Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State (27 page)

Unlike in World War I, the Food Ministry instituted a complex rationing system in the first phase of German mobilization. In late August 1939, a few days before German soldiers marched into Poland, food ration cards were already being distributed. Commenting overoptimisti-cally on what she saw as Germany’s poor prospects for military success, Simone de Beauvoir wrote on August 28, 1939: “No one begins a war by handing out cards for bread rations.”
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But de Beauvoir was mistaken. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, it had a cleverly devised and well-planned food distribution system in place that would continue functioning until the final days of the conflict.

As early as 1939, Backe’s subordinates and advisers decided to reduce the relatively cost-intensive production of meat and eggs to the minimum that they thought the populace would tolerate. Because roughly five kilograms of grain were required to produce one kilogram of meat, the move allowed Germany to exploit its agricultural resources better. Initially, generous allowances for other kinds of food were combined with price controls, and draconian punishments were meted out to people caught dealing on the black market. The public viewed the rationing system as fair, especially since it gave preference to selected categories of recipients such as physical laborers, pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers, children, and the ill. The rationing procedure also took account of regional differences in eating habits.

Even with food rationing and wartime changes in people’s eating habits, shortfalls occurred. But as it had not done in World War I, the German leadership transferred the burdens of those shortages to people in occupied countries, to disadvantaged minorities, and to Soviet prisoners. The result was famine in Poland, Greece, and especially the Soviet Union; in psychiatric hospitals, ghettos, concentration camps, and POW camps, people starved to death. Summing up the government’s attitude, Göring proclaimed: “If someone has to go hungry, let it be someone other than a German.”
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This sentiment was reflected in a document laying out the central guidelines for German rule in the Soviet Union: “Under no circumstances should the status quo be maintained; rather, it must be consciously departed from by incorporating Russia’s food economy into the European framework. This will necessarily lead to the extinction of both the [native agriculture] industry and large segments of the population.” Another passage reads: “Tens of millions of people in these areas will become superfluous and either die or have to to Siberia.” The plan was to have them march there on foot.
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The same cruelty also informed the official policy toward Soviet prisoners of war. As late as November 13, 1941, Quartermaster General Ed-uard Wagner proclaimed that “prisoners who don’t work in the camps will be left to starve.” In December, the political leadership changed course. From then on, camp commanders were to try “to preserve as many POWs as possible and make them capable of working.” The reason for the shift was a German military defeat outside Moscow, which forced German military and economic strategists to plan for a longer, more uncertain war. POWs were now to be employed as forced laborers. Yet that change in policy took some time to take effect and came too late for the many captured Soviets who had already been weakened by malnutrition.

The new directive did not affect the general policy of allowing Ukraine’s urban population to go hungry. Wagner prohibited soldiers from giving away “any provisions allocated for troop maintenance to the populace of the occupied territories.” To prevent food shortages back in Germany, the 3-million-strong army was to feed itself “from the soil.” The officers in charge of troop maintenance were instructed to be ruthless in keeping supply requisitions to a minimum. The urgency was compounded when the Reich was forced to order a temporary stoppage of food deliveries from the agrarian south of the Soviet Union to northern regions and urban centers. Along the route taken by the German invaders, whole stretches of land were left stripped of anything edible. In December 1942, officials within the German agrarian administration in southern Russia spoke of “an 800-to-1,000-kilometer-wide swath” in which all available foodstuffs were to be confiscated and eaten.
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The German invader saw little reason to provide for civilians. “For economic reasons,” the Nazi leadership quickly decided, “taking large cities is undesirable. It’s more advantageous to place them under siege.” On September 20, 1941, the Wehrmacht’s food and nutrition expert, Professor Wilhelm Ziegelmayer, noted in his diary: “In the future we will be burdened by demands that Leningrad be allowed to capitulate. It will have to be destroyed in accordance with a scientifically based method.” On November 27, Hamburg mayor Carl Vincent Krogmann jotted down an account one of his administrators had given of an official trip to the front near Leningrad: “It is assumed that the majority of the people in Leningrad, around 5.5 million, will starve to death.” The Nazi minister for the occupied eastern territories spoke of “a bitter necessity that is beyond all sentiment.”
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Around the same time Göring foresaw “the greatest incidence of death since the Thirty Years War.”

Eduard Wagner announced that “Leningrad, in particular, will have to starve to death.” Two months earlier, in a letter to his wife, he had written: “For the time being we’re letting them stew in St. Petersburg.” One couldn’t, Wagner wrote, take on the care of several million people by burdening “the wallet that pays for our subsistence. Sentimentality has no place here.”
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At least a million people in Leningrad starved to death during the two-and-a-half-year German siege of the city.

The commander in charge of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv received instructions that “the German Wehrmacht has no interest in maintainig large ciarkiv’s urban population.” Kharkiv was occupied by the Sixth Army under Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau. On the question of how “troops in the East should behave,” he concluded: “Maintaining local residents is like giving away cigarettes and bread—an example of misdirected compassion.” At about the same time, reports came in from the occupied Crimean town of Kerch that “the pace of the liquidation of Jews has been accelerated because of the precarious food situation in the city.”
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Meanwhile, in May 1942, the Army High Command issued an order aimed at ensuring that cupboards in Germany were full. It allowed soldiers on the Eastern Front to send back home, in addition to the usual small packages, one of up to twenty kilograms. The official justification for the directive was the need “to free troops from unnecessary baggage.” Nonetheless, the High Command stressed the importance “of preventing customs officials from checking the contents of these packages at recipients’ homes.”
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If the typical “laundry package” were to be examined, Hamburg’s chief financial officer wrote, officials would discover that the contents consisted “exclusively of smoked pork.”
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In December 1942, Göring granted the Wehrmacht permission to organize an “additional package operation for all frontline soldiers on home leave” from Africa, from submarines, and from the Eastern Front.
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In Ukraine, food worth 37 million reichsmarks was purchased expressly for this purpose.
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In a meeting with Reich commissioners and military commanders on August 6, 1942, Göring demanded a dramatic increase in the amount of goods extracted from occupied territories. “It is of no concern,” Göring thundered, “if they say that their people are dropping dead of starvation. Let them drop dead so long as not a single German does.”
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The relatively small state of Serbia, which had already lost its most fertile regions to German occupation, was required to deliver an additional 100,000 tons of wheat and corn.
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Similar demands were placed on France and Belgium for contributions to the “anti-Bolshevist” struggle, in which Germans were putatively shedding their blood on Europe’s behalf. Food exports from France to Germany rose 50 percent between 1942 and late 1943.
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In August 1942, after a conversation with Hitler, the Reich commissioner for Ukraine, Erich Koch, laid out a set of guidelines for food policies. The summary protocol read: “Ukraine is required to provide everything Germany lacks. This requirement is to be fulfilled without regard to casualties. . . . The increase in bread rations is a political necessity crucial to our ability to pursue the war to its victorious conclusion. The grain we lack must be extracted from Ukraine. In light of this task, feeding the civilian population there is utterly insignificant.”
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As historian Christian Gerlach has shown in his 1999 study of Belarus, the difficulties the Nazi government encountered in keeping Germans well fed accelerated the pace of the mass murder of European Jews. In the summer of 1942, State Secretary Backe ordered huge quotas of grain and meat delivered to Germany from the General Government, previously a recipient of food from the Reich. This action drew energetic protests from the director of the food department in Pola, Karl Naumann, who pointed out that the Poles were undernourished. Backe responded: “The 3.5 million Jews remaining in the General Government of Poland will have to be cleansed this year.”
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That number was either a drastic exaggeration or a typo—the actual population of Jews was much smaller—but the intention is clear. During a meeting of the General Government on August 24, 1942, Naumann told administrative heads: “The maintenance of the estimated 1.5 million Jews in the population has been abandoned, with the exception of 300,000 Jews who are useful to the Reich because of artisan or other work skills. . . . The other 1.2 million Jews will no longer be given food.”
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And in fact, by the end of 1942, well over a million Jews had been murdered in the gas chambers of the General Government.
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Gerlach has also demonstrated that the German leadership took equally drastic measures earlier, in September 1941, when they radicalized their food policies toward Soviet prisoners. By that point, it had become clear to senior officials that Germany was not going to be able to conquer Russia before the onset of winter. On September 4, Backe refused a request by the Wehrmacht for 2.1 million tons of grain and 652,000 tons of meat, saying that the troops would have to feed themselves from resources available in occupied territories and at the front. With explicit reference to the strikes of 1918, when Germans had revolted in response to food shortages at the end of World War I, Göring ruled out reducing food rations on the home front and issued an order dated September 16, 1941: “As a general principle for occupied territories, only those who work for us should be assured of receiving the food they need.” He also decreed that “ruthless conservation measures” be undertaken to ensure food imports to Germany. A short time later, after a conversation with Backe about the situation of captured Red Army soldiers in detention camps, Goebbels noted: “The catastrophic starvation there exceeds all description.” In the officers’ mess in Riga, Wehrmacht soldiers were quoted as discussing their “assignment to let Russian POWs starve and freeze to death.”
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By February 1, 1942, 2 million of the 3.3 million Red Army prisoners—60 percent—had died either in German detention camps or in transit. Excluding the first three weeks of the war, when captured soldiers were generally in good physical condition, an average of ten thousand Soviet prisoners died per day. In World War I, the German home front had suffered from food shortages, but only 5.4 percent of the 1.4 million Russian POWs died in German detention. Considering that most of those POWs were either wounded or physically depleted, it’s clear that the German leadership under Kaiser Wilhelm II closely followed the guidelines of the Hague Conventions.

On October 4, 1942, with the rigid policy of starvation in place toward Soviet POWs, Jews, and the populations of Soviet cities, Göring gave a Sunday address in Berlin’s Sportpalast to mark the end of the harvest season. He told his audience that “we are feeding our entire army from the occupied territories.” He also announced that food rations would be increased in the months to come, especially in areas susceptible to aerial bombardment. In addition, a “special allocation” would be made available at Christmas. As for the parts of Eastern Europe that Germany had conquered, Göring proclaimed: “From this day on things will continue to get better since we now possess huge stretches of fertile land. There are stocks of eggs, butter, and fr there that you cannot even imagine.” A few days previously, in a speech to mark the start of the Winter Relief Fund, Hitler had stoked listeners’ hopes that the “opening up of space in the East” would soon allow for a return to “near-peacetime conditions.” The Eastern Front, Hitler promised, would allow Germany “to pursue the war to its successful conclusion without major privations.”

With Hitler having laid the groundwork, Göring’s address encouraged the German populace to have faith in their regime. The Security Service reported an overwhelmingly positive public reaction to Göring’s speech. “Göring spoke to the heart and the stomach,” read one report. “The detailed description of the continually improving food situation in the Reich,” another stated, has strengthened “the belief that we have put the worst behind us.” The working classes, in particular, saw Göring’s promises as “something concrete.” Moreover, throughout the country, people “were no longer as worried about the military situation—for example, the duration of the fighting in Stalingrad.” The author of a Security Service report on October 12, 1942, wrote “that the mood among women has improved considerably since, with good reason, the promise of an increasingly better food and subsistence situation is particularly important to them.” Goebbels, too, noted “a veritable surge in the mood of the German people.”
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