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

by Lizzie Collingham

  In conjunction with the blockade of the cities, an intensive food confiscation campaign was begun in the villages. The German and Ukrainian police went from village to village searching houses, backyards, sheds, gardens and mills, confiscating every sack of grain they could find. Peasants were forced to thresh any grain they had in their stores. Those who simply could not deliver the food demanded of them were relieved of their cows or other livestock.174 The supplies of grain, meat and fat extracted from the Soviet Union increased from 3.5 million tons to 8.78 million tons. Although most of this was eaten on the spot by the Wehrmacht, large transports of food were sent to the Reich from the Ukraine in the autumn of 1942. By the end of the year the Food and Agriculture department in the Ukraine reported with satisfaction that they had collected the entire harvest: the peasants had nothing more to give.175

  Fritz Sauckel, in charge of the recruitment of forced labour, was amazed that 10–20 million people had not died of hunger in the Ukraine over the winter of 1941–42, as the experts had predicted.176 But when in June 1941 Backe had drafted twelve commandments to guide future administrators in the east, the eleventh was that no ‘false sympathy’ was needed for the Russian, as he ‘has already endured poverty, hunger and frugality for centuries. His stomach is elastic.’177 This pronouncement had come back to haunt him. The Soviets’ ability to survive was remarkable (it was equally astonishing in the unoccupied Soviet Union). Many of those alive in the winter of 1941–42 had survived the Ukrainian famine of 1932–33 and had acquired useful survival skills. For example, the Germans were sickened to discover that the civilians would dig up and eat dead horses. The Sicherheitsdienst reported that the Ukrainians ‘got food by begging from the army; in part they had also gathered well hidden and carefully looked after reserves, and on top of this, they seem used to putting up with famine in a manner which is quite unbelievable from the German perspective and can hold on to life by making do with the most inferior food substitutes’.178

  In the cities people found ways around the police checks. Vasyl Iablonsky, a factory worker, would often slip on to the cargo trains to nearby towns where more food was available. Announcements were made in three languages warning that anyone caught without a permit would be shot, but, ‘You don’t scare people like us. We hopped on and off we went. What’s the difference how you’re done for, you gotta eat.’179 The rural population was saved by the inefficiency of the German civil administration. The German farmers who were put in place to administer the collective farms were too few and too under-qualified to be effective.180 On average they were only able to visit each of the farms under their supervision once a week. This gave the Ukrainian farmers a large amount of room for manoeuvre. It allowed the peasants to indulge in petty acts of resistance, such as working slowly and frequent absenteeism. They used the time they took off from working on the collective farm to grow their own food in their garden plots. One day Oskana Iatsenko decided to stay at home to weed her garden but was filled with terror when she realized that her village chief had come to look for her, accompanied by ‘the German’. ‘I looked and died of fear. I thought I had died.’ She hid among some plum trees and although they did not find her she thought: ‘They will kill me, they will kill me.’181 A peasant caught breaking the rules might be shot or hung on the spot, receive a brutal beating or be sent to a labour camp. The harshness of German punishments was balanced by the fact that the German administrators were far less likely to find out about mis-demeanours than the Soviets. The mutual surveillance, which worked as a powerful force for conformity under the Bolsheviks, evaporated in the face of the hostility felt towards the Germans.

  The Ukrainian farmers used the freedom they gained in a variety of ways. Farm and brigade leaders would siphon off large amounts of produce on to the black market. Others used their new-found powers for good. Hryhorii Kariak Sova, the head of the land administration in the Novi Sanzhary district, persuaded the collective farm administrators to prepare fake records which undervalued the harvest. A second secret set of records then ensured that each peasant received more grain than they had received under the Soviet system.182 Indeed, when Sauckel complained that the Ukrainians were eating better than the normal consumer in Germany this may not have been an exaggeration.183 In the less fertile areas such as Polissia the peasants teetered on the verge of famine, and in the areas where the partisans were active the German reprisals left the peasants without homes or fields. But in the fertile regions many peasants recall the period of German occupation as a time of plenty, despite the summer confiscation campaign. The peasants found it much easier to hide food from the Germans and in later years there were some who reminisced that they ‘ate well’ and ‘were not hungry’, in comparison to the years of hunger under Soviet rule.184 In a reversal of the famine caused by collectivization, it was mainly the towns and cities rather than the countryside that starved during the occupation.

  The National Socialist leadership seem to have been incapable of grasping that a reign of terror is not sufficient to force people to surrender their means of existence. Hitler argued that the greater the chaos in the occupied areas the easier it would be to carry through the brutal Hunger Plan. In fact, in an under-developed agricultural area such as the occupied Soviet Union, erratic acts of violence accompanied by inadequate supervision simply resulted in the peasants retreating into self-sufficiency. They hoarded and hid away what supplies they could and directed their surplus out of the grasp of the occupiers and on to the black market. By late 1942 the civil administration was beginning to adopt a more placatory policy and there was talk of dissolving the collective farms. But it was far too late. In the spring of 1943 the Red Army began advancing towards the Ukraine, and when agricultural officials fell victim to the partisans delivery quotas remained unfulfilled. The Germans began to evacuate and took as much grain and agricultural equipment with them as they could. In a last act of spite Göring issued a secret order that all ‘bases of agricultural production are to be destroyed’.185 Backe’s bread-basket slipped from his grasp.

  The Wehrmacht stationed in the occupied Soviet Union never succeeded in extracting all the food it needed from the east, and the occupied Soviet Union never fed the entire Wehrmacht, as was the stated aim of the Hunger Plan. Even in the Ukraine the Wehrmacht still needed the Reich to provide 33 per cent of its meat and 60 per cent of its fat requirements.186 Backe’s Hunger Plan was never properly thought through and the backward nature of agriculture in much of the occupied Soviet Union, the disruption caused by the continual fighting, the loss of agricultural labour, machines, animals and fertilizer, the contradictions of the German agricultural policy which maintained the despised collectives and simply imposed draconian collection quotas without price incentives, the growth of the black market and the Soviet peasants’ ability to hide food stores from the German farm administrators, all combined to prevent the German occupiers from extracting the hoped-for quantities of food from the area. In order to gain as much food as Backe had hoped for, the agricultural administration would have had to inject capital, machinery and modern agricultural techniques into the farms. Conciliatory policies and fair prices for agricultural products would also have gone a long way towards creating an incentive for the peasantry to produce.

  Despite the shortcomings of National Socialist occupation policy, the Wehrmacht and the eastern civilian administration were fed by over 7 million tons of Soviet grain and, in the Ukraine at least, 17 million cattle, 20 million pigs, 27 million sheep and goats, and more than 100 million domestic fowl disappeared into the stomachs of the German soldiers.187 This relieved pressure on German farmers and freed up home-grown food for German civilians. Although the Soviet Union never supplemented the Reich’s food supplies to the extent that Backe had hoped, Germany did receive 2 million tons of grain, large quantities of potatoes, and some meat and vegetable oils from the east.188 Much of the food arrived in late 1942 as a result of the good Polish harvest and the concerted food collection campaign in
the Ukrainian countryside. In the autumn of 1942 Backe and Göring were both relieved to conclude that their radical actions in the east had succeeded in staving off a food crisis within Germany. Goebbels announced that Germany was ‘digesting’ the occupied territories. In October Göring announced a welcome increase in the bread and meat rations.189 The Sicherheitsdienst reported a noticeable relaxation of the tension among civilians.190 The Christmas of 1942 was made more cheerful by imports of sugar from Hungary, wheat from the Warthegau, and sunflower oil from the Ukraine. A good potato harvest within Germany also meant that the weekly ration virtually doubled.191

  Millions of eastern Jews and Soviet citizens died in order, supposedly, to free up food for the German occupiers. But it is doubtful that these murderous measures contributed a great deal to the collection of food in the east. Certainly, the annihilation of the Jews in the General Government did nothing to suppress the black market, and therefore what little food was freed up by their deaths was not channelled on to the plates of the Germans. In addition, much of the food that was denied the urban population in the Ukraine seems to have been eaten instead by the Ukrainian peasantry. Nevertheless, German army and civilian rations rested firmly upon the exploitation of foreign labour. Around 40 per cent of the bread and meat eaten by the Wehrmacht and the Reich population was either produced in the occupied territories, or produced within Germany using the forced labour of foreigners from these countries.192

  It was not until after the war that the German civilian population began to suffer from inadequate rations, and this post-war experience of hunger meant that many contrasted the competence and responsibility of the Nazi government to the callous failure on the part of the victorious Allied powers to feed the civilians in their care. This attitude was expressed by Margo Nagel, a student and dentist’s assistant in Berlin during the war. ‘I do not recall yearning for something that was not available … I do not recall anyone who said they were hungry during the war. Germany was always a well-organized country and I am sure that the party authorities saw to it that food was stockpiled and well distributed. The winter after the war was quite different when I lived in Hamburg where thousands of people died of starvation and exposure to the cold.’193 While her comments overlook the fact that the National Socialist government inflicted food shortages on urban Germans, they also show determined disregard for the fact that while Germans were well supplied between 1939 and 1945 their European neighbours were systematically plundered, murdered and deliberately starved to death for the sake of a secure food supply for German civilians.

  10

  Soviet Collapse

  I’ll never forget the little village deep in the forest where we were billeted or the atmosphere of tragedy and anxiety that permeated every word spoken, weighed upon the women drawing water at the well, and made even the children unusually reticent.

  (Andrei Sakharov, a Russian physicist who spent some of the war in the countryside)1

  When the young physicist (and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) Andrei Sakharov graduated from university in the autumn of 1942 his first war-work assignment was to go out into the countryside to cut wood. In the village where he stayed there were only old women and children left and the atmosphere was polluted by a ‘foreboding that things would get even worse before they got better … the horror of war was always uppermost in people’s minds’.2 The weakest link in the Soviet wartime edifice was undoubtedly agriculture. The struggles of Soviet farmers make the problems faced by farmers in the other major combatant countries pale in comparison. With the nation’s best agricultural land lost to the Germans until 1943, it was not so much a question of carefully balancing production to favour bread grains and maintain a minimum level of fats, fodder and meat, as a desperate struggle to cultivate as much of anything as possible. Throughout the war the Soviet Union struggled to feed its vast army, let alone all its citizens. The battle to produce food in the Soviet Union extracted every ounce of food from the peasantry while reducing both them and the land to a state of exhaustion.

  The Soviet Union entered the war with its agricultural sector in a wretched state of disrepair. The politics of the preceding decades had caused endless disruption. The requisitioning of food, men and horses during both the First World War and the ensuing civil war led to hardship in the countryside. This was matched by food shortages in the towns.3 Lenin’s introduction of the New Economic Policy in 1921 produced a short period of relative recovery. But then, in 1926, in an attempt to release revenue for industry, the government lowered agricultural prices. The peasants reacted by holding back their food from the cities. Rationing, which had only been discontinued in 1921, had to be reintroduced. In the end rationing was in force for more than half the twenty-five years preceding the Second World War.4

  Stalin was determined to eradicate market forces from the food economy and in 1929 he set about modernizing the agricultural sector in order to lay the foundation for his planned rejuvenation of Soviet industry.5 He even invited Thomas Campbell, a pioneer of large-scale mechanized wheat farming in the United States, to come to the Soviet Union to give advice on the introduction of new techniques.6 But Stalin’s programme of collectivization was no neutral programme of modernization. It was a scheme designed to impose the deadly will of the state upon the peasantry. The ownership of land as private property was abolished. The kulaks, the so-called rich peasantry, whose wealth often consisted only of one or two cows, were rounded up and deported to the gulags. Between 4 and 5 million were murdered.7 The rest of the peasantry were coerced into working for the new Party-owned farms, the kolkhozy, which, by consolidating peasant landholdings, were supposed to make farming more efficient.

  A young Cherkessian peasant who fled the Soviet Union in 1945 expressed the views of the majority of the Soviet peasantry when he denounced collectivization as a ‘slave system’. The peasants were forced to work for the collective farms for a certain number of days per year. In return they were supposed to be paid sufficient food to feed themselves and their families. However, before the collective farm could distribute food to its workers it had to deliver a quota of food to the state. These quotas were frequently set so high that the farms had virtually nothing left to feed their workers. The Cherkessian recalled that, ‘There were years when you worked a whole year and got nothing, everything went to the state … They took the butter … the eggs … the meat … we had to give wool … the food products from [our private] garden … Collective farmers ate worse than workers … the collective farmer worked from dawn to dusk and got nothing.’8 His family survived on one potato and a teaspoon of corn mush a day. ‘Life was horrible, life held on by a bare thread.’9 A Ukrainian from Chernigov explained that the only way to survive was for the peasantry to cultivate the tiny plots of land which they were allowed to keep for their own use. But because ‘socialist work comes first, then your private work’ it was very difficult for the members of the collective to find the time to work on the private plots of land and ‘in actuality, what will often happen is that his children or some grandmother in the family will work in his private lot’.10

  In the Ukraine, where resistance to collectivization had been particularly strong, the state ruthlessly requisitioned food to the point where the villages were stripped of food, seed grain and fodder. With nothing left to feed them, the peasants slaughtered their livestock. But once the animals had been eaten there was nothing left for the people to eat either and famine spread.11 In the Ukraine as many as 7 million peasants died of starvation. One survivor recalled how, in 1933, ‘You could go into a village and see the corn standing high in the fields yet there would not be a soul in the entire village. They had planted the corn in the spring, and died during the summer, so that the corn grew untended.’12

  The end result of collectivization was to relocate hunger to the villages rather than the towns and cities.13 While the peasants suffered, the food situation gradually improved in the urban areas. By 1936 the government was able to abolish r
ationing. Emigrants interviewed by the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System in the 1950s routinely recalled that in the towns clothing was more of a problem than food just before the outbreak of war. In the countryside collectivization did introduce new and better strains of wheat and the collective farms were mechanized, but the peasants were repressed, disillusioned and demotivated. They had no incentive to work hard on the state farms given that they were unlikely to receive a fair share of the harvest. In terms of productivity the Soviet agricultural sector continued to lag behind industry, and it was unable to provide a solid foundation upon which to build an economy, let alone to fight a war.14