The Annihilation of Superfluous Eaters: Nazi Plans for and Uses of Famine in Eastern Europe
by Steven R. Welch
The deliberate use of famine was an integral part of Nazi plans and policies regarding Eastern Europe during World War II. The following essay will examine three key examples: first, the so-called General Plan for the East (Generalplan Ost; hereafter GPO); second, the hunger strategy carried out by the Germans in the occupied regions of the Soviet Union following the invasion of June 1941, which included the starvation of Soviet POWs and Soviet civilians; and third, the Nazi ghettoization policies from 1940 to 1942 which created famine conditions in which hundreds of thousands of Jews died of hunger and hunger-related diseases.
I. The General Plan for the East
The General Plan for the East, the first draft of which was presented to Heinrich Himmler in July 1941, embodied the Nazi vision for a complete and ruthless demographic revolution in Eastern Europe. The GPO was premised on the belief that the Wehrmacht would quickly and decisively vanquish the Soviet Union and thus bring a vast new territorial empire under Nazi control. Hitler and other leading Nazis conceived of the newly conquered areas as a German �India� over which they would wield absolute power and within whose boundaries they could realize their plans for a sweeping racially-based reorganization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. �The GPO was to provide the blueprint for this new colonial empire. �It called for all of Poland, Czechoslovakia and large parts of the Soviet Union to be transformed into gigantic German settlement areas. �This would entail �resettling� or killing between 30 to 50 million of the present inhabitants of those areas: 80-85 per cent of the Polish, 75 per cent of the Belorussian and 65 per cent of the Ukrainian populations would be affected. The GPO implicitly factored into its grisly calculations that many millions of the victims would die as a result of famine and disease brought on by malnutrition and overwork. After the massive liquidation of much of the Slavic population of Eastern Europe the remaining fourteen million people were to be reduced to the status of slave laborers for the ruling Germans who would control all property and monopolize positions of skilled labor. The territory vacated by the millions of deported or liquidated Slavs was to be settled by some 4.5 million Germans drawn from the Reich, from overseas Germans and other Germanic groups (such as Norwegians and Danes) in Europe. The entire process was originally scheduled to be completed within thirty years. Himmler later insisted that the pace be accelerated so that the program of Germanization would be accomplished within no more than twenty years.
The first draft of the GPO included a provision for the forced resettlement of five to six million Jews as part of the Germanization project. By the time a revised version was prepared the following year this provision had disappeared. By then the mass murder of European Jewry in specially designed extermination camps was already well underway. As an official from Alfred Rosenberg�s Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories noted in April 1942, the Eastern Jews did not need to be included in the revised version of the GPO since they �would already be eliminated before evacuation [to the East].�
Thanks to the defeat of the German army by Soviet forces the provisions of the GPO remained for the most part unfulfilled. Himmler did attempt one large-scale resettlement project in November 1942 in the area of Zamosc in the General Government. Thousands of Polish farmers were forced out of their homes to make room for 27,000 ethnic Germans. From the German perspective the action ended as a dismal failure: throughout the region security worsened, produce deliveries declined and Polish resistance escalated. The deteriorating war situation from 1943 on prevented any further experiments in mass resettlement. After the disastrous defeat at Stalingrad Hitler ordered that further work on the GPO be suspended. Had Hitler�s forces been successful in the East, however, there can be no doubt that under the auspices of the GPO tens of millions of Slavs would have been subjected to a program of mass killing in which deliberately imposed famine would have been a major component.
II. The �Hunger Strategy� of 1941-42
In spring 1941 the Reich Food Ministry and the Armed Forces High Command (OKW) developed what Rolf-Dieter M�ller has termed a �hunger strategy� devised to deprive millions of Soviet citizens of food in order to provide surpluses which would feed the German army in Russia as well as allow foodstuffs to be sent back to the Reich from the occupied territories in the East. � This hunger strategy, as M�ller has convincingly demonstrated, was not an unintended or unavoidable outcome of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union but was deliberately planned in advance and must be regarded as a �consciously implemented policy of extermination.�
Plans for the economic exploitation of the occupied territories had been considered in some detail by German civilian and military experts in advance of the invasion. A statement of goals for the upcoming campaign from early May 1941 succinctly noted: �1. The war can only be continued if all armed forces are fed by Russia in the third year of war. 2. There is no doubt that as a result many millions of people will be starved to death if we take out of the country the things necessary for us.� �A much more detailed document prepared by the �Economic Staff East, Agricultural Group� on 23 May 1941, painted an even grimmer picture of the mass starvation and deindustrialization planned for some Soviet regions. The planners commented dispassionately that �the population of these areas, in particular the urban population, will have to face most serious distress from famine.� �The document went on to state with brutal frankness that the policy being enunciated would result in mass death for the population of the occupied regions:
It follows from all that has been said that the German administration in these territories may well attempt to mitigate the consequences of the famine which undoubtedly will take place, and to accelerate the return to primitive agricultural conditions. An attempt might be made to intensify cultivation in these areas by expanding the acreage under potatoes or other important food crops giving a high yield. However, these measures will not avert famine. Many tens of millions of people in this area will become redundant and will either die or have to emigrate to Siberia. Any attempt to save the population there from death by starvation by importing surpluses from the black soil zone would be at the expense of supplies to Europe. It would reduce Germany�s and Europe�s power to resist the blockade. This must be clearly and absolutely understood.
Within the context of the racial ideology of Nazism, which posited the supremacy of the Ayran master race over the inferior Slavs and Jews, the murder of �many tens of millions of people� by means of deliberate starvation was accepted as perfectly legitimate and indeed desirable. The utter disregard of humane values by the German planners provides very striking evidence of what Hans Mommsen has referred to as the �deformation of public and private morality� during the Third Reich. �The hunger strategy which the economic experts in the Wehrmacht and the state ministries formulated was a clear violation of international law which required that occupying forces insure an adequate food supply for the indigenous population. The economic planners cynically choose to ignore their obligations under international law and endorsed a policy guaranteed to condemn millions to starvation. In comments made on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, Alfred Rosenberg explicitly rejected the notion that Germany had any obligation toward the peoples it was about to subjugate; German interests alone were paramount: �the job of feeding the German people stands, this year, without a doubt, at the top of the list of Germany�s claims on the East�We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus-territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings.�
Rosenberg was articulating a view which was shared by all members of the top Nazi leadership. Three weeks into Operation Barbarossa Hermann Goering spelled out German priorities when it came to the distribution of food supplies: �It is clear that a graduated scale of food allocations is needed. First in line are the combat troops, then the remainder of the troops in enemy territory, and then those troops stationed at home. The rates are adjusted accordingly. The supply of the German non-military population follows and only then comes the population of the occupied territories.� �He went on to note, �In the occupied territories on principle only those people are to be supplied with an adequate amount of food who work for us. Even if one wanted to feed all the other inhabitants, one could not do it in the newly-occupied Eastern areas. It is, therefore, wrong to funnel off food supplies for this purpose, if it is done at the expense of the army and necessitates increased supplies from home.The economic welfare and indeed the survival of the subject populations was to be callously and criminally disregarded; all that mattered was what benefit Germany could derive from the occupied territories. Hitler of course was in full agreement with a policy of maximum exploitation and minimum concern for the population of the occupied territories: �Our guiding principle must be that these people have but one justification for existence�to be of use to us economically. We must concentrate on extracting from these territories everything that it is possible to extract.� �It can come as no surprise that the hunger strategy could count on Hitler�s complete support. On 8 July 1941 General Franz Halder, Chief of the Army General Staff, noted that the F�hrer had indicated that it was his �firm decision to level Moscow and Leningrad, and make them uninhabitable, so as to relieve us of the necessity of having to feed the populations through the winter.� �All the evidence amply justifies Theo J. Schulte�s judgement that �the economic and military leadership of the Third Reich�advocated a radical policy of exploitation that did not merely allow for but, rather, was based on the need for the extermination of millions of people.�
The hunger strategy had a devastating impact on the Soviet population in the occupied regions. One of the most remarkable and brutally frank assessments of the consequences of the strategy was provided in a report from the Armaments Inspector for the Ukraine, Major General Hans Leykauf, dated 2 December 1941. Leykauf�s report is noteworthy for its matter-of-fact acknowledgment of the scale and scope of mass killing being carried out by German forces in the East:
When we shoot the Jews to death, allow the POWs to die, expose considerable portions of the urban population to starvation and in the upcoming year also lose a part of the rural population to hunger, the question remains to be answered: who is actually supposed to produce economic values?
Leykaufs attention, of course, was focused not on the lethal human consequences of the hunger strategy and the other atrocities committed against the Soviet population but solely on the effects such a strategy might have on the productivity of the occupied regions. As he made clear, his own views were based not on humane �sentiment� but on �sober economic calculations.� �These calculations undoubtedly informed his suggestions for a continuation of the hunger strategy:
Scooping off the agricultural surplus in the Ukraine for the purpose of feeding the Reich is therefore only feasible if traffic in the interior of the Ukraine is diminished to a minimum. The attempt will be made to achieve this
1. by annihilation of superfluous eaters (Jews, population of the Ukrainian big cities, which like Kiev do not receive any supplies at all);
2. by extreme reduction of the rations allocated to the Ukrainians in the remaining cities;
3. by decrease of the food of the farming population.
