Hunger Plan

The Hunger Plan (German der Hungerplan, also der Backe-Plan) was an economic management scheme that was put in place to ensure that Germans were given priority over food supplies, at the expense of everyone else. This plan was featured as part of the planning phase of the Wehrmacht (German Armed Forces) invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa). Germany itself was running low on food supplies, and the same problem faced the various territories occupied by Germany. The fundamental premise behind the Hunger Plan was that Germany was not self-sufficient in food supplies during the war, and to sustain the war it needed to obtain the food from conquered lands at any cost. It was an engineered famine, planned and implemented as a rational act of policy for the benefit of the German Nation above all others. The plan as a means of mass killing was outlined in a document which became known as Goering's Green Folder.

Outline of the plan

The architect of the Hunger Plan was Herbert Backe. Together with others, such as Heinrich Himmler, Backe spearheaded the coalition of radicals among the Nazi politicians, dedicated to securing German food supply at any cost. The Hunger Plan may have been made almost as soon as Hitler announced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940. Certainly by 2 May 1941, it was in advanced stages of planning and was ready for discussion between all the major Nazi state ministries and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) office of economics, headed by General Georg Thomas. The lack of capacity of Russian railways, the inadequacy of road transport and the shortages of fuel, meant that the German Army would have to feed itself by taking food from the farms in Soviet Russia and Ukraine. One of the meetings for the logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union included in its conclusions:

1) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.

The protocol of the meeting exemplifies German planning of the occupation of the Soviet Union. It camouflages a deliberate decision on the life or death of vast parts of the local population as a logical, almost inevitable development. Three weeks later on 23 May 1941 the economic-political guidelines for the coming invasion produced by the agricultural section of the Economic Staff East appeared:

Many ten of millions of people in this country will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone […] prevent the possibility of Germany holding out till the end of the war.

The perceived grain riches of Ukraine were particularly important to the vision of a self-sufficient Germany. Yet Ukraine did not produce enough grain for export to solve Germany's problems. Scooping off the agricultural surplus in Ukraine for the purpose of feeding the Reich called for: 1. annihilation of superfluous population (Jews, the population of Ukrainian big cities such as Kiev which did not receive any supplies at all); 2. extreme reduction of the rations allocated to Ukrainians in the remaining cities; 3. decrease of the food of the farming population.

In the discussion of the plan, Backe noted a 'surplus population' in Russia of about 20–30 million. If that population was cut off from food, that food could be used to feed both the invading German army and the German population itself. Industrialization had created a large urban society in the Soviet Union. The Plan envisioned that this population, numbering in many millions, would be cut off from the food supply thus freeing the food produced in the Soviet Union, now to be at German disposal, to sustain Germans. As a result, great suffering among the native Soviet population would take place, with tens of millions of deaths expected within the first year of German occupation. Starvation was to be an integral part of the German Army's campaign. It preceded the invasion and was in fact an essential condition of it; the assault on Russia would not succeed without it.

Effect of the plan

The Hunger Plan caused the deaths of many, primarily Jews in the Soviet Union whom the Nazis had forced into ghettos, and Soviet prisoners of war, which were most easily controlled by the Germans and thus easily cut off from food supplies. Jews for example were barred from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat or fruit. The so-called "ration" for Jews in Minsk and other cities within the control of Army Group Center was no more than 420 calories per day. Tens of thousands of Jews died of hunger and hunger-related causes over the winter of 1941-2.

Between one and two million Soviet POWs died as a result of starvation and poor conditions in just the first year of the war. While large numbers of deaths among the prisoners would have been expected under the terrible conditions of the war, the starvation of these prisoners became a deliberate policy of the Nazi regime and of the Wehrmacht.

While the Hunger Plan was first designed for the Soviet Union, it was soon expanded to include occupied Poland (General Government). Similar to the Soviet Union, the Jewish population in ghettos suffered most heavily, although Poles faced increasing starvation as well. Raul Hilberg has estimated that over half a million Polish Jews died in the ghettos due to starvation.^{[citation needed]} For example, in early 1943, Hans Frank, German governor of Poland, estimated that three million Poles will be facing starvation as a result of the Plan. In August, the Polish capital Warsaw was completely cut off from grain delivery. Only the above average harvest of 1943, and the collapsing Eastern Front of 1944 saved the Poles from starvation. Western Europe was third on the German list of food re-prioritizing. Food was also shipped to Germany from France and other occupied countries in the West, although the West never suffered genocidal starvation as occurred in the East,

By mid 1941, the German minority in Poland received 2613 calories per day while Poles received 699 and Jews in the ghetto 184. The Jewish ration fulfilled 7.5 percent of their daily needs; Polish rations only 26 percent. Only the ration allocated to Germans fulfilled the full needs of their daily calorie intake.

Nonetheless the Hunger Plan was never fully implemented, but "what one is dealing with here is the blueprint for a programme of mass murder unprecedented in modern history". The Germans lacked the manpower to enforce a 'food blockade' of the Soviet cities; neither could they confiscate all the food for their own purpose. However, the Germans were able to significantly supplement their grain stocks, particularly from the granaries in fertile Ukraine, and cut off the Soviets from them, leading to significant starvation in the Soviet-held territories (most drastically in Leningrad, encircled by German forces, where about one million people died). The lack of food also contributed to the starvation of forced labor, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates in Germany.

In late 1943 the Plan also bore another success for the Germans: German food supplies were stabilized. In autumn 1943, for the first time since the war began, the food rations for German citizens — which had been cut several times before — were increased.

In the years 1942–3, occupied Europe supplied Germany with more than one fifth of its grain, a quarter of its fats and thirty percent of meat.

Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diaries about the Hunger Plan that its principle was that "before Germany starved, it would be the turn of a number of other people".

The historian Timothy Snyder estimates: “4,2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, an Ukrainians) starved by the German occupiers in 1941-1944.”

See also

• Extermination of Soviet prisoners of war by Nazi Germany
• Final Solution
• Generalplan Ost
• Lebensraum
• War crimes of the Wehrmacht
• Effect of the Siege of Leningrad on the city
• Soviet Famine of 1932-33
• A-A line

References

• Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution. The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942. With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem 2004, ISBN 0-8032-1327-1
• Lizzie Collingham: The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. Allen Lane, 2011, ISBN 9780713999648
• Christian Gerlach: Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-930908-54-9 (German)
• Alex J. Kay: Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941. (Studies on War and Genocide, vol. 10) Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 2006, ISBN 1-845-45186-4
• Alex J. Kay: Germany's Staatssekretäre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941, in: Journal of Contemporary History, 41/4 (October 2006), P. 685–700.
• Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin. The Bodley Head, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-224-08141-2, pp. xiv, 162-188, 411.
• Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction, Viking, 2007 ISBN 0670038261