The age of empire for western Europe had come to an end with the First World War. Now, rather than slowly fading away, Germany was about to deliver a body blow. As the Royal Air Force prepared to take to the skies for the Battle of Britain, loud voices trumpeted the end of an era. The German minister in Kabul was busy predicting that by the end of the summer Hitler would be in London. In preparation for the British Empire’s final collapse, concrete proposals were put to leading figures in the Afghan government: if the country abandoned the neutral stance it had adopted at the start of the war, Germany promised to cede a large chunk of north-western India as well as the port of Karachi when these fell into its lap. It was a tempting offer. Even the British envoy in Kabul recognised that the British ship ‘looked like sinking’, and taking the chance that it ‘might stay afloat’ needed courage and faith. Taking steps like cutting freight costs for Afghan cotton crops to make sure the local economy did not collapse was the smallest of token gestures – and a sign of how limited Britain’s options were. At this crucial moment, the Afghans held firm – or at least they wavered, not throwing their lot in with Germany straight away.57
By the summer of 1940, Britain and its empire were hanging on for dear life. The stroke of a pen in the small hours in Moscow the previous summer sealing an agreement between Nazi Germany and Communist Soviet Union had made the world look very different, very quickly. The future lay with a new series of connections that would link Berlin through the Soviet Union deep into Asia and the Indian subcontinent, one that would re-route trade and resources away from western Europe to its centre.
This reorientation, however, depended on continued and consistent support from the Soviet Union. Although goods and materials flowed through to Germany in the months that followed the invasion of Poland, they did not always do so smoothly. Negotiations were tense, particularly when it came to wheat and oil – two resources that were in particular demand. Stalin oversaw matters personally, deciding whether the Germans should be allowed to take delivery of a requested consignment of 800,000 tons of oil or only a much smaller amount, and on what terms. Discussing individual shipments was fraught and time consuming, and a source of near-constant anxiety for German planners.58
Not surprisingly, the German Foreign Office recognised how fragile the state of affairs was and produced reports underlining the dangers of over-dependence on Moscow. If for whatever reason something went wrong – change of leadership, obstinacy or simple commercial disagreement – Germany would be exposed. This was the single biggest threat to Hitler’s astonishing run of military success in Europe.59
It was this sense of unease and uncertainty that led to the decision that was to cost the lives of millions of German soldiers, millions of Russians – and millions of Jews: the invasion of the Soviet Union. In typical fashion, when Hitler announced his latest venture at the end of July 1940, he dressed it up in terms of an ideological battle. It was time to seize the chance, he told General Jodl, to eliminate Bolshevism.60 In fact, what was at stake were raw materials, and above all, food.
Over the course of the second half of 1940 and early 1941, it was not just the military who were set to work on the logistics of an invasion, but economic planners too. They were led by Herbert Backe, an agricultural specialist who had joined the Nazi party in the early 1920s and rose steadily through the ranks, becoming a protégé of Richard Darré, Reichsminister of Food and Agriculture. Backe’s slavish devotion to the Nazi cause, coupled with his expertise in farming, led to his becoming increasingly influential in the reforms of the 1930s that regulated prices and set limits on both import and export markets.61
Backe was obsessed with the idea that Russia might be the solution to Germany’s problems. As the Russian Empire had expanded, the steppes had been slowly transformed from a home to nomadic pastoralists to a perfect breadbasket, field upon field of cereals stretching out across flat plains as far as the eye could see. The soil was extraordinarily fertile, especially in the areas where the earth was dark from the richness of its minerals. Scientific expeditions sent to explore the region by the Russian Academy of Sciences waxed lyrical about the belt that stretched from the Black Sea deep into Central Asia, reporting excitedly that conditions were ideally suited to highly productive large-scale arable farming.62
Agriculture in southern Russia and Ukraine had grown at ferocious speed before the 1917 Revolution, boosted by growing domestic demand, rising exports and scientific research into the best-quality wheat and how to maximise yields from lands that had been grazed for millennia by nomads and their livestock.63 No one knew the potential of the steppes, which had expanded production so quickly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, better than Herbert Backe: his area of expertise, and the topic of his doctoral dissertation, was Russian grain.64 A small, wiry man who wore glasses and dressed smartly, Backe led teams that produced successive drafts of what the aims and objectives of an invasion should be. As he stressed to Hitler, Ukraine was the key: control of the rich agricultural plains that ran across the north of the Black Sea and on past the Caspian would ‘liberate us from every economic pressure’.65 Germany would be ‘invincible’ if it could take the parts of the Soviet Union that held ‘immense riches’.66 Gone would be the dependence on the USSR’s goodwill and its whimsical leadership; the effects of the British blockade of the Mediterranean and the North Sea would be massively reduced. This was the chance to provide Germany with access to all the resources it needed.
This is exactly how Hitler came to talk about what was at stake after the attack eventually got under way in the summer of 1941. As German troops moved east with astonishing speed in the first days of the invasion, the Führer could barely contain his excitement. Germany would never leave these newly conquered lands, he asserted gleefully; they would become ‘our India’, ‘our very own Garden of Eden’.67
Joseph Goebbels, Reichsminister of Propaganda, also had little doubt that the attack was all about resources, especially wheat and grain. In an article written in 1942, he declared in his characteristic deadpan and callous manner that the war had been started for ‘grain and bread, for a well-stocked breakfast, lunch and dinner table’. This, and nothing more, was Germany’s war aim, he went on: the capture of ‘the vast fields of the east [which] sway with golden wheat, enough – more than enough – to nourish our people and all of Europe’.68
There was an urgent reality behind comments like these, for Germany found itself running increasingly short of food and supplies – with shipments of Soviet grain failing to reduce chronic problems of supply. In February 1941, for example, German radio was broadcasting that there were food shortages across Europe as a result of trade blockades by the British that had previously been described as nothing less than ‘mental derangement’ – or ‘dementia Britannica’, as announcers referred to it.69 By the summer of 1941, Goebbels was recording in his diary that shops in Berlin had bare shelves; finding vegetables for sale was a rarity. This caused unstable prices and fuelled a thriving black market, which increased the anxieties of a population that, while not yet restless, was starting to ask precisely what the benefits of German expansion had been – a development which made Hitler’s propaganda chief decidedly nervous.70 As one local official put it, the ‘overworked and exhausted men and women’ in his part of Germany ‘do not see why the war must be carried on still further into Asia and Africa’. Happier days were now a distant memory.71
The solution had been provided by Backe and his cohort of analysts. Backe himself had been at pains to note the deteriorating food situation within Germany in his annual report on supplies at the end of 1940. Indeed, in a meeting held by state secretaries in January 1941 with Hermann Göring in his capacity as co-ordinator of a Four Year Plan, he had gone so far as to warn that it would not be long before meat would have to be rationed, a step that had been repeatedly vetoed for fear of losing support not just for the war but for the Nazis.72
Backe’s proposal was radical. While the Soviet Unio
n was vast and varied in terms of geography and climate, it could be divided by a crude line. To the south, covering Ukraine, southern Russia and the Caucasus, were fields and resources that formed a ‘surplus’ zone. To the north, that is central and northern Russia, Belarus and the Baltics, there was a ‘deficit’ zone. As Backe saw it, those on one side of the line produced food; those on the other side just consumed it. The answer to Germany’s problems was to concentrate on taking the former – and to ignore the latter. The ‘surplus’ zone should be captured, and its produce diverted to Germany. The ‘deficit’ zone was to be cut off; if and how it survived was of little concern. Its loss was to be Germany’s gain.
The reality of what this meant was spelt out at a meeting that took place in Berlin just weeks before the launch of Operation Barbarossa, the codename given to the invasion of the Soviet Union. On 2 May, planners discussed the priorities and expected results of the attack: the German armies should strip what they could from the land to feed themselves as the advance progressed; the promised land was expected to start producing from the outset. The Wehrmacht was to be supplied from Russia from the moment German soldiers crossed the frontier.
The effect on those living in the ‘deficit’ zone was also noted at the meeting. They were to be cut off at a stroke. In one of the most chilling documents in history, the minutes simply state: ‘as a result, x million people will doubtlessly starve, if that which is necessary for us is extracted from the land’.73 These deaths were the price to pay for Germany being able to feed itself. These millions were collateral damage, necessary victims for German success and survival.
The meeting went on to consider other logistical matters to ensure things went smoothly. The main arteries that linked the agricultural plains to the transport infrastructure were to be secured to enable materials to be shipped back to Germany. Careful consideration was given to what the agricultural leaders who would supervise collection of the harvest and future planting should wear: greyish silver arm stripes on their civilian clothing. As one leading scholar puts it, the meeting was a case of the mundane being mixed with the murderous.74
In the three weeks that followed, a concerted effort was made to quantify the numbers of likely casualties, to put a value to the ‘x million’ whose deaths were forecast in the ‘deficit’ zone. On 23 May, a twenty-page report was issued that was essentially an updated form of the conclusions that had already been reached. The ‘surplus’ region of the Soviet Union was to be detached, its grain and other agricultural produce gathered and diverted to Germany. As discussed at the previous meeting in Berlin, the local population would suffer the consequences. These were now spelt out, with the previous, open estimate of likely deaths given definition. ‘Many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia,’ read this report. ‘Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation . . . can only be at the expense of the provisioning of Europe. They prevent the possibility of Germany holding out till the end of the war.’75 The attack did not just concern victory in the war. It was literally a matter of life and death.
Although a list of attendees at the 2 May meeting does not survive, Backe’s fingerprints are all over the agenda and the conclusions. He was highly regarded by Hitler, more so than those senior to him, and as Backe’s wife wrote in her diary, the German leader sought his advice above all others during briefings to plan the invasion. Then there was the revised introduction to his dissertation that was finally published in the summer of 1941. Russia had failed to use its resources properly, he wrote; if Germany seized them, it would surely use them more efficiently.76
But most telling of all was a short note he wrote on 1 June 1941, three weeks before the invasion. The Russians, he wrote, needed no sympathy for what they were about to experience. ‘The Russian has already endured poverty, hunger and frugality for centuries . . . Do not attempt to apply the German standard of living as [your yardstick] and to alter the Russian way of life.’ The Russian stomach, he went on, ‘is stretchable’. Pity for those who are to starve, therefore, would be misplaced.77 The clarity of his thought impressed others, as Goebbels observed in his diary while preparations for the attack on the USSR gathered pace. Backe, he wrote, ‘dominates his department in a masterly manner. With him, everything that is possible to get done, gets done.’78
The momentousness of what lay ahead was not lost on those involved. There will be food shortages in the winter of 1941, Goebbels predicted in his diary, so severe that other famines will look insignificant by comparison. That is not our problem, he added, with the obvious inference that it would be Russians and not Germans who would suffer.79 Assuming that the Germans were listening as carefully to Soviet radio broadcasts as the British were, Goebbels would have taken heart from the news less than three days before the invasion began that ‘in central Russia, the fields look like green carpets; in the south-east, the wheat is ripening’. The harvest was just starting, and it looked like a bumper crop.80
As preparations for the attack reached their final stages, the rank and file of the army, as well as the senior officers, had what was at stake seared into their minds. According to Franz Halder, a Bavarian career soldier who had risen inexorably through the ranks of the Wehrmacht, Hitler was typically forthright and categorical. This is a fight to the finish, he told his generals in March 1941. Force must be used in Russia ‘in its most brutal form’. This was to be a ‘war of extermination’. ‘Troop commanders must know the issues at stake.’ As far as the Soviet Union was concerned, Hitler said, ‘severity today means lenience in the future’.81
This was all set out more fully in May 1941, by which time official Guidelines for the Behaviour of Troops in Russia had been prepared and were being circulated to those taking part in the invasion. These listed the threats that were to be expected from ‘agitators’, ‘partisans’, ‘saboteurs’ and Jews, making clear to German soldiers that they were to trust no one and show no mercy.82 Orders were also issued describing how the conquered territories were to be controlled. Collective punishment was to be used in the event of insurrection or resistance. Those suspected of working against German interests were to be tried on the spot and shot if found guilty, regardless of whether they were soldiers or civilians.83
Finally, a series of directives was issued, among them the so-called ‘Commissar Order’ that gave graphic warnings of what to expect: the enemy would be likely to behave in a manner that contravened the principles of international law and of humanity. Commissars – shorthand for the Soviet political elite – fought in ways that could only be described as ‘barbaric and Asiatic’. They were to be shown no mercy.84
20
The Road to Genocide
In the build-up to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the message to the officers and the troops was consistent and remorseless: everything rested on taking the wheatfields of the south. Soldiers were told that they should imagine food eaten by Soviet citizens had been torn from the mouths of German children.1 Senior commanders told their men that the very future of Germany rested on their success. As Colonel-General Erich Hoepner told his Panzer Group in an operational order immediately before Barbarossa began, Russia had to be crushed – and crushed ‘with unprecedented severity. Every military action must in conception and execution be led by the iron will mercilessly and totally to annihilate the enemy.’2 Contempt for the Slavs, hatred of Bolshevism and anti-Semitism ran through the veins of the officer corps. These now blended, as one leading historian puts it, ‘as the ideological yeast whose fermentation now easily converted the generals into accessories to mass murder’.3
Hitler, while urging the implementation of horror, daydreamed about the future: the Crimea would be like the Riviera for Germans, he reflected; how wonderful it would be to link the peninsula in the Black Sea to the motherland with a motorway so that every German could visit in their People’s Car (or Volkswagen). He took to wishing whimsically he was younger so that
he could see how it would all turn out; it was a shame, he thought, that he would miss out on a time of intense excitement in decades to come.4 Himmler likewise contemplated a rosy view where ‘pearls of settlements’ (Siedlungsperlen) would exist, peopled by colonisers, and ringed by villages that were home to German farmers, reaping the crops from the rich black earth.5
Hitler and those closest to him had two templates for expanding Germany’s resource base. First was the British Empire. Germany would stamp itself on enormous new territories in the east, just as Britain had done in the Indian subcontinent. A small population of German colonisers would rule Russia, just as a few British ruled in the Raj. European civilisation would triumph over a culture that was simply inferior. The British in India were constantly cited by the Nazi leadership as a model of how large-scale domination could be accomplished by few people.6
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