Hunger Plan
The Hunger Plan was a plan developed by Nazi Germany during World War II to seize food from the Soviet Union and give it to German soldiers and civilians; the plan entailed the death by starvation of millions of Slavs following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The premise behind the Hunger Plan was that Germany was not self-sufficient in food supplies, and to sustain the war and keep up the domestic morale it needed to obtain the food from conquered lands at any cost. It was an engineered famine, planned and implemented as an act of policy. This plan was developed during the planning phase for the Wehrmacht invasion and provided for diverting of the Ukrainian food stuffs away from central and northern Russia and redirecting them for the benefit of the invading army and the population in Germany. The plan resulted in the deaths of millions of people. The plan as a means of mass murder was outlined in several documents, including one that became known as Göring's Green Folder, which quoted a number of "20 to 30 million" expected Russian deaths from "military actions and crises of food supply."
Outline of the plan
The architect of the Hunger Plan was Herbert Backe. Together with others, such as Heinrich Himmler, Backe led a coalition of Nazi politicians, dedicated to securing Germany's food supply. The Hunger Plan may have been decided on almost as soon as Hitler announced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940. Certainly by 2 May 1941, it was in the advanced stages of planning and was ready for discussion between all the major Nazi state ministries and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht office of economics, headed by General Georg Thomas. The lack of capacity of the Russian railways, the inadequacy of road transport and the shortages of fuel, meant that the German Army would have to feed itself by living off the land in the territories they conquered in the western regions of the Soviet Union. A meeting on 2 May 1941 between the permanent secretaries responsible for logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, as well as other high-ranking Nazi party functionaries, state officials and military officers, included in its conclusions:The minutes of the meeting exemplify German planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union. They present a deliberate decision on the life or death of vast parts of the local population as a logical, inevitable development.
Three weeks later, on 23 May 1941, economic policy guidelines for the coming invasion appeared that had been produced by Hans-Joachim Riecke's agricultural section of the Economic Staff East, which had direct responsibility for the economic and agricultural exploitation of the soon-to-be occupied Soviet territories:
The perceived grain surpluses of Ukraine figured particularly prominently in the vision of a "self-sufficient" Germany. Hitler himself had stated in August 1939 that Germany needed "the Ukraine, in order that no one is able to starve us again as in the last war." 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:
- the annihilation of what the German régime perceived as a superfluous population
- the extreme reduction of the rations allocated to Ukrainians in the remaining cities
- a reduction in the foodstuffs consumed by the farming population
Effects of the plan
The Hunger Plan caused the deaths of millions of citizens in the German-occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The historian Timothy Snyder estimates that "4.2 million Soviet citizens starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944." Among the victims were many Jews, whom the Nazis had forced into ghettos, and Soviet prisoners of war, whose movement was most easily controlled by the Germans and thus easily cut off from food supplies. Jews, for example, were prohibited from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat or fruit. The so-called "rations" for Jews in Minsk and other cities within the control of Army Group Centre were no more than per day. Tens of thousands of Jews died of hunger and hunger-related causes over the winter of 1941–1942.. Unknown date
The most reliable figures for the death rate among Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity reveal that 3.3 million died from a total of 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945, most directly or indirectly as a result of starvation and undernourishment. Of these 3.3 million, 2 million had already died by the beginning of February 1942. The enormous number of deaths was the result of a deliberate policy of starvation directed against Soviet POWs. The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war, i.e. roughly the same number as during the 1940 campaign against France and the Low Countries. The number of French, Belgian and Dutch POWs who died in German captivity, however, was extremely low compared with the number of deaths among Soviet POWs.
In spite of the exorbitantly high death rate among Soviet POWs, who constituted the main group of victims of the Hunger Plan, the plan was never fully implemented due to the ultimate failure of the German military campaign. As the historian Alex J. Kay makes clear, however, "what one is dealing with here is the blueprint for a programme of mass murder unprecedented in modern history". Except in isolated cases, the Germans lacked the manpower to enforce a 'food blockade' of the Soviet cities; neither could they confiscate all the food for their own purposes. 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. Germans also tried to starve Kiev and Kharkov in German-occupied Ukraine. During the German occupation, about 80,000 residents of Kharkov died of starvation. The lack of food also contributed to the starvation of forced labourers and concentration camp inmates in Germany.
Starvation in other German-occupied territories
The Hunger Plan directed against the population of Soviet cities and grain-deficit territories was unique—the Nazis formulated no other premeditated plan against the inhabitants of any other German-occupied territory. However, starvation did affect other parts of German-occupied Europe, including Greece and Poland. Unlike in the Soviet Union, in Poland the Jewish population in ghettos suffered most heavily, although ethnic Poles also faced increasing levels of starvation. Raul Hilberg estimated that "in the whole of occupied Poland 500,000 to 600,000 Jews died in ghettos and labor camps", in part due to starvation. In early 1943, Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, estimated that three million Poles would face starvation as a result of the Plan. In August, the Polish capital Warsaw was completely cut off from grain deliveries. 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 for food re-prioritizing. Food was also shipped to Germany from France and other occupied territories in the West, although the West was never subjected to the genocidal starvation experienced in the East. As many as 22,000 people died during the Dutch famine of 1944 as a result of an embargo placed by the Germans on transporting food into the country.By mid-1941 the German minority in Poland received per day, while Poles received and Jews in the ghetto. The Jewish ration supplied a mere 7.5 percent of human daily needs; Polish rations only 26 percent. Only the rations allocated to Germans fulfilled the full needs of their daily caloric intake.