Hunger Plan

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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. 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, 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 cold, rational act of policy.

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 planned almost as soon as Hitler announced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940, but 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 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 requisitioning food from the farms in Soviet Russia and Ukraine. One of the meetings for the logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union concluded that "1) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war and 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 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 the Ukraine for the purpose of feeding the Reich called for 1. annihilation of superfluous eaters (Jews, population of the Ukrainian big cities, which like Kiev do not receive any supplies at all); 2. extreme reduction of the rations allocated to the 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 millions. If that population was cut off from food, that food could have been 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 envisaged that this population, numbering in many millions, would be cut off from the food supply, thus freeing the food produced in Soviet Union to sustain them, now to be at German disposal. There would therefore be great suffering among the native Soviet population, 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.

The Hunger Plan caused the deaths of many, primarily the ghettoized Russian Jews and Soviet prisoners of war, which were most easily controlled by the Germans and thus easily cut off from food supplies. As such it was linked to the Holocaust — with the unstated aim that the Jews who were starved to death did not need to be killed in the concentration camps. Between one and two millions of Soviet POWs died as well as a result of starvation and poor conditions in just the first year of the war.

While the Hunger Plan was first designed for the Soviet Union, it was soon expanded to include occupied Poland (General Government); similarly to the Soviet Union, the Jewish population in ghettos suffered most heavily, although Poles faced increasing starvation as well. For example, in early 1943, Hans Frank, German governor of Poland, estimated that 3 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 coming of the Eastern Front in 1944 saved the Poles from starvation. Western Europe was third on the German list of food reprioritizng; although it never suffered a genocidal starvation like the East, food was also shipped from France and other occupied countries in the West to Germany.

By mid 1941 in Poland, the German minority received 2613 calories per day while Poles 699 calories and Jews in ghetto 184 calories.[1] The Jewish ration fulfilled 7.5 percent of daily needs, Polish ration 26 percent of the daily needs. The German ration fulfilled full needs for daily calorie intake.[2]

Nonetheless the Hunger Plan was never fully implemented. 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 also to significant starvation in the Soviet-held territories (most drastically in Leningrad, encircled by German forces, where over half a 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: the German food supplies were stablized; 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.

Raul Hilberg has estimated that over half a million Polish Jews died in the ghettos due to starvation. Approximately 7.5 million non-Jewish Ukrainian, White Russian and Polish civilians died as a result of German occupation, many of them starved to death. In addition, some 3.3 million Soviet POWs perished through hunger, disease or shooting at the hands of the Germans on the Eastern front over the course of the war. The victims of the Hunger Plan were not unavoidable casualties of war but victims of a deliberate policy on the part of the occupational authorities, who set about implementing the first phase of their plan to colonize and Germanize the lands of Poland and the Soviet Union. It was the beginning of a premeditated genocide on a colossal scale.

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".

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[edit] References

  • Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, Viking, 2007, pp. 476–85, 538–49, ISBN 0670038261
  • 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.
  1. ^ Roland, Charles G (1992). "Scenes of Hunger and Starvation", Courage Under Siege. New York: Oxford University Press, 99–104. ISBN 978-0195062854. Retrieved on 2008-01-25. 
  2. ^ Odot (PDF). Yad Vashem.

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