields. But in the fertile regions many peasants recall the period of German occupation as a time of plenty, despite the summer confiscation campaign. The peasants found it much easier to hide food from the Germans and in later years there were some who reminisced that they ‘ate well’ and ‘were not hungry’, in comparison to the years of hunger under Soviet rule.
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In a reversal of the famine caused by collectivization, it was mainly the towns and cities rather than the countryside that starved during the occupation.

The National Socialist leadership seem to have been incapable of grasping that a reign of terror is not sufficient to force people to surrender their means of existence. Hitler argued that the greater the chaos in the occupied areas the easier it would be to carry through the brutal Hunger Plan. In fact, in an under-developed agricultural area such as the occupied Soviet Union, erratic acts of violence accompanied by inadequate supervision simply resulted in the peasants retreating into self-sufficiency. They hoarded and hid away what supplies they could and directed their surplus out of the grasp of the occupiers and on to the black market. By late 1942 the civil administration was beginning to adopt a more placatory policy and there was talk of dissolving the collective farms. But it was far too late. In the spring of 1943 the Red Army began advancing towards the Ukraine, and when agricultural officials fell victim to the partisans delivery quotas remained unfulfilled. The Germans began to evacuate and took as much grain and agricultural equipment with them as they could. In a last act of spite Göring issued a secret order that all ‘bases of agricultural production are to be destroyed’.
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Backe’s bread-basket slipped from his grasp.

The Wehrmacht stationed in the occupied Soviet Union never succeeded in extracting all the food it needed from the east, and the occupied Soviet Union never fed the
entire
Wehrmacht, as was the stated aim of the Hunger Plan. Even in the Ukraine the Wehrmacht still needed the Reich to provide 33 per cent of its meat and 60 per cent of its fat requirements.
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Backe’s Hunger Plan was never properly thought through and the backward nature of agriculture in much of the occupied
Soviet Union, the disruption caused by the continual fighting, the loss of agricultural labour, machines, animals and fertilizer, the contradictions of the German agricultural policy which maintained the despised collectives and simply imposed draconian collection quotas without price incentives, the growth of the black market and the Soviet peasants’ ability to hide food stores from the German farm administrators, all combined to prevent the German occupiers from extracting the hoped-for quantities of food from the area. In order to gain as much food as Backe had hoped for, the agricultural administration would have had to inject capital, machinery and modern agricultural techniques into the farms. Conciliatory policies and fair prices for agricultural products would also have gone a long way towards creating an incentive for the peasantry to produce.