Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (7 page)

The desire for an agrarian empire can make National Socialism seem archaic and backward looking. Britain had long since outgrown the strategy of solving the problem of agricultural decline at home by promoting emigration overseas. But if it was impossible to emulate the United States, which was large and resource-rich enough to achieve autarky within the confines of its own borders, the only other contemporary model for achieving great power status was Great Britain’s empire. And there were modern precedents for ‘demographic colonization’ within an empire. In the 1880s Czarist Russia had begun settling Russian peasantry in their newly acquired territories of Kazakh and Turkestan as a means of ensuring these territories were Russified and thus tied in to the empire.
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Likewise, Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia in 1935 was born out of his desire to create a new Roman empire with Italy once more dominating the Mediterranean region. Agricultural experts were sent to Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia to assess whether the colonies could be transformed into a breadbasket for Italy. The cultivation of bananas, peanuts and sesame seeds were all considered. Bizarrely, given the fact that coffee plants were indigenous to the area, planners even looked into the viability of growing hibiscus flowers for a herbal tea which was an autarkic substitute for coffee. The Ethiopian campaign was ill-judged. It proved overly expensive, resulted in economic sanctions and caused food shortages throughout Italy. The Italian settlers were unsuccessful in establishing Italian-style agriculture and had to be sent food supplies from the home country.
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In 1938 Italy again sought to invigorate food production in its empire and sent 20,000 peasants to Libya (which had been an Italian colony since 1912). They were settled on specially created farms and their role was to rebuild Libya as the erstwhile ‘granary of Imperial Rome’, and strengthen the Italian campaign for food autarky. They were also regarded as a reserve garrison of farmer-soldiers.
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At the same time the Japanese were implementing the Plan for the Settlement of One Million Households in Manchuria. Poor tenant farmers were encouraged to settle in northern China as a way of
establishing Japanese culture on the Chinese mainland and to act as a reserve for the army should the Soviets invade. Thus, the German plan to acquire
Lebensraum
was not so much an attempt to set the clock back as a contemporary solution to the problems caused by industrialization. The Italians, Germans and Japanese all sought to remove from society those potentially destabilizing groups which had lost out in the process of modernization and, by using them to create utopian settler communities, to transform them into a positive by-product of modernity.
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HERBERT BACKE AND THE HUNGER PLAN

One of the most chilling aspects of Nazi Germany is the way in which various men, all with their own iniquitous plans, were able to exploit Hitler’s seizure of power and his conveniently hazy vision of the future to realize their own designs. Herbert Backe was one of these men. For most National Socialists an eastern agrarian empire was a vision to be realized once the war was won, but Backe saw the agricultural riches of the east not as the eventual spoils of war but as the means to win the conflict.

In his position as representative for agriculture for the Four Year Plan, Backe managed, in the winter of 1940, to persuade first Hermann Göring, and then Hitler, that in order to win the war Germany would have to be self-sufficient, but in order to be self-sufficient it
must
first conquer the Soviet Union. While Darré found himself increasingly shut off from the Führer, Backe became increasingly influential and his solution to the problem of the wartime food supply contributed directly to Hitler’s decision to go to war with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.

Until recently Backe’s role in the National Socialist path to war and the regime’s progressive radicalization has been overlooked. Many historians have regarded him as an innocuous agronomist whose involvement in National Socialism was confined to the apparently harmless sphere of food.
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Neither Backe nor the National Socialist attitude towards food was harmless. In order to secure the German food supply for the duration of the war Backe devised the Hunger Plan, which proposed the mass murder of the Slavic inhabitants of the eastern
Soviet Union. Later his increasing worries over food shortages in the Reich fuelled the discussions which surrounded the decision to speed up the Holocaust and remove ‘useless’ Jewish eaters from Poland.

Backe’s hatred of the Russian people stemmed from his traumatic experiences during the First World War. Born in 1896 to German parents in Georgia, then part of the Russian empire, he was interned as an enemy alien in the Urals in 1914. When he was eventually repatriated to Germany after the war he was appalled by the bitterness of the defeated Germans and shaken by his social decline into poverty. He supported his sick mother and three younger sisters by taking menial labouring jobs, eventually working as a farm agent. He later wrote to his wife, ‘I realise that my tension and nervousness are a result of my development being distorted – hindered and destroyed: my hatred of the authors of this destruction [Russians] came about as a result of that.’
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Backe joined the Storm Troopers (
Sturmabteilung
or SA) in the early 1920s while working on an agrarian diploma at the University of Göttingen. He abandoned political agitation when he went to Hanover to work on a doctorate under Professor Erich Obst, an advocate of agrarian autarky. In his thesis Backe expounded the racial theories that he had developed in discussion with fellow SA members in Göttingen. He set out the argument that when Bolshevik rule disintegrated in Russia (as it surely must) ‘The People without Space’ (i.e. the Germans) would step into the vacuum to farm the east. His examiners failed the thesis on the grounds that it was a work of sociology, in other words of politics, and Backe set off into deserved obscurity to take up the tenancy of a dilapidated farm near the Harz mountains.
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However, Darré’s attention had been caught by some articles that Backe had published, and he repeatedly invited Backe to join him in the agrarian wing of the NSDAP in Munich. It was only after Backe had seen Hitler speak in 1931 that he finally acceded to the invitation and, having joined the NSDAP, was integrated into the National Socialist agricultural administration. In the autumn of 1936 Backe was recommended to Göring, who was looking for an agricultural representative on the Council of the Four Year Plan.
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Göring’s office of the Four Year Plan was intended to rejuvenate German agriculture and industry and undertake a massive rearmament programme. Backe’s position in charge of agriculture in the Four Year Plan made him effectively a second Minister of Food and Agriculture
in competition with Darré. He enthusiastically undertook the task of liberating Germany from what he termed the ‘Jewish’ (i.e. American) liberal world economy by striving towards the achievement of ‘nutritional freedom’.
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If Hitler was bored by Darré’s plans for fodder silos, Göring could barely disguise his impatience when asked to listen to Backe’s plans to increase food self-sufficiency through land reclamation, fish farms, mechanization and artificial fertilizer. But while Darré fell from favour, Backe became increasingly influential. Alongside the internal agricultural reforms he developed a proposal which promised to resolve the impasse which the war and the German food situation had reached by the winter of 1940.
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The National Socialists began the Second World War well aware that a short war was essential for success and that only during a short war could adequate civilian rations be guaranteed.
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Initially, things went according to plan and Germany achieved a string of rapid successes. First, Hitler made sure that the Soviet Union would not enter the war if he attacked Poland. The 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and parts of Romania. In return Stalin agreed to provide Germany with raw materials, oil and food, reasoning that if the Soviet Union generously provided Germany with all that it needed there would be no reason for it to attack.
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On 1 September 1939 Hitler took Europe to war by invading Poland, which was defeated within a matter of weeks. Riding high on this rapid success, by June 1940 Germany had conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. But then the war stalled over Britain. The British government had not been willing (as Hitler had hoped) to negotiate for peace, and neither the Battle of Britain nor the Blitz had brought the British to their knees. Without air supremacy plans to invade had to be shelved and Germany now faced a protracted war of attrition with Britain, supported by the immense resources of the United States.
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Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union. Victory in the east was always his ultimate goal and he argued that Germany should make speed to defeat the Russians before the United States was officially drawn into the conflict. He also hoped that the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union would leave the British feeling even more isolated and perhaps persuade them to capitulate.
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Backe was aware that the limits of the German food supply system might hamper the execution of this plan. By the end of 1940 Germany was in possession of a number of occupied economies which had not prepared their agricultural sectors for war. All were dependent on food imports to a greater or lesser extent, ranging from Norway’s reliance on imports for 57 per cent of its food, to France, where imports made up 17 per cent of the total food consumption.
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In addition, the agricultural sectors of all of these countries were extremely dependent on fodder and fertilizer imports which would now be cut by the British blockade.
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On 20 August 1940, Churchill announced a total blockade against Germany, its allies and all occupied countries. Every ship wishing to take cargo through the blockade had to apply for a ‘navicert’ which showed that its load was not contraband. Crucially, the British extended the definition of contraband to cover food if it could be used by the enemy’s armed forces or government. In practice this cut continental Europe off from the rest of the world’s food supplies. Only twelve ships broke the blockade in the year 1941–42.
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Even if the occupied territories comprehensively restructured their agricultural sectors it was clear that they, like Germany, would suffer from fodder, meat and fat shortages and a consequent decline in food production. Germany had no intention of exporting food to these countries, and even the food they were receiving from the Soviet Union under the terms of the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression was insufficient to cover the deficit. In a series of reports written in May 1940 Backe warned that in the light of the Allied blockade, ‘if the war lasts more than two years it is lost’.
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By December 1940 anxiety about Germany’s food situation was widespread among the National Socialist leadership. Backe did nothing to assuage these concerns. Now was his opportunity to press for the solution to Germany’s problems which he had been incubating since he first wrote his thesis in 1926. During the Christmas holidays of 1940 he spent his time redrafting, for the third time, the annual report of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture on the food situation in Germany, the seriousness of which it was his purpose to emphasize to the leadership. In January he had the opportunity to put forward his concerns, and his ideas for a solution, not only to his direct boss, Göring, but also to Hitler, whom he met some time that month.
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One of the problems with piecing together the history of the National Socialist regime is that the leadership was wary of leaving behind incriminating evidence. Backe warned, ‘clearly in case the enemy should hear of it, it is better not to cite the [Hunger] plan.’
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Therefore records of what was said during meetings with Hitler were not always kept, or were later destroyed. How decisions were reached, and who influenced policy, has to be painstakingly pieced together from information about who attended specific meetings and knowledge of their political agenda at the time. Diary entries and other scattered references to such meetings often offer clues. A second complicating factor was that Hitler himself preferred to give orders orally and was frequently vague, leaving his subordinates to guess his intentions and to strive to fulfil his wishes according to their own interpretation of what exactly it was that he wanted them to do.

We do know that by February 1941 what would become known as the Hunger Plan had been formulated by Backe and had received both Göring’s and Hitler’s approval. Alfred Rosenberg, future Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, was informed about it in a meeting with Hitler on 2 April 1941. He noted in his diary that although he would never forget what the Führer had told him he would not write it down.
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The plan does not seem to have been formulated on paper until 2 May, when it was summarized in a blandly entitled ‘memorandum on the result of today’s discussion with the state secretaries regarding Barbarossa’
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which was later found among the papers of General Georg Thomas, head of the War Economy and Armaments Office. Only three copies of the plan now exist, one of which, known as the ‘Yellow Folder’, is a much shortened version which was circulated to agricultural functionaries. The original document came out of Backe’s office and is covered in his handwriting.
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