Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (34 page)

Once it became clear that the eastern territories were not going to yield the quantities of food that had been hoped for, the policy of allowing the prisoners to slowly starve to death shifted to one of determined extermination. Backe threatened that, unless the Soviet prisoners’ ration was reduced, a cut in the German civilian ration would be necessary. In one of the few statements that clearly expressed what was usually an unspoken policy, the Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told the army chiefs of staff in no uncertain terms that ‘prisoners incapable of work in the prison camps are to starve’.
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Even those who were selected as fit enough to work died as they laboured. A lieutenant in charge of reconstructing the Russian railways complained in October 1942 that he was ‘experiencing horrible days. Every day thirty of my prisoners die, or I must allow them to be shot. It is certainly a picture of cruelty … The prisoners, only partially clothed, partly without coats, could no longer get dry. The food is not sufficient, and they collapse one after the other … When one sees what a human life really means, then an inner transformation in your own thinking happens. A bullet, a word, and a life is no more. What is a human life?’
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Between October 1941 and March 1942 somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war starved to death. The prisoners held by Army Group Centre and in the General Government, where food-supply problems were at their worst, were the most affected. While Army Group Centre took only 47 per cent of the Soviet prisoners, 71 per cent of those for whom they were responsible died.
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In Poland, 85 per cent of the prisoners died. By February 1942, 60 per cent of the 3.35 million Soviet prisoners were dead.
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If the Germans were to fail to achieve their goal of starving the entire urban Soviet population to death, they applied the principles of the Hunger Plan to their Soviet captives with chilling efficacy.

The siege of Leningrad has become an iconic symbol of starvation during the Second World War. Stories abound of Leningraders boiling
leather to make jellies and burning antique furniture and precious books to keep warm.
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The desperate inhabitants of the city are known to have resorted to cannibalism, and about 1,500 people, mainly young unemployed women desperate to find food for their children, were arrested for the crime.
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One million people died in the siege of Leningrad. The responsibility for their deaths lies largely with the German invaders, but the Soviets were also partly to blame for the plight of the city. As the German army made alarmingly fast progress across western Russia it became clear that it would reach the city, but the authorities evacuated only 636,000 people, leaving more than 2.5 million to face a long winter of hunger. In all likelihood ‘the leadership did not want to appear to be abandoning the city, a symbolism that would not have been lost on the rest of the country’.
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Stalin was prepared to sacrifice Leningrad’s population ruthlessly for the sake of Soviet morale.

Disorganization and lack of preparation meant that there was too little food stored in the city for its citizens to survive a prolonged siege. The authorities failed to disperse what food there was, leaving it vulnerable to air raids. On 8 September, 3,000 tons of grain and 2,500 tons of sugar went up in flames when the Badaev warehouses were firebombed. Later, Alexei Bezzubov, an inventive nutritionist who worked at Leningrad’s Vitamin Institute, initiated the digging-up of the ‘boulders of sweet black earth’ which remained at the burnt-out site, and managed to manufacture boiled sweets out of it for the energy-starved Leningraders.
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Initially, rations were too generous and used up the meagre stores of food too quickly. Eventually the corn and rye flour that was left had to be eked out with cottonseed oil cake, which was usually used for ship fuel, edible cellulose, chaff, flour sweepings and dust from flour sacks. The resulting bread was ‘black, sticky, like putty, sodden with an admixture of wood pulp and sawdust’.
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Anna Ivanovna Likhacheva, a doctor working in the clinic of the Red Banner factory, recalled how the ‘fatalities began in December, when the lack of food was coupled with the cold and loss of public transportation. Cold starving people, faithfully carrying out their duties … trudged tens of kilometres, often on only 125g of ersatz bread per day and soured cabbage leaves or yeast soup for dinner … Excruciating hunger forces a person to think and talk only about one thing – about food, to share memories of dishes that one loved or disliked.’
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Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers – or, rather, ‘useless eaters’ – as possible. Even if the inhabitants had wished to surrender, explicit orders had been given forbidding the Wehrmacht from accepting. Quartermaster-General Wagner remarked, ‘What are we supposed to do with a city of three and a half million which just rests itself on our supply pouch?’
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There could be no question of diverting food from the Wehrmacht into a conquered city.
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If the Germans had taken the city they would still have left the population to starve, just as they did the people living in the area around the city. These civilians were so desperate that it was impossible to stop them wandering around in the front-line areas looking for something to eat. Tatiana Vassilieva was thirteen when the war stranded her family in Wyritza, a small town in the German-occupied area, about 60 kilometres from Leningrad. In autumn they slaughtered their goat and ‘ate meat for a whole week. Everything from the garden was eaten up ages ago.’ Her mother then bartered all their possessions for potatoes, but by December they had nothing left to barter. Not quite defeated, her mother made a soup out of the family cat and a gruel out of birch wood, against which their stomachs revolted. Then, in despair, Tatiana, her two-year-old sister and her mother joined her sick father on the bed and ‘prepared to die’. They were saved by a German tailor who was billeted in their house in January. ‘“Bread … children” he said, and put his finger to his lips.’ But then he was called up to fight on the front. Rather than watch her family fade, Tatiana set out with a sledge in search of food. On an empty stomach she walked 120 kilometres, taking several days before reaching a corn-growing area where two kind women give her a sack of grain.
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Although she saved her family, her father was later beaten to death by the SS and she was eventually deported to the Reich as a forced labourer. At the end of the war she came home to a ‘broken’ mother, and to her sister, who had become partially deaf and had lost the use of her legs.

The policy of starvation was also applied against the populations of Kiev and Kharkov in the Ukraine, but because the circumstances were less dramatic in that they were not besieged the stories of these
cities are less well known. Hitler ordered that Kiev be reduced to rubble by aerial bombing but his generals ignored his demand and took possession of the city on 16 September 1941. Every day a large proportion of the 400,000 people still living in the city would stream out into the countryside to bargain for food. A reverse stream of farmers would later be seen driving their carts into the city to pick up the household goods they had been offered in exchange for food. Then, in October, the German authorities banned the supply of food to the city.
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Otto Bräutigam later wrote of how the agronomists in meetings would simply state, ‘Kiev must starve.’
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Road-blocks were set up and the peasants were no longer able to trundle their carts laden with cabbages and potatoes into the city.
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The authorities did allow a market to open two days a week where it was sometimes possible to buy a few potatoes. Mostly only potato peelings were available. They were minced to make into a flour which was fried as a sort of pancake. A survivor recalled that as a child he found these pancakes ‘unbelievably nice’.
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Bread was still sold in the city but non-workers were allocated a mere 200 grams, or one or two slices, a
week
(this was eventually raised to 400 grams in December). Even in Leningrad at that time people were receiving 125 grams of bread a
day
(875 grams a week). The bread was a peculiar substitute substance made from millet mixed with barley, chestnuts and lupine (usually used as fodder for animals). It had a clay-like consistency but disintegrated as it dried out and, as one unfortunate consumer described, ‘it was gritty to eat and had a bitter-sweet taste. It was difficult to digest.’
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Many became ill from eating it.
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The only sure way of obtaining food was to work for the Germans in one of the small factories that were still functioning, on the railways or in an administrative office. A cleaning lady for the railway administration recounted how she received millet soup and porridge at work, which enabled her to survive. In the winter of 1941 Kiev’s Labour Office was ‘besieged by hungry people’.
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But the sick, the elderly, the young and the unemployed – among them many scientists and scholars from the universities and academic research institutes – were unable to scratch together enough food. The mayor of the city did what he could, protecting food supplies for the hospitals from the depredations of the police and distributing food to the elderly and the scholars. But people began to die. From the (probably inaccurate and low) figures of the
Sicherheitsdienst
it is possible to see that the mortality rate rose steeply from 58 deaths in October 1941, to 1,120 in February 1942.
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In November Mikhail Iakovlevich Gerenrot, a former communist official, reported that the city was deserted. The only people on the streets were ‘emaciated or swollen from hunger, they roam the streets and walk from house to house in search of charity … I also came across people who were lying and sitting; they were so emaciated that they were unable to move.’
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A. Anatoli Kuznetsov commented on the mood of those who were managing to survive: ‘It was bitterly cold and the people walked down the streets with grim expressions on their faces, hunching themselves up from the wind, worried, in ragged clothes, in all sorts of strange footwear and threadbare coats. It was indeed a city of beggars.’
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In Kharkov the horror began with the Soviet scorched earth policy. By the time it became clear that the Germans were going to capture the city it was too late to evacuate the remaining 450,000 inhabitants (before the war the population was about 1 million). Instead, the authorities simply began blowing up buildings, to the surprise and shock of passers-by. In an article entitled ‘Lest we forget’, in the
Ukrainian Quarterly
of 1948, an anonymous ‘citizen of Kharkiw’ described what happened: ‘The government authorities … took great trouble to destroy all food products. Declaring the remaining part of the population as traitors and “enemies of the nation” the authorities fully justified themselves in destroying all food stores. Long grains and vast stores of corn, flour and vegetables were destroyed, burnt or spoiled by soaking with kerosene. These enormous quantities of food if justly distributed among the people who stayed would have saved the majority of them from starvation.’
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Kharkov was a ruined city of bombed and burned-out houses, ‘the black silhouettes of exploded and burnt factories and official buildings’ stood out against the skyline, bomb craters were scattered across the city, and where once there had been bridges there was now a ‘chaos of stone and iron’.
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The infrastructure broke down and the people were left without electricity, water or a sewerage system. The anonymous citizen described how ‘every kind of communication and transportation facility is totally destroyed. The entering and the leaving of the town is strictly prohibited. Communication of any kind is cut off even
between the parts of the town situated on both sides of the small river … There are no stores, no markets, no shops of any kind.’
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Those who worked for the Germans received about 300 grams of bread a day. The only way of surviving was to evade the police checks and barter for food in the countryside.

That winter of 1941–42 ‘the silence of death prevail[ed] in the main streets which only a year ago were crowded with people and traffic … No people are to be seen anywhere … No sign of life is to be found. But you can notice some window frames closed with boards and a crooked stove-pipe emitting a faint stream of smoke. Here people live! People who have found a miserable corner to go and hide in, a wretched nook slowly to die in. In these very small kitchens life is pulsating still. Here a whole family and sometimes many families have found their poor shelter. All the inhabitants of Kharkiw live this winter in small kitchens often with seven to ten people together. They sleep on benches, tables and simply on the floor in dust and smoke amidst dirty dishes and garbage. In the daytime they all crowd around the kitchen stove, – dreary figures wrapped up in odds and ends of raiment and in old galoshes, snow-boots, warm slippers etc. The rooms are extremely cold because of the prevailing cold of thirty degrees below zero … Food is an article still more rare and consequently more expensive than fuel … The small supplies of food stored by the population have been long consumed. The town is void of eatables like a desert.’
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By the end of 1942, 150,000 of the 450,000 inhabitants who had stayed in Kharkov had died, the great majority of them from starvation.
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