The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  The department of the quartermaster, food officers and the military commanders and commandants on the ground responded to the problem of the disappointing food deliveries by calling for the removal of Jewish mouths from the Soviet food chain. It is difficult to build up a precise picture of the plans for the annihilation of the Soviet Jews as the National Socialists took care not to leave incriminating written records. It is certain that ‘pre-invasion there were no orders given and no written plan to wipe out all the Soviet Jews’.43 It was assumed that the majority of the Soviet Jewish population would die from undernourishment along with the rest of the inhabitants of the western towns in which they were concentrated.44 As the Wehrmacht stormed across the Soviet Union it was followed by the Einsatzgruppen, who were ordered to murder all adult men identified as potential political leaders and resistance organizers. Some of their victims were Bolsheviks but most of them were Jewish. In the summer the campaign was stepped up and the SS and the police began systematically to murder all Soviet Jews, including women and children. The quartermaster-general reported that he expected the annihilation of the Jews in central Lithuania, which began in August, to significantly alleviate the food supply problems for Army Group North. In August, 15,000 Jews were shot in Polesje (Prijetsümpfe). Task forces moved through northern Ukraine massacring the inhabitants of village after village. Particular targets were Jews in urban areas where the civilian population was starving, especially in the towns where food and shelter were a problem for troops moving up to the front.45 In Kharkov 15,000 Jews were murdered that winter, supposedly in order to alleviate the food situation. In Kiev the German authorities claimed that a systematic massacre of Jews on 29 and 30 September had alleviated the food and housing conditions for the rest of the civilian population.46 By the end of 1941 there were virtually no Jews left in eastern Belorussia, northern and eastern Ukraine or any other parts of the occupied Soviet Union. Over a period of six months a total of 800,000 Soviet Jews had been murdered.47

  IMPLEMENTING THE HUNGER PLAN

  In the summer of 1941 the shortcomings of Backe’s starvation policy became apparent. The designation ‘plan’ gives an entirely false impression that the implementation of the strategy was well thought through and organized. In fact, the bureaucrats on the ground were given no precise instructions as to how the Hunger Plan should be implemented.48 The attack on the Soviet Union was supposed to end in victory sometime towards the end of September. This would free up plenty of troops, whom Hitler, Göring and Backe then intended to deploy in enforcing the starvation of the towns.49 There was no contingency plan in place for the eventuality that a military campaign would be taking place while the inhabitants of the hinterland behind the front were supposed to be starving to death. For example, it was predicted in the document that livestock rearing would cease in Belorussia due to a lack of imported feed.50 This was all very well as long as there were no longer troops at the front line relying on local food supplies.

  In the first few weeks of the military campaign the principles of the Hunger Plan were followed and Soviet civilians received no food handouts and no provision was made to introduce rationing in the towns and cities. However, the army relied on the urban areas as transport and support centres for the troops. Given the small numbers of security forces, the prospect of civilian unrest in these towns was most unwelcome. In the Ukraine the Wehrmacht used the towns not only as food supply bases for the soldiers at the front but also as centres for small-scale repair workshops and armaments factories, even though this was in direct conflict with an alternative plan to shut down all eastern industry and ship the labour back to the Reich. Instead of going to work in their factories the industrial workforce spent long days trawling the countryside for food. The armaments inspector for the Ukraine, Major-General Hans Leykauf, complained in frustration, ‘if we shoot dead all the Jews, allow the prisoners of war to die, dish out famine to the majority of the urban population, and in the coming year will lose a proportion of the rural population to hunger, the question remains unanswered: Who will actually produce economic goods?’51

  As the realities sank in of the difficulty of controlling vast swathes of eastern territory filled with starving towns and cities, the military administration in the Ukraine changed its mind about the Hunger Plan. A local military administrator commented in October that ‘ever more frequently there has been mention of the civilian food supply … That the Russians are still here too, we never really considered. No, that is not quite right. Following the official instructions we were … not supposed to consider them. But the war has taken a different turn … Under these circumstances we cannot afford not to consider the population in food terms. But where are we supposed to get anything from?’52 Orders were sent out by the field commanders for the peasants to bring food into the towns.53 It was proving impossible to close off entire towns from the countryside, and the black market was flourishing as civilians streamed into the rural areas to barter for food.54

  Once the civil administration took over the government of the occupied areas from the military, the agricultural organization was put under the control of Backe and the hard line of the Hunger Plan was re-imposed. Exceptions were made for those sections of the population that were useful to the Germans. Railway workers, wagon drivers and colonies of road-builders were fed on the lowest ration scale of the army.55 But the rest of the people were allocated no rations. The brutal policy swelled the ranks of the partisans and the rural population was augmented by townspeople fleeing the hunger. The military appealed for a change of policy. Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch suggested a new feeding hierarchy which prioritized the German army, but which placed the indigenous civilian population second in line, before German civilians in the Reich. Lieutenant-General Erich Friderici supported such a scheme, pointing out, ‘This is not a humanitarian concern but a purely practical consideration in German interests.’56

  Göring remained implacable, and doggedly repeated to military sceptics his mantra that the German administration must expect ‘the greatest death rate since the Thirty Years War’.57 Despite the Wehr-macht troops’ reputation for brutality there were evidently plenty who found this too much to stomach. Not only did the quartermaster-general have to issue repeated warnings to the troops that they must not plunder indiscriminately, he also had continually to issue commands that troops were not to feed Russian civilians from the mess. Evidently, in the contradictory chaos that was the occupied Soviet Union, both were frequent occurrences. The quartermaster-general noted that the ordinary soldiers were often ‘very kind’ to the civilians, even though they were repeatedly told, ‘every gram of bread or food that I give out of generosity to the people in the occupied territories, I take away from the German people, and my family’.58

  Towards the end of the year, the Commander-in-Chief of the 9th Army made the bitter observation that ‘if the Russian attack had been a Blitzkrieg, then we would not have needed to take the civilian population into account. But an end [to the fighting] is not foreseeable … in these circumstances it is not sensible to follow a course which makes the civilian population 100 per cent into an enemy.’59 On 4 November 1941 the civil administration bowed to the reality that some townspeople were already receiving food and set a maximum ration scale for the towns in the occupied territories. However, the allocation of food simply modified the principles of the Hunger Plan and targeted more specific groups. It was stipulated that those who worked for the Germans could receive up to 1,200 calories a day, their dependants 850 calories, but the number of people receiving this ration was not to amount to more than 20 per cent of the total population. Children under fourteen and Jews were allocated the impossibly tiny amount of 420 calories, which amounts to about 500 grams of potatoes. Jews were banned from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat or fruit, from dealing with farmers directly or from going to the food markets. This was a death sentence by hunger rather than by shooting. Over the winter of 1941–42 tens of thousands of Jewish men, women a
nd children died of starvation.60 They were joined by at least 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, deliberately left to starve in the holding camps, and millions of Soviets who lived in cities which were deprived of a food supply.

  In the autumn of 1941, in the area controlled by Army Group Centre and in the General Government, about 9,000 Soviet prisoners of war were dying in the German camps each month.61 This equals the total number of British and American soldiers who died in German and Italian captivity during the entire five and a half years of the war.62 At a meeting with the Wehrmacht, Göring clarified the National Socialist attitude to the Soviets: ‘When it comes to the care of the Bolshevik prisoners, we are not, in contrast with other prisoners of war, bound by any international agreement to look after them. Their care can only be determined by their ability to work for us.’63

  The conditions in which Soviet prisoners of war were held were appalling. The camps were nothing more than fields surrounded by fences. There were frequently no buildings, nor even tents. There was little water, the distribution of food was minimal; the Ministry of Food allocated them a ration of 1,561 calories a day but transport problems meant that supplies were erratic. While the prisoners still had some fat reserves and bodily resistance there were only one or two deaths a day in each camp. But as autumn approached and the weather conditions worsened they began to die in droves. A German officer described how anyone following a column of prisoners ‘can see that all the leaves and the discarded stalks of sugar beet have been picked up from the fields with wild greed and consumed … In the fields if a group of prisoners approaches, the women throw sugar beet on the path and they are gathered by the prisoners as quickly as possible. It is to be expected that the sight of these weakened prisoners whose hunger stares out of their eyes, damages the reputation of the Germans in the eyes of the population.’64 But comments such as this were not welcome. Those uneasy about the policy were told, in the language of the Hunger Plan, that they ‘must realise that every unjustified or surplus amount of food that the prisoners receive, must be removed from the civilians at home or the German soldiers’.65 By September 1941 the prisoners were so desperate with hunger they began to beg the guards to shoot them.66

  Once it became clear that the eastern territories were not going to yield the quantities of food that had been hoped for, the policy of allowing the prisoners to slowly starve to death shifted to one of determined extermination. Backe threatened that, unless the Soviet prisoners’ ration was reduced, a cut in the German civilian ration would be necessary. In one of the few statements that clearly expressed what was usually an unspoken policy, the Quartermaster-General Eduard Wagner told the army chiefs of staff in no uncertain terms that ‘prisoners incapable of work in the prison camps are to starve’.67 Even those who were selected as fit enough to work died as they laboured. A lieutenant in charge of reconstructing the Russian railways complained in October 1942 that he was ‘experiencing horrible days. Every day thirty of my prisoners die, or I must allow them to be shot. It is certainly a picture of cruelty … The prisoners, only partially clothed, partly without coats, could no longer get dry. The food is not sufficient, and they collapse one after the other … When one sees what a human life really means, then an inner transformation in your own thinking happens. A bullet, a word, and a life is no more. What is a human life?’68

  Between October 1941 and March 1942 somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 Soviet prisoners of war starved to death. The prisoners held by Army Group Centre and in the General Government, where food-supply problems were at their worst, were the most affected. While Army Group Centre took only 47 per cent of the Soviet prisoners, 71 per cent of those for whom they were responsible died.69 In Poland, 85 per cent of the prisoners died. By February 1942, 60 per cent of the 3.35 million Soviet prisoners were dead.70 If the Germans were to fail to achieve their goal of starving the entire urban Soviet population to death, they applied the principles of the Hunger Plan to their Soviet captives with chilling efficacy.

  The siege of Leningrad has become an iconic symbol of starvation during the Second World War. Stories abound of Leningraders boiling leather to make jellies and burning antique furniture and precious books to keep warm.71 The desperate inhabitants of the city are known to have resorted to cannibalism, and about 1,500 people, mainly young unemployed women desperate to find food for their children, were arrested for the crime.72 One million people died in the siege of Leningrad. The responsibility for their deaths lies largely with the German invaders, but the Soviets were also partly to blame for the plight of the city. As the German army made alarmingly fast progress across western Russia it became clear that it would reach the city, but the authorities evacuated only 636,000 people, leaving more than 2.5 million to face a long winter of hunger. In all likelihood ‘the leadership did not want to appear to be abandoning the city, a symbolism that would not have been lost on the rest of the country’.73 Stalin was prepared to sacrifice Leningrad’s population ruthlessly for the sake of Soviet morale.

  Disorganization and lack of preparation meant that there was too little food stored in the city for its citizens to survive a prolonged siege. The authorities failed to disperse what food there was, leaving it vulnerable to air raids. On 8 September, 3,000 tons of grain and 2,500 tons of sugar went up in flames when the Badaev warehouses were firebombed. Later, Alexei Bezzubov, an inventive nutritionist who worked at Leningrad’s Vitamin Institute, initiated the digging-up of the ‘boulders of sweet black earth’ which remained at the burnt-out site, and managed to manufacture boiled sweets out of it for the energy-starved Leningraders.74 Initially, rations were too generous and used up the meagre stores of food too quickly. Eventually the corn and rye flour that was left had to be eked out with cottonseed oil cake, which was usually used for ship fuel, edible cellulose, chaff, flour sweepings and dust from flour sacks. The resulting bread was ‘black, sticky, like putty, sodden with an admixture of wood pulp and sawdust’.75 Anna Ivanovna Likhacheva, a doctor working in the clinic of the Red Banner factory, recalled how the ‘fatalities began in December, when the lack of food was coupled with the cold and loss of public transportation. Cold starving people, faithfully carrying out their duties … trudged tens of kilometres, often on only 125g of ersatz bread per day and soured cabbage leaves or yeast soup for dinner … Excruciating hunger forces a person to think and talk only about one thing – about food, to share memories of dishes that one loved or disliked.’76

  Despite the fact that so much has been written about the siege of Leningrad, it is less well known that the Germans regarded the death by starvation of its inhabitants as only one element in a far larger plan to eliminate as many Soviet consumers – or, rather, ‘useless eaters’ – as possible. Even if the inhabitants had wished to surrender, explicit orders had been given forbidding the Wehrmacht from accepting. Quartermaster-General Wagner remarked, ‘What are we supposed to do with a city of three and a half million which just rests itself on our supply pouch?’77 There could be no question of diverting food from the Wehrmacht into a conquered city.78

  If the Germans had taken the city they would still have left the population to starve, just as they did the people living in the area around the city. These civilians were so desperate that it was impossible to stop them wandering around in the front-line areas looking for something to eat. Tatiana Vassilieva was thirteen when the war stranded her family in Wyritza, a small town in the German-occupied area, about 60 kilometres from Leningrad. In autumn they slaughtered their goat and ‘ate meat for a whole week. Everything from the garden was eaten up ages ago.’ Her mother then bartered all their possessions for potatoes, but by December they had nothing left to barter. Not quite defeated, her mother made a soup out of the family cat and a gruel out of birch wood, against which their stomachs revolted. Then, in despair, Tatiana, her two-year-old sister and her mother joined her sick father on the bed and ‘prepared to die’. They were saved by a German tailor who was billeted in their house in January. ‘“Bread �
�� children” he said, and put his finger to his lips.’ But then he was called up to fight on the front. Rather than watch her family fade, Tatiana set out with a sledge in search of food. On an empty stomach she walked 120 kilometres, taking several days before reaching a corn-growing area where two kind women give her a sack of grain.79 Although she saved her family, her father was later beaten to death by the SS and she was eventually deported to the Reich as a forced labourer. At the end of the war she came home to a ‘broken’ mother, and to her sister, who had become partially deaf and had lost the use of her legs.

  The policy of starvation was also applied against the populations of Kiev and Kharkov in the Ukraine, but because the circumstances were less dramatic in that they were not besieged the stories of these cities are less well known. Hitler ordered that Kiev be reduced to rubble by aerial bombing but his generals ignored his demand and took possession of the city on 16 September 1941. Every day a large proportion of the 400,000 people still living in the city would stream out into the countryside to bargain for food. A reverse stream of farmers would later be seen driving their carts into the city to pick up the household goods they had been offered in exchange for food. Then, in October, the German authorities banned the supply of food to the city.80 Otto Bräutigam later wrote of how the agronomists in meetings would simply state, ‘Kiev must starve.’81 Road-blocks were set up and the peasants were no longer able to trundle their carts laden with cabbages and potatoes into the city.82 The authorities did allow a market to open two days a week where it was sometimes possible to buy a few potatoes. Mostly only potato peelings were available. They were minced to make into a flour which was fried as a sort of pancake. A survivor recalled that as a child he found these pancakes ‘unbelievably nice’.83 Bread was still sold in the city but non-workers were allocated a mere 200 grams, or one or two slices, a week (this was eventually raised to 400 grams in December). Even in Leningrad at that time people were receiving 125 grams of bread a day (875 grams a week). The bread was a peculiar substitute substance made from millet mixed with barley, chestnuts and lupine (usually used as fodder for animals). It had a clay-like consistency but disintegrated as it dried out and, as one unfortunate consumer described, ‘it was gritty to eat and had a bitter-sweet taste. It was difficult to digest.’84 Many became ill from eating it.85