Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (38 page)

Despite the shortcomings of National Socialist occupation policy, the Wehrmacht and the eastern civilian administration were fed by over 7 million tons of Soviet grain and, in the Ukraine at least, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats, and more than 100 million domestic fowl disappeared into the stomachs of the German soldiers.
¹⁸⁷
This relieved pressure on German farmers and freed up home-grown food for German civilians. Although the Soviet Union never supplemented the Reich’s food supplies to the extent that Backe had hoped, Germany did receive 2 million tons of grain, large quantities of potatoes, and some meat and vegetable oils from the east.
¹⁸⁸
Much of the food arrived in late 1942 as a result of the good Polish harvest and the concerted food collection campaign in the Ukrainian countryside. In the autumn of 1942 Backe and Göring were both relieved to conclude that their radical actions in the east had succeeded in staving off a food crisis within Germany. Goebbels announced that Germany was ‘digesting’ the occupied territories. In October Göring announced a welcome increase in the bread and meat rations.
¹⁸⁹
The
Sicherheitsdienst
reported a noticeable relaxation of the tension among civilians.
¹⁹⁰
The Christmas of 1942 was made more cheerful by imports of sugar from Hungary, wheat from the Warthegau, and sunflower oil from the Ukraine. A good potato harvest within Germany also meant that the weekly ration virtually doubled.
¹⁹¹

Millions of eastern Jews and Soviet citizens died in order, supposedly, to free up food for the German occupiers. But it is doubtful that these
murderous measures contributed a great deal to the collection of food in the east. Certainly, the annihilation of the Jews in the General Government did nothing to suppress the black market, and therefore what little food was freed up by their deaths was not channelled on to the plates of the Germans. In addition, much of the food that was denied the urban population in the Ukraine seems to have been eaten instead by the Ukrainian peasantry. Nevertheless, German army and civilian rations rested firmly upon the exploitation of foreign labour. Around 40 per cent of the bread and meat eaten by the Wehrmacht and the Reich population was either produced in the occupied territories, or produced within Germany using the forced labour of foreigners from these countries.
¹⁹²

It was not until after the war that the German civilian population began to suffer from inadequate rations, and this post-war experience of hunger meant that many contrasted the competence and responsibility of the Nazi government to the callous failure on the part of the victorious Allied powers to feed the civilians in their care. This attitude was expressed by Margo Nagel, a student and dentist’s assistant in Berlin during the war. ‘I do not recall yearning for something that was not available … I do not recall anyone who said they were hungry during the war. Germany was always a well-organized country and I am sure that the party authorities saw to it that food was stockpiled and well distributed. The winter after the war was quite different when I lived in Hamburg where thousands of people died of starvation and exposure to the cold.’
¹⁹³
While her comments overlook the fact that the National Socialist government inflicted food shortages on urban Germans, they also show determined disregard for the fact that while Germans were well supplied between 1939 and 1945 their European neighbours were systematically plundered, murdered and deliberately starved to death for the sake of a secure food supply for German civilians.

10

Soviet Collapse

I’ll never forget the little village deep in the forest where we were billeted or the atmosphere of tragedy and anxiety that permeated every word spoken, weighed upon the women drawing water at the well, and made even the children unusually reticent.

(Andrei Sakharov, a Russian physicist who spent some of the war in the countryside)
¹

When the young physicist (and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) Andrei Sakharov graduated from university in the autumn of 1942 his first war-work assignment was to go out into the countryside to cut wood. In the village where he stayed there were only old women and children left and the atmosphere was polluted by a ‘foreboding that things would get even worse before they got better … the horror of war was always uppermost in people’s minds’.
²
The weakest link in the Soviet wartime edifice was undoubtedly agriculture. The struggles of Soviet farmers make the problems faced by farmers in the other major combatant countries pale in comparison. With the nation’s best agricultural land lost to the Germans until 1943, it was not so much a question of carefully balancing production to favour bread grains and maintain a minimum level of fats, fodder and meat, as a desperate struggle to cultivate as much of anything as possible. Throughout the war the Soviet Union struggled to feed its vast army, let alone all its citizens. The battle to produce food in the Soviet Union extracted every ounce of food from the peasantry while reducing both them and the land to a state of exhaustion.

The Soviet Union entered the war with its agricultural sector in a wretched state of disrepair. The politics of the preceding decades had caused endless disruption. The requisitioning of food, men and horses during both the First World War and the ensuing civil war led to hardship in the countryside. This was matched by food shortages in the towns.
³
Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 produced a short period of relative recovery. But then, in 1926, in an attempt to release revenue for industry, the government lowered agricultural prices. The peasants reacted by holding back their food from the cities. Rationing, which had only been discontinued in 1921, had to be reintroduced. In the end rationing was in force for more than half the twenty-five years preceding the Second World War.
⁴

Stalin was determined to eradicate market forces from the food economy and in 1929 he set about modernizing the agricultural sector in order to lay the foundation for his planned rejuvenation of Soviet industry.
⁵
He even invited Thomas Campbell, a pioneer of large-scale mechanized wheat farming in the United States, to come to the Soviet Union to give advice on the introduction of new techniques.
⁶
But Stalin’s programme of collectivization was no neutral programme of modernization. It was a scheme designed to impose the deadly will of the state upon the peasantry. The ownership of land as private property was abolished. The kulaks, the so-called rich peasantry, whose wealth often consisted only of one or two cows, were rounded up and deported to the gulags. Between 4 and 5 million were murdered.
⁷
The rest of the peasantry were coerced into working for the new Party-owned farms, the
kolkhozy
, which, by consolidating peasant landholdings, were supposed to make farming more efficient.

A young Cherkessian peasant who fled the Soviet Union in 1945 expressed the views of the majority of the Soviet peasantry when he denounced collectivization as a ‘slave system’. The peasants were forced to work for the collective farms for a certain number of days per year. In return they were supposed to be paid sufficient food to feed themselves and their families. However, before the collective farm could distribute food to its workers it had to deliver a quota of food to the state. These quotas were frequently set so high that the farms had virtually nothing left to feed their workers. The Cherkessian recalled that, ‘There were years when you worked a whole year and got nothing,
everything went to the state … They took the butter … the eggs … the meat … we had to give wool … the food products from [our private] garden … Collective farmers ate worse than workers … the collective farmer worked from dawn to dusk and got nothing.’
⁸
His family survived on one potato and a teaspoon of corn mush a day. ‘Life was horrible, life held on by a bare thread.’
⁹
A Ukrainian from Chernigov explained that the only way to survive was for the peasantry to cultivate the tiny plots of land which they were allowed to keep for their own use. But because ‘socialist work comes first, then your private work’ it was very difficult for the members of the collective to find the time to work on the private plots of land and ‘in actuality, what will often happen is that his children or some grandmother in the family will work in his private lot’.
¹⁰

In the Ukraine, where resistance to collectivization had been particularly strong, the state ruthlessly requisitioned food to the point where the villages were stripped of food, seed grain and fodder. With nothing left to feed them, the peasants slaughtered their livestock. But once the animals had been eaten there was nothing left for the people to eat either and famine spread.
¹¹
In the Ukraine as many as 7 million peasants died of starvation. One survivor recalled how, in 1933, ‘You could go into a village and see the corn standing high in the fields yet there would not be a soul in the entire village. They had planted the corn in the spring, and died during the summer, so that the corn grew untended.’
¹²

The end result of collectivization was to relocate hunger to the villages rather than the towns and cities.
¹³
While the peasants suffered, the food situation gradually improved in the urban areas. By 1936 the government was able to abolish rationing. Emigrants interviewed by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System in the 1950s routinely recalled that in the towns clothing was more of a problem than food just before the outbreak of war. In the countryside collectivization did introduce new and better strains of wheat and the collective farms were mechanized, but the peasants were repressed, disillusioned and demotivated. They had no incentive to work hard on the state farms given that they were unlikely to receive a fair share of the harvest. In terms of productivity the Soviet agricultural sector continued to lag behind industry, and it was unable to provide a solid foundation upon which to build an economy, let alone to fight a war.
¹⁴

When the German attack on Russia was announced, a disgruntled peasant in Archangel province was reported to have remarked, ‘Our government fed the Germans for two years, it would have been better to have saved food for our army and for the people, but now all of us expect hunger.’
¹⁵
He was right in thinking that the Soviet people were going to go hungry. The country was living so close to its food margins that almost no surplus existed from which to create food reserves.
¹⁶
The Soviet Union lost the central black soil area, the Ukraine, parts of the Crimea and the Caucasus to German occupation. The Germans came into possession of just under half the Soviet Union’s crop regions and land for beef and dairy cattle, more than half the Union’s pigs and virtually all the sugar-producing land.
¹⁷
Grain and sugar beet now had to be grown in the less fertile north and east. Great efforts succeeded in expanding the cultivated area but yields were driven down by lack of technical expertise and the unsuitable climate in these areas, let alone all the usual wartime difficulties of insufficient manpower, lack of machines (or fuel to run them) and draught animals, as well as shortages of fertilizer and seed.
¹⁸

The redirection of all energies towards maintaining the fighting at the front dealt agriculture a fundamental blow.
¹⁹
Nineteen million able-bodied peasants were called up, more than half of the male rural workforce. The tractor drivers were the first to go, leaving the collective farms without workers trained to use the machinery.
²⁰
In 1942 the peasants were reduced to sowing and harvesting 79 per cent of the grain by hand.
²¹
It was not uncommon for the peasant women to resort to yoking themselves to the plough in place of draught animals. Almost the entire burden of providing food for the Soviet Union fell on women, children, the elderly and the infirm. By 1945 women made up 92 per cent of the agricultural workforce.
²²
Victor Kravchenko and his fellow army recruits, walking across snowbound Tataria as they were evacuated east in November 1941, were ‘amazed to see great fields of wheat, unharvested, under the snow and now and then even sheaves of harvested grain. Later a peasant gave us the explanation: “with all able-bodied men taken for the army and horses commandeered for the fronts, only women, children and cows” remained to do the harvesting and immense quantities of produce could not be carried off.’
²³

The collective farms were pushed into a vicious cycle of over-extraction,
falling yields and demotivation. Decline could possibly have been reversed if the collective farms had been dismantled and the newly independent peasants motivated to increase production by high prices for agricultural produce. But this would have required large capital investment to inject much-needed equipment and livestock into the countryside. The Soviet Union in 1941 did not have the economic wherewithal to do this. Industry was overwhelmed and stretched to its limit simply trying to produce enough armaments to keep the men at the front fighting. There was absolutely no question of producing tractors or agricultural equipment. Besides, the benefits would have been felt only in the long term.