Exorcising Hitler (27 page)

To see themselves through the eyes of their occupiers, the defeated population in Germany needed only to observe the foreign soldiers’ behaviour, and that behaviour did not bode well. If any Germans had really dared to believe that they were to be ‘liberated’, in a fashion in any way similar to other European nations, disillusionment came quickly and thoroughly.

As for the effect of this on a population of seventy million Germans, quite suddenly relieved of the thrill and the burden of European mastery, it was hard to tell. It soon became clear that the chief task facing the German people was not political or spiritual regeneration, but finding enough food to get through to the next harvest. And then the one after that.

It was equally clear from what the victors said and did after peace was declared, that, unlike in most of the rest of the continent, which was also facing terrible hardship, this was a task that would be down to Germans, and Germans alone. No one planned to help them. No one.

6

Hunger

On the afternoon of 4 October 1942, one of the most well-fed men in Europe gave a speech, recorded in front of an enthusiastic audience and broadcast live on the radio throughout the Greater German Reich and the occupied countries. In this speech he celebrated the fact that during the coming winter, as during the previous one, Germans would eat while millions of their fellow human beings would, in a quite planned and strategic way, starve.

The man was Reich Marshal Hermann Goering, the venue the Sportpalast in Berlin-Schöneberg. The occasion was the ‘Reich Harvest Thanksgiving Festival’. Of course, he did not actually say, ‘We are planning to starve and kill millions’. He simply told his audience, in his firm but friendly way – Goering was, despite his own wildly excessive, decadent lifestyle, remarkably adept at finding the ‘common touch’ – that their rations would be increased, and that, as it approached its fourth wartime winter, Germany’s problems with food shortages were over.

The reason for this was twofold: first, that year’s harvest was better than the previous two; and second, the rest of Europe – especially Poland and Russia – was being systematically robbed to ensure that the German population, far from suffering, lived better than before, as befitted their status as rulers of Europe and as ‘the master race’.

What Goering didn’t tell his audience was even more significant. Who was paying the price for their continued wellbeing in the middle of such a terrible war? The answer was never revealed during the war, although it was well known among Nazi officials in the occupied countries and also among those responsible for feeding the nation. But it was and is quite clear. So that Germans could eat, Jews and Poles and Russians (and Serbs and Greeks and Dutch people, among others) must and would go hungry or, in millions of cases, die.

Already in the winter of 1941–2, newly occupied Greece had been the first nation to suffer. In peacetime this largely rocky and mountainous country had always needed to import food. It was now plunged into crisis by systematic hoarding, soaring inflation, crippling occupation costs and an enforced ‘loan’ to Germany inflicted upon the collaborationist Greek government – all further exacerbated by ruthless requisitioning of foodstuffs on the part of the Germans and their Italian and Bulgarian co-occupiers.

As a result, Greece suffered the first famine of the Second World War. The ‘great hunger’ cost the lives of up to 300,000 Greeks, especially in metropolitan Athens, which relied on suddenly non-existent imports from the countryside, and the picturesque but arid Cycladic islands. Viewed in immediate terms, the Germans had not deliberately caused the catastrophe, but they did little to mitigate it, and continued to exploit the country’s remaining resources wholly without consideration for the starving natives. It was Goering once again who acted as brutally frank spokesman for the Nazi elite: ‘We cannot worry unduly about the Greeks,’ he said coldly. ‘It is a misfortune which will strike many other people beside them.’
¹

In fact, while the German armies appeared everywhere victorious, the year 1942 had been a difficult one when it came to feeding the Reich’s population. Two previous consecutive harvests had been poor, and the horrendous cost in money and production of keeping an army of three million fed on the Russian front had led to embarrassing shortfalls, rations cuts, rapid reduction of the national grain store and widespread public discontent.

An intricately interconnected nexus involving Goering’s Four Year Plan Office, Himmler’s SS empire and the powerful State Secretary (later Minister) for Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe, hummed with activity as officials spent the first months of that year organising a solution to this problem. It would be terrifyingly radical.

It was Backe, a cold-blooded technocrat, who had reorganised German agriculture before 1939 to make it independent of world markets, as part of the Nazis’ master plan for economic autarky, sidelining the romantic ‘blood-and-soil’ dreams of his nominal boss, Minister Walter Darré, in favour of more efficient and ‘modern’ modes of food production.

After the outbreak of war, following ruthless racist logic, Backe and his experts, including leading academics in their fields, developed plans to cover the supply and feeding of the German army during the invasion of the Soviet Union. These were frankly genocidal in tone. It was clear that the people of the Reich could not be fed comfortably unless the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front ceased altogether drawing on food supplies from Germany proper, which were barely adequate for the domestic civilian population. Instead, it must ‘live off the land’ in occupied Russia. And, if necessary, provide a surplus that could be sent to Germany to cover shortages there.

The Nazi state’s experts were quite clear: if the Wehrmacht was to be self-sufficient, and German civilians kept well fed, then many millions of Russians, especially in the cities – which had grown rapidly during the 1930s as a result of Stalin’s programme of rapid industrialisation – would have to starve. On 2 May 1941, at a meeting at which all the major ministries were represented at State Secretary level, this murderous policy was agreed. According to a contemporary report, the conclusions were as follows:

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 many millions of people will die of starvation.

3. The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake, and only then the removal of grain.
²

Backe himself believed that the Soviet Union had a ‘surplus population’ of between twenty and thirty million that could and must be liquidated in the course of Operation Barbarossa, the campaign against the Soviet Union – this quite apart from any later post-war plans to settle the fertile Ukrainian and White Russian plains with Germans.

Himmler stated openly at a meeting of senior SS officers a few days before ‘Barbarossa’ was launched in June 1941 that in this fight to the death ‘through military actions and the food problems, 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will die’.

Goering himself said in November, less than five months after the invasion had begun, that the battle for Russia would bring about ‘the greatest mortality since the Thirty Years War’.
³
He repeatedly made gloating remarks to the effect that ‘if anyone’s going to starve, it will not be Germans, but someone else’.
⁴
These were echoed by a remark by Goebbels in his diary that before Germany would ‘starve . . . a series of other countries will have to take their turn first’.
⁵

The fact that, less than three months before Goering’s ‘harvest festival’ speech, the food situation in the Reich itself remained problematic, was further proved by a report that has survived of a meeting at Rovno, the seat of the East Prussian Gauleiter and ‘Reich Commissar for the Ukraine’, Erich Koch. In his address to his officials, Koch broached precisely that subject. The Reich Commissar, who had just returned from Hitler’s headquarters, recounted how he had tried to resist Goering’s demands for more imports from Russia. However, the Führer supported Reich Marshal Goering, and, according to the report of the meeting, that was that:

The Gauleiter came direct from the Führer’s headquarters . . . The food situation in Germany is serious. Production is already falling as a result. An increase in the bread ration is a political necessity if the war is to be continued with success. The shortfall in grain will have to be made up from the Ukraine. The Führer has made the Gauleiter responsible for ensuring that these quantities are secured. In the light of this situation, the feeding of the [Ukrainian] population is a matter of complete indifference . . .
⁶

Koch’s remarks to his underlings are not just another expression of the consensus that by then had emerged among all senior Nazi officials. In the early autumn of 1942, farmers in occupied Poland and Russia were placed under enormous pressure from armed foraging groups, in Poland supervised by the notoriously brutal German ‘District Captains’ (
Kreishauptleute
). Sixty per cent of this already demanding quota was to be supplied by the end of September, and the rest by the end of November. Punishments for withholding of produce, real or imagined, were draconian:

. . . because of the increased pressure, [the District Captains] on their own initiative increased the consignments compulsorily due by 10 to 70%. Moreover, the district farm supervisors had tightened the schedules, so that the farmers had to deliver the 60% by 20 September and the remaining 40% by 1 November. In Garwolin District, the farmers had to deliver as much as 90% of the bread grain by as early as 9 September. The seizures were once again accompanied by terror and violence. In Grójec, several farmers were hanged because they had not fulfilled their quotas. In Lublin District, the terror was particularly severe. Farms were put to the torch and farmers beaten. According to the reports from the [Polish] underground, the shooting and hanging of farmers were everyday events.

The gathering of the harvest in 1942 went satisfactorily for the German authorities . . .
⁷

It was not just that Ukrainians, Russians and Jews were to be starved – not to mention the Polish and Jewish inhabitants of the General Government of Poland, who were to suffer a similar fate. Worse, it seems likely that Goering’s and Backe’s demands for massively increased confiscation of food supplies from the conquered eastern territories  led almost immediately to an acceleration of the Holocaust itself. ‘Unproductive’ individuals in the occupied east, who merely consumed food that might otherwise help support the Wehrmacht in Russia or keep up the standard of living of the population back in Germany, were from now on to be systematically murdered on an industrial scale.
⁸

In the second half of 1942, during the campaign known as
Aktion Reinhard
– in honour of the recently assassinated SD Chief and ‘Protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich – the extermination camps at Treblinka and Bełżec, Majdanek and Sobibór reached the peak of their ghastly productivity. At least 1.5 million ‘unproductive’ Jews died.

The same went – had to a great extent already gone – for the 3.3 million soldiers of the Red Army who had become prisoners after the huge German victories of June–November 1941. By February 1942, 60 per cent of them had perished – starved, shot, even gassed (some of the early experiments with so-called ‘gas wagons’ were carried out on Soviet prisoners of war).
⁹

This treatment was, incidentally, in stark contrast to the fates of Russian prisoners a quarter of a century earlier during the First World War. The Kaiser’s government and its military were quite capable of tough, even harsh occupation policy, but they kept to the letter of the Hague Convention when it came to treatment of POWs. Of 1.4 million Russian prisoners then, a mere 5.4 per cent died in German captivity
¹⁰
– and this at a time when German civilians were starving in their thousands because of the British naval blockade (roughly 800,000 were reckoned to have died as a result of malnutrition and associated diseases between 1914 and 1918 – more than died from Allied bombing between 1939 and 1945).

By deliberate policy, the German army failed to advance into Leningrad in the autumn of 1941. To do so would have involved decisions about how to either feed or dispose of at least three million Russian civilians. The siege that followed was intended to starve the city’s people to death, thus avoiding the unpleasant necessity of liquidating them in some other, more active way. ‘For economic reasons, the conquest of large cities is undesirable,’ the view went. ‘To besiege them is more advantageous.’
¹¹
As Professor Wilhelm Ziegelmayer, nutrition adviser to the Wehrmacht High Command, wrote in September 1941: ‘We shall also not allow ourselves in the future to be burdened with demands for the capitulation of Leningrad. It must be annihilated by a scientifically based method.’ By January 1942, the people of Leningrad were dying at the rate of nearly 4,000 a day. In the first eleven months of the siege, around 650,000 died of starvation and disease.
¹²