What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future!
(Adolf Hitler, August 1941)1
The standard meal of an eighteenth-century German rural labourer was ‘gruel and mush’, a soupy combination of grains and lentils. This was typical fare for the rural population throughout Europe. In 1796 Richard Walker, a farm labourer, bell ringer, grave digger and barber, living in the Northamptonshire parish of Roade with his wife, a lace maker, and their five children, spent half the family’s annual income of £26 8 s. on bread. The bread was sometimes supplemented by a little bacon, the occasional potato, a small amount of cheese, and washed down with beer, sugared tea and tiny quantities of milk. In the eighteenth century three-quarters of all European foods were derived from plants, and even the fat in the diet was drawn predominantly from plant oils.2
Throughout the nineteenth century, but with a marked increase in the 1870s, the amount of meat in the European diet steadily rose from 16 kilograms per person per year to 50 kilograms by 1914.3 The diet of Ben Turner, his father and brother, all mill workers in Huddersfield in 1876, illustrates the change: ‘On Monday a bit of cold meat, on Tuesday a hash, on Wednesday a potato pie, on Thursday some fry [liver] and onions, on Friday a bit of potted meat, on Saturday a bit of sausage, and on Sunday the usual joint, always providing the funds ran to it.’ For breakfast and tea they ate bread and dripping, ‘sometimes a Spanish onion or some “craps” (pork fat made crisp), and on Sunday teatime, a bit of special home-made cake to make the distinction from the other days. At the worst times our cut of beef was brisket, because it went the farthest, and made the most “drip”, besides being the cheapest cut.’4 Bread still featured largely in working-class meals but they now revolved around meat dishes and were much richer in animal proteins and fats. The Germans ate more pork, the British more mutton and beef.
These changes in the European diet were made possible by the development of a new, global food economy. The globalization of food systems began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the growth of railways and the introduction of ocean-going steamships dramatically reduced the cost of transporting food. Whereas in the 1860s it had cost 4 s. 7½ d. to ship a quarter* of wheat from New York to Liverpool, by 1902 it cost a mere 11½ d. Subsequently there was a corresponding fall in the price. Wheat production in America doubled, in Russia it trebled, and a global economy of specialized agriculture began to emerge.5 North America, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and Russia grew the wheat that made the European working man’s loaf and fattened the cattle, sheep and pigs that were shipped as frozen meat for his table. European meat production also benefited, as cheap maize, barley, oilseeds and soya beans, grown in Australia and the Americas, were shipped in for animal feed. The slaughter weight of European livestock increased, the time it took to fatten animals was reduced, and milk yields rose. This made food cheaper and more plentiful for the expanding urban working classes.6
Britain was the first European country to follow the path of transferring the job of growing food to its colonies. From the mid-nineteenth century Britain’s agricultural economy began to shrink as labourers left the countryside for the cities, and others travelled abroad, swapping a life of deference for one of greater dignity, if not wealth, farming in the colonies. The British food-import economy turned on its head as the spices, sugar, cocoa and tea which had been unloaded at the docks in the early eighteenth century as luxuries for the dining tables of the wealthy, were, during the nineteenth century, redirected into the kitchens of the masses. Sugar from the Caribbean, tea from India and China, wheat and meat from the Commonwealth countries, all connected the British working man to every part of Britain’s empire, from the tropics to the temperate zones.7 By 1914 Britain was reliant on imports for over half of its food (measured by value) and was Europe’s major importer of grain. Indeed, the British developed a preference for the roller-ground hard wheat produced in Minneapolis and Buffalo over the soft European stone-ground wheat. The hard, glutinous American wheat produced a soft, moist loaf which stayed fresh for longer.8
The apparent improvement in the British working man’s diet hid a decline in the nutritional quality of his food. Roller-grinding wheat to make flour is a process which discards much of the wheat germ, the source of wheat’s protein, vitamins, minerals and fats. The softer loaf may have been more easily digestible than the old style stone-ground bread but it was far less nutritious. Even though the British working classes could afford more meat, the loss of vitamins and minerals in the bread was not compensated for by an increase in the consumption of vitamin-rich foods such as fruit, vegetables, cheese and eggs. In the towns fresh milk was hard to store and the urban population tended to rely on less nutritious imported cans of condensed and evaporated milk. Much of the energy in the working-class diet came from the sugar in their tea, and in the jam they spread on their bread. Sugar consumption per person increased dramatically over the nineteenth century until by the early twentieth century the British were eating about 36 kilograms a year. Thus, an unhealthy quantity of sugar had replaced the energy derived from plant carbohydrates that had been the main source of calories in the eighteenth century. This diet combined with urban poverty meant that hunger and malnutrition haunted the poorer sections of the working class, especially families with many children.9
However, the British celebrated their cheap white loaf; a direct product of free trade, it was regarded as a symbol of Britain’s powerful international status and the benefits this brought Britain.10 The country’s dependence on imports was a positive force as ‘the large food deficit acted as a pump for the world’s commerce’.11 The vast colonial agricultural hinterland provided a market (made wealthy by exporting food) for the manufactured goods that Britain needed to export in order to pay for its food. The ships that sailed for Canada, Jamaica and Australia were laden with Sheffield knives and Lancashire cloth, and returned with holds full of wheat, sugar and wool. British service industries invested in these same countries, further enriching British companies.12
Germany, in contrast, found itself in an uncomfortable position. Bismarck’s protectionist tariffs had sheltered farmers from the growth in the global trade of cheap grain and had enabled the large farms owned by Junkers* east of the River Elbe, to prosper. Germany’s industrial revolution began almost half a century later than Britain’s but, as the process began to gather speed, more liberal voices within the country advocated a less protectionist economic course. Germany, they argued, should follow a path similar to that of Britain and expand manufacturing in order to produce exports which would then pay for the import of primary products, including cheap food to feed the growing urban population.13 In fact, protectionism ensured the German working classes ate a slightly healthier diet than the British. German-grown rye produced a far more nutritious loaf of bread and fewer imports meant that the Germans drank more fresh milk than the British and ate a more modest 21 kilograms of sugar per head.14 But German workers also wanted to indulge in luxurious, light crusty white bread and they wanted more meat in their diet. In the 1890s Bismarck’s successors began to dismantle the wall of tariffs in order to enable German export industries to develop. The economic writer and social reformer Karl Oldenberg warned that this would lead to ruin. Germany would become dependent on the United States and China for its food. The farming communities, which were the source of the nation’s social health, would be destroyed. Meanwhile, the expanding urban areas would spread decay and undermine the nation’s social fabric.15 A fin-de-siècle fear of the anonymous and corrupting city was widespread throughout Europe, but in Germany conservative forces prevailed and in 1902 protectionist tariffs were reintroduced.16
Nevertheless, the German economy continued to expand and more and more imports of raw materials and food were required. The German chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi (1890–94), tried to solve the problem of dependence on food imports by increasing Germany’s self-sufficiency in food and this was fairly successful. In 1916 German farmers were feeding about seventy people per 100 acres of cultivated land, in contrast to the British farmer who fed about forty-five people from an equivalent area. Only 19 per cent of the German population’s calories came from imports. But these meat, livestock feed and fat imports were important sources of energy and taste, providing 27 per cent of the protein and 42 per cent of the fat consumed in Germany. By 1914 Germany (together with the Low Countries) formed the largest wheat-deficit area in the world.17 But by delaying migration from the countryside to the cities, agricultural protectionism had burdened the nation with a large agricultural sector which held back the process of industrialization. It also kept food prices artificially high, with the result that urban working-class protests about the price of milk, butter, and especially meat, erupted between 1906 and 1912.18 Those who advocated free trade within Germany argued that it was only by becoming a manufacturing and trading nation that Germany could hope to raise the standard of living of its growing urban population.19
For the British, the German loaf of rye bread symbolized the barbarism of autocratic German society, hemmed in by protectionism. German politicians were frustrated by their inability to challenge American and British dominance both over the world’s wheat-growing areas and the sea lanes, and by Germany’s lack of a dependent agricultural hinterland which could supply raw materials, or colonial markets to boost the German economy, in the same way that the empire created British wealth.20 Behind the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jostle for a balance of power between Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and France, lurked the problem of how to feed a working population within the constraints of the economics of global trade. Within Germany, nationalist social commentators, and an increasing number of German Conservative Party politicians, thought that successful pursuit of profit, power and influence was contingent on the country finding a more equitable position in the global economy of food production, import and export, and the only way to achieve this was through war. If it fought a short war the German government felt confident that it could feed its people for the duration of the conflict. Then, if Germany were victorious, it could defeat France and expand eastwards into a belt stretching from Finland to the Black Sea coast, thus establishing German dominance over western and eastern Europe. When they went to war in 1914 German politicians were hoping that the conflict would be decisive in disentangling the German nation from the world markets which put it at such a disadvantage.21
If the problem of food supply was one of the factors which placed the great powers in hostile relations with each other, it was also one of the causes of Germany’s downfall in 1918. The First World War is associated with stagnant trench warfare but the battle was also fought in the Atlantic. For the first time naval battles became subordinate to commercial warfare, and in this way the First World War prefigured the Second. The international specialization of food production made both Britain and Germany vulnerable to blockade. Both countries relied on imports of raw materials, food and fodder to keep the war economy afloat and to feed their people. Even a reduction in imports could cause food prices to skyrocket and cripple industry. Hungry, unemployed workers might then pressurize the government to negotiate a peace before a military victory was clear.
The British Admiralty planned to impose an economic blockade on Germany long before the war began, and a new dimension was added to the concept of blockade when the British revised the naval code in 1907 and 1908, extending the definition of an instrument of war to food, and changing the rules of engagement to allow for attacks on neutral shipping, if the ship was carrying supplies to the enemy.22 When the war began Britain not only blockaded the German ports but extended the action to neutral continental countries by severely limiting the amount of imports they could receive, in an effort to prevent them from re-exporting surplus goods to Germany.23 During the Second World War these principles were applied even more harshly when occupied countries came under a complete blockade and the amount of food and petrol allowed in to neutral countries such as Spain was strictly limited.24
The German Admiralty introduced their own crucial change in blockade techniques by using the submarine as a weapon against merchant shipping. They wanted to use the submarines to attack Britain’s supply of wheat, but in the early years of the war the German military command hesitated to employ this strategy for fear of hitting an American ship and thus drawing the United States into the conflict.25 The Germans did not adopt all-out submarine warfare until mid-1917, by which time America had entered the war. However, by then the Allies had begun to co-ordinate their use of shipping space and had introduced the system of grouping ships into convoys travelling together with escort vessels, which was very effective in reducing the number of sinkings.26 German submarines did, however, inflict painful damage on Allied shipping and in 1917 Britain came close to using up its food reserves.27 High food prices even caused a certain amount of industrial unrest but Britain was able to keep open its supply lines and feed its population adequately. Ultimately, the international system of maritime trade was not only a weakness but also a strength as it enabled Britain to draw on the economies of the Commonwealth and the colonies, which provided raw materials, men, clothing and food.28 It was to prove equally crucial as a site of vulnerability and a source of strength during the Second World War.
The German submarine campaign was less successful than Britain’s traditional blockade, which succeeded in cutting Germany off from ‘direct imports from five enemy nations that together in 1913 had accounted for 46 per cent of Germany’s total imports’.29 When America entered the war in 1917 Germany’s fate was sealed, as the United States placed an embargo on exports not only to Germany but also to neutral continental countries. This put an end to Germany’s indirect trade with America while at the same time Britain gained better access to the boundless resources of the United States.30 Eventually, a shortage of agricultural labour combined with the blockade to reduce the Germans to a miserable state of hunger.
Inspecting the food ration lines in Berlin in the autumn of 1916, the American newspaper correspondent George Schreiner wrote: ‘among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the younger women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless.’31 Shortages began with bread, and then spread to potatoes, butter, fats and meat, until the Germans were forced to resort to eating turnips and swedes, which were normally fed to animals. The winter of 1916–17 became known as the turnip winter. Ethel Cooper, an Australian then living in Leipzig, wrote to her family: ‘I think that if I were to bray … it is all that could be expected … after a month of living on parsnips and turnips.’32 It was bitterly cold, coal ran out, electricity was cut off, the trams stopped running, even turnips were running short. ‘Germany’, Ethel wrote, ‘has at last ceased to trumpet the fact that it can’t be starved out.’33 Life was thoroughly exhausting and uncomfortable, interspersed with periods of absolute deprivation when the urban population teetered on the verge of starvation. The Germans lost weight, the birth-rate fell and the mortality rate rose. Deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis increased significantly, a strong indicator of malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions. Three-quarters of a million Germans died of malnutrition. George Schreiner noticed that the underfed bodies on the trams gave off an odour reminiscent of ‘a cadaver’.34
Despondency and fatigue overwhelmed the nation. If the lack of food contributed to the German defeat it was not because the Germans were dying in vast numbers but because the grinding misery of never having quite enough to eat wore down the morale of the people. New recruits and soldiers returning from leave brought news of the misery to the front line, where the troops themselves were hungry and ill. They stole the barley feed meant for the horses and ground it in their coffee mills to make flour for pancakes.35 The horses died; the soldiers’ will to fight dissipated. The German request for an armistice in October was the result of failure on the battlefield. But to many of those who witnessed these events, it appeared as though hunger was the victor, and that it was starvation among the army and civilians which had brought about a humiliating defeat.36
Even after Germany had signed the armistice the British continued to impose an economic blockade. This was supposed to help suppress a communist revolution and pressurize the Germans into accepting the unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Versailles.37 The winter of 1918–19 was the hungriest and most miserable for the German population. From the regimental barracks in Munich the twenty-nine-year old Adolf Hitler, who had served in the German army as a dispatch runner at the rank of corporal, watched how the city came under the rule of, first, a Jewish radical Social Democrat, and then of a number of Soviet-style councils, until it was eventually brought under control by the troops of the newly formed Weimar Republic.38 These events, which demonstrated the vulnerability of a hungry and defeated Germany to the threat of communist revolution, ensured that Hitler (and many others who would later take up positions of power under the National Socialists) developed an acute awareness of the dangers of civilian hunger. Indeed, Hitler developed an obsession with the need to secure the German food supply, especially at a time of war. This would later provide him with one of the reasons for the attack on the Soviet Union, and add fuel to the fire of progressive radicalization which characterized the National Socialist regime during the Second World War. On 8 March 1919, Lloyd George warned the Supreme War Council and the Allies that ‘the memories of starvation might one day turn against them … [T]he Allies were sowing hatred for the future: they were piling up agony, not for the Germans, but for themselves.’39 Lloyd George’s comments were alarmingly prescient. The hatred the Allies had sowed came back to haunt the British in 1940–42 during the height of the U-boat blockade. But it was the inhabitants of eastern Europe who experienced the worst of the agony that Lloyd George had foreseen. During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.
The First World War intensified Germany’s problems with regard to its position in the world food economy. The most critical problem was the country’s lack of foreign exchange. Germany’s manufacturing industry did not produce enough exports to earn sufficient foreign exchange to pay for all its import requirements. Food and fodder for livestock made up half of all Germany’s imports, but it also needed raw materials to generate industrial growth and the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles swallowed up yet more foreign exchange. In 1927 the prominent agronomist Friedrich Aereboe published a study of the influence of the First World War on agricultural production and concluded that Germany would have been better off if it had followed the liberal course of integrating into the world economy in the nineteenth century. Agriculture should have been scaled down, freeing up workers for industry to produce manufactured goods for export which would then, in turn, have paid for increasing imports of food and consumer goods.40 By not following this course Germany had burdened itself with an agricultural sector which was too large for a modern economy and farms which were too small, inefficient, and wallowing in debt.41
In the inter-war years it was not too late for Germany to choose to follow the liberal course mapped out by Aereboe, and fully (and peacefully) integrate itself into the global market economy. However, even Britain and America were moving towards protectionism in the 1930s. When the First World War came to an end a sudden drop in the demand for food left Europe and the United States with a surplus of foodstuffs. The interests of the farmer and the working man now converged. Both favoured a secure food supply and stable, if higher, prices. The economic impact of the Great Depression intensified the problem and in response the United States increased tariffs on both imports and exports. The days of British free trade came to an end with the Ottawa agreements of 1932, which gave favoured access to foodstuffs entering Britain from the Dominions in return for special privileges for British manufactured goods in the Dominions’ home markets. France and Italy defended their low-productivity farms as the site of national identity and set up walls of protective tariffs, while injecting money into farming in an attempt to increase agricultural productivity.42
August Skalweit, another prominent agriculturalist, who published his analysis of the German food economy during the First World War in the same year as Aereboe, drew the opposite conclusion to his colleague. He argued that it was imperative that Germany should become less dependent on this hostile world market.43 In conservative circles, which favoured this alternative course of action, food preferences were transformed into a political statement. German housewives’ associations, with strong links to centre-right political parties, campaigned for patriotic consumption choices.44 Germans preferred to eat crusty white rolls but two-thirds of the wheat to make them had to be imported. ‘Good’ German women were encouraged to support the German farmer and preserve the traditional social hierarchy and lifestyle, by purchasing rye bread made from home-grown grain. Housewives’ associations also promoted German-produced potatoes, butter and fish. Even bananas and oranges were rejected as decadent fruits and shunned in favour of the German apple.45 However, Skalweit warned that if Germany was really to become self-sufficient, and free of the need to spend precious foreign exchange on food, then its farmers would have to increase fodder production in order to feed the animals which would produce the protein and fat which Germany presently relied on imports to provide. He argued that this could only be achieved if a new, central organizational body was set up to co-ordinate the drive for self-sufficiency or autarky.46
The agronomists in the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) would probably have known Skalweit’s work and they implemented many changes which resembled his recommendations. But their agenda was not simply to create a self-sufficient food economy which would secure the food supply for the German people but also to create a food economy which would provide the basis for military action.47 As soon as the National Socialists came to power Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Food and Agriculture from June 1933, set up a new organizational body to co-ordinate the battle for self-sufficiency. Germany’s woefully backward agricultural sector was completely removed from the market system and put under the control of the Reich Food Corporation (Reichsnährstand). Every farmer, agricultural labourer, trader or food processor was expected to join. This vast power complex administered all aspects of the food system from production to distribution, from the plants which farmers were instructed to cultivate to the price of essential foodstuffs in the shops.48 German agriculture was cut off from international markets by protectionist tariffs. The prices farmers were paid for their products were often double what they were worth on the global market. Consequently, farm incomes rose and farm debt was reduced.49 But the ideology of protection had shifted. It was no longer for the benefit of a small and powerful aristocratic Junker elite. National Socialist ideology maintained that farmers were working for the good of the German race. Their primary motivation in cultivating the land was supposed to be not profit but feeding the nation.50
Darré idealized farmers as the backbone of the Aryan race and advocated a return to the soil as a way of reversing the dangerous racial deterioration brought about by urban life. A regenerated countryside would, he argued, benefit the entire Volk (people) by strengthening the ‘life-source’ of society. During the 1933 election campaign he was extremely successful at winning the farming vote for the NSDAP.51 However, once the National Socialists had come to power he gradually fell from favour with Hitler and the rest of the National Socialist leader-ship. Darré’s problem was that once power had been achieved Hitler quickly lost interest in the problems of farmers. Indeed, Hitler demonstrated just how much Darré’s plans for internal agricultural restructuring bored him at a meeting in July 1934: while Darré was talking he picked up and began reading a newspaper.52
After 1933 agricultural reform was a low priority for the majority of the National Socialist leadership as they focused on preparing for war. But it is a mistake, which many historians have made, to conclude that issues of agriculture, farming and food supply were of little importance in determining wider National Socialist policy.53 Food was a constant worry for Hitler. Darré’s campaign for food self-sufficiency was modestly successful. The yield of key crops such as potatoes, sugar beet, cabbage and rye increased and in 1939 Germany was 83 per cent self-sufficient in the most important foodstuffs such as bread grains, potatoes, sugar and meat. However, this only represented a 3 per cent increase in self-sufficiency since the National Socialists had come to power.54 The best efforts of the Reich Food Corporation could not solve the problem of the need for imported fodder. This brought Darré into conflict with Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister for Economics. While Darré wanted foreign currency for the purchase of oilseeds and food, Schacht wanted to prioritize raw materials for the armaments industry.55 In 1936 food shortages and rising food prices combined with fears of inflation and a rise in unemployment to revive the spectre of November 1918. Hitler demanded that a brake should be put on food prices.56 Two years later he warned that unless sufficient foreign exchange was made available to overcome food shortages the regime would face a crisis. It was by now clear to Hitler and his leadership that, as the German standard of living rose, the country would face a food disaster unless large quantities of food could be imported.57 This would, of course, slow down rearmament. In February 1939 he told a meeting of troop commanders that the food question was the most urgent problem facing Germany.58
The solution lay, in Hitler’s mind, in the conquest of Lebensraum (living space). In his never published ‘Second Book’, written in 1928, Hitler had already formulated the argument that in order to achieve the same level of wealth and prosperity as the United States, Germany needed its own version of the American west.59 The Reich Food Corporation confirmed this belief in the need for expansion. It calculated that Germany needed another 7–8 million hectares of farmland.60 If farms in the Reich were consolidated and rationalized many farmers would have to be evicted from their tiny farms. The plan was to send them east where they could settle new farms and supply the foodstuffs which Germany currently needed to import. Lebensraum would make Germany truly self-sufficient and immune to blockade and this would eventually enable Germany to challenge British and American hegemony.61
This vision of Lebensraum in the east was shared by many National Socialists, not least by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo (Secret State Police) and SS (Schutzstaffel or Protection Squad). His Race and Resettlement office was intended as the vehicle by which greater Germany would be settled by a racially healthy German People.62 Darré, who in the early years was a friend of Himmler and director of the Race and Resettlement office, shared this vision, and as early as the summer of 1932 he can be found at a secret NSDAP leadership conference detailing plans for large eastern agricultural estates run by an aristocracy of SS members and worked by enslaved former inhabitants.63 This perceived need to expand eastwards made conflict inevitable. In a secret speech to young military officers in May 1942, Hitler explained why Germany had gone to war. While it was the duty of the German people to multiply, they lacked the space to do so. If they failed to multiply they faced racial decline and therefore needed to capture living space. ‘It is a battle for food, a battle for the basis for life, for the raw materials the earth offers, the natural resources that lie under the soil and the fruits that it offers to the one who cultivates it.’64 The entire future of the Volksgemeinschaft (the classless People’s Community which the National Socialists claimed they were striving to create) depended upon the creation of a new agrarian system throughout the Greater Reich.65
The desire for an agrarian empire can make National Socialism seem archaic and backward looking. Britain had long since outgrown the strategy of solving the problem of agricultural decline at home by promoting emigration overseas. But if it was impossible to emulate the United States, which was large and resource-rich enough to achieve autarky within the confines of its own borders, the only other contemporary model for achieving great power status was Great Britain’s empire. And there were modern precedents for ‘demographic colonization’ within an empire. In the 1880s Czarist Russia had begun settling Russian peasantry in their newly acquired territories of Kazakh and Turkestan as a means of ensuring these territories were Russified and thus tied in to the empire.66
Likewise, Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia in 1935 was born out of his desire to create a new Roman empire with Italy once more dominating the Mediterranean region. Agricultural experts were sent to Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia to assess whether the colonies could be transformed into a breadbasket for Italy. The cultivation of bananas, peanuts and sesame seeds were all considered. Bizarrely, given the fact that coffee plants were indigenous to the area, planners even looked into the viability of growing hibiscus flowers for a herbal tea which was an autarkic substitute for coffee. The Ethiopian campaign was ill-judged. It proved overly expensive, resulted in economic sanctions and caused food shortages throughout Italy. The Italian settlers were unsuccessful in establishing Italian-style agriculture and had to be sent food supplies from the home country.67 In 1938 Italy again sought to invigorate food production in its empire and sent 20,000 peasants to Libya (which had been an Italian colony since 1912). They were settled on specially created farms and their role was to rebuild Libya as the erstwhile ‘granary of Imperial Rome’, and strengthen the Italian campaign for food autarky. They were also regarded as a reserve garrison of farmer-soldiers.68
At the same time the Japanese were implementing the Plan for the Settlement of One Million Households in Manchuria. Poor tenant farmers were encouraged to settle in northern China as a way of establishing Japanese culture on the Chinese mainland and to act as a reserve for the army should the Soviets invade. Thus, the German plan to acquire Lebensraum was not so much an attempt to set the clock back as a contemporary solution to the problems caused by industrialization. The Italians, Germans and Japanese all sought to remove from society those potentially destabilizing groups which had lost out in the process of modernization and, by using them to create utopian settler communities, to transform them into a positive by-product of modernity.69
One of the most chilling aspects of Nazi Germany is the way in which various men, all with their own iniquitous plans, were able to exploit Hitler’s seizure of power and his conveniently hazy vision of the future to realize their own designs. Herbert Backe was one of these men. For most National Socialists an eastern agrarian empire was a vision to be realized once the war was won, but Backe saw the agricultural riches of the east not as the eventual spoils of war but as the means to win the conflict.
In his position as representative for agriculture for the Four Year Plan, Backe managed, in the winter of 1940, to persuade first Hermann Göring, and then Hitler, that in order to win the war Germany would have to be self-sufficient, but in order to be self-sufficient it must first conquer the Soviet Union. While Darré found himself increasingly shut off from the Führer, Backe became increasingly influential and his solution to the problem of the wartime food supply contributed directly to Hitler’s decision to go to war with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
Until recently Backe’s role in the National Socialist path to war and the regime’s progressive radicalization has been overlooked. Many historians have regarded him as an innocuous agronomist whose involvement in National Socialism was confined to the apparently harmless sphere of food.70 Neither Backe nor the National Socialist attitude towards food was harmless. In order to secure the German food supply for the duration of the war Backe devised the Hunger Plan, which proposed the mass murder of the Slavic inhabitants of the eastern Soviet Union. Later his increasing worries over food shortages in the Reich fuelled the discussions which surrounded the decision to speed up the Holocaust and remove ‘useless’ Jewish eaters from Poland.
Backe’s hatred of the Russian people stemmed from his traumatic experiences during the First World War. Born in 1896 to German parents in Georgia, then part of the Russian empire, he was interned as an enemy alien in the Urals in 1914. When he was eventually repatriated to Germany after the war he was appalled by the bitterness of the defeated Germans and shaken by his social decline into poverty. He supported his sick mother and three younger sisters by taking menial labouring jobs, eventually working as a farm agent. He later wrote to his wife, ‘I realise that my tension and nervousness are a result of my development being distorted – hindered and destroyed: my hatred of the authors of this destruction [Russians] came about as a result of that.’71
Backe joined the Storm Troopers (Sturmabteilung or SA) in the early 1920s while working on an agrarian diploma at the University of Göttingen. He abandoned political agitation when he went to Hanover to work on a doctorate under Professor Erich Obst, an advocate of agrarian autarky. In his thesis Backe expounded the racial theories that he had developed in discussion with fellow SA members in Göttingen. He set out the argument that when Bolshevik rule disintegrated in Russia (as it surely must) ‘The People without Space’ (i.e. the Germans) would step into the vacuum to farm the east. His examiners failed the thesis on the grounds that it was a work of sociology, in other words of politics, and Backe set off into deserved obscurity to take up the tenancy of a dilapidated farm near the Harz mountains.72 However, Darré’s attention had been caught by some articles that Backe had published, and he repeatedly invited Backe to join him in the agrarian wing of the NSDAP in Munich. It was only after Backe had seen Hitler speak in 1931 that he finally acceded to the invitation and, having joined the NSDAP, was integrated into the National Socialist agricultural administration. In the autumn of 1936 Backe was recommended to Göring, who was looking for an agricultural representative on the Council of the Four Year Plan.73
Göring’s office of the Four Year Plan was intended to rejuvenate German agriculture and industry and undertake a massive rearmament programme. Backe’s position in charge of agriculture in the Four Year Plan made him effectively a second Minister of Food and Agriculture in competition with Darré. He enthusiastically undertook the task of liberating Germany from what he termed the ‘Jewish’ (i.e. American) liberal world economy by striving towards the achievement of ‘nutritional freedom’.74 If Hitler was bored by Darré’s plans for fodder silos, Göring could barely disguise his impatience when asked to listen to Backe’s plans to increase food self-sufficiency through land reclamation, fish farms, mechanization and artificial fertilizer. But while Darré fell from favour, Backe became increasingly influential. Alongside the internal agricultural reforms he developed a proposal which promised to resolve the impasse which the war and the German food situation had reached by the winter of 1940.75
The National Socialists began the Second World War well aware that a short war was essential for success and that only during a short war could adequate civilian rations be guaranteed.76 Initially, things went according to plan and Germany achieved a string of rapid successes. First, Hitler made sure that the Soviet Union would not enter the war if he attacked Poland. The 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression gave the Soviet Union eastern Poland, the Baltic states, Finland and parts of Romania. In return Stalin agreed to provide Germany with raw materials, oil and food, reasoning that if the Soviet Union generously provided Germany with all that it needed there would be no reason for it to attack.77 On 1 September 1939 Hitler took Europe to war by invading Poland, which was defeated within a matter of weeks. Riding high on this rapid success, by June 1940 Germany had conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. But then the war stalled over Britain. The British government had not been willing (as Hitler had hoped) to negotiate for peace, and neither the Battle of Britain nor the Blitz had brought the British to their knees. Without air supremacy plans to invade had to be shelved and Germany now faced a protracted war of attrition with Britain, supported by the immense resources of the United States.78
Hitler turned his attention to the Soviet Union. Victory in the east was always his ultimate goal and he argued that Germany should make speed to defeat the Russians before the United States was officially drawn into the conflict. He also hoped that the rapid collapse of the Soviet Union would leave the British feeling even more isolated and perhaps persuade them to capitulate.79
Backe was aware that the limits of the German food supply system might hamper the execution of this plan. By the end of 1940 Germany was in possession of a number of occupied economies which had not prepared their agricultural sectors for war. All were dependent on food imports to a greater or lesser extent, ranging from Norway’s reliance on imports for 57 per cent of its food, to France, where imports made up 17 per cent of the total food consumption.80 In addition, the agricultural sectors of all of these countries were extremely dependent on fodder and fertilizer imports which would now be cut by the British blockade.81 On 20 August 1940, Churchill announced a total blockade against Germany, its allies and all occupied countries. Every ship wishing to take cargo through the blockade had to apply for a ‘navicert’ which showed that its load was not contraband. Crucially, the British extended the definition of contraband to cover food if it could be used by the enemy’s armed forces or government. In practice this cut continental Europe off from the rest of the world’s food supplies. Only twelve ships broke the blockade in the year 1941–42.82
Even if the occupied territories comprehensively restructured their agricultural sectors it was clear that they, like Germany, would suffer from fodder, meat and fat shortages and a consequent decline in food production. Germany had no intention of exporting food to these countries, and even the food they were receiving from the Soviet Union under the terms of the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression was insufficient to cover the deficit. In a series of reports written in May 1940 Backe warned that in the light of the Allied blockade, ‘if the war lasts more than two years it is lost’.83 By December 1940 anxiety about Germany’s food situation was widespread among the National Socialist leadership. Backe did nothing to assuage these concerns. Now was his opportunity to press for the solution to Germany’s problems which he had been incubating since he first wrote his thesis in 1926. During the Christmas holidays of 1940 he spent his time redrafting, for the third time, the annual report of the Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture on the food situation in Germany, the seriousness of which it was his purpose to emphasize to the leadership. In January he had the opportunity to put forward his concerns, and his ideas for a solution, not only to his direct boss, Göring, but also to Hitler, whom he met some time that month.84
One of the problems with piecing together the history of the National Socialist regime is that the leadership was wary of leaving behind incriminating evidence. Backe warned, ‘clearly in case the enemy should hear of it, it is better not to cite the [Hunger] plan.’85 Therefore records of what was said during meetings with Hitler were not always kept, or were later destroyed. How decisions were reached, and who influenced policy, has to be painstakingly pieced together from information about who attended specific meetings and knowledge of their political agenda at the time. Diary entries and other scattered references to such meetings often offer clues. A second complicating factor was that Hitler himself preferred to give orders orally and was frequently vague, leaving his subordinates to guess his intentions and to strive to fulfil his wishes according to their own interpretation of what exactly it was that he wanted them to do.
We do know that by February 1941 what would become known as the Hunger Plan had been formulated by Backe and had received both Göring’s and Hitler’s approval. Alfred Rosenberg, future Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, was informed about it in a meeting with Hitler on 2 April 1941. He noted in his diary that although he would never forget what the Führer had told him he would not write it down.86 The plan does not seem to have been formulated on paper until 2 May, when it was summarized in a blandly entitled ‘memorandum on the result of today’s discussion with the state secretaries regarding Barbarossa’* which was later found among the papers of General Georg Thomas, head of the War Economy and Armaments Office. Only three copies of the plan now exist, one of which, known as the ‘Yellow Folder’, is a much shortened version which was circulated to agricultural functionaries. The original document came out of Backe’s office and is covered in his handwriting.87
Backe’s plan provided Hitler with a solution to the problem of a war of attrition with Britain and America by arguing that the Soviet Union could be transformed into a huge resource base if the needs of its inhabitants were ignored. In a vague way Hitler had for years been expounding the idea that ‘the occupation of the Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry’.88 Already in 1939 he had told League of Nations High Commissioner for the city of Danzig, Carl J. Burckhardt, ‘I need the Ukraine, so that no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.’89 But most of Hitler’s advisers were under no illusions about the difficulties involved in exploiting Soviet resources. Virtually all of the Ukraine’s grain went to feed the vastly expanded cities of the Soviet Union. The process of collectivizing the farms had changed the social structure of Soviet society, creating an industrial proletariat out of peasants driven off the land. Whereas four-fifths of Soviets lived in the countryside in 1926, only one-half were still peasants in 1939. Officials in the German Food and Agriculture Ministry calculated that during the twentieth century more than 30 million people had moved into the Soviet Union’s cities. While in the early years of the twentieth century Russia had produced a surplus of 11 million tons of grain, most of this was now disappearing into the stomachs of Russia’s rapidly expanding urban population. This left only a small surplus which could be siphoned off to feed Germany.90
The memorandum outlining the Hunger Plan acknowledged this problem and the additional difficulties that the Soviet scorched earth policy, normal war damage and the emergence of a black market would cause. But the solution, it suggested, was simple. The memo spoke euphemistically of suppressing Russian consumption but what was actually intended was to shut down the flow of food from the Ukraine to the towns and cities of northern and central Russia. The food would be diverted on to the plates of German troops and civilians in the Reich. As a consequence, the document acknowledged, ‘unbelievable hunger’ would rule in northern Russia and the industrial areas, which would ‘die out, so to speak’.91 The meeting casually concluded that ‘umpteen millions of people will be starved to death’.92 The actual figure that Backe had in mind was 30 million, precisely the number by which his administrators calculated the Soviet Union’s urban centres had grown in the past few decades. Those charged with implementing the plan were warned that any sympathy they might feel for the starving Soviets would be misplaced as ‘the war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war’.93
Given the nature of the events that followed the invasion of the Soviet Union, much historical work understandably focuses on the racial and ideological motivation for the attack. It is only with the recent work of historians such as Christian Gerlach, Adam Tooze and Alex Kay that the centrality of food as an engine of the Second World War has become apparent. ‘As hard as it may be for us to credit, agrarian ideology is crucial if we are to understand, not the archaism of Hitler’s regime, but its extraordinary militancy.’94 Hitler had always intended to wipe out Bolshevism and colonize the east. Backe’s sinister plan now gave him a sound economic reason to set alongside the ideological reasons to launch an attack.95
Securing the nation’s food supply was a primary war aim in Hitler’s mind and the central importance of food was clear to the men charged with planning and executing Barbarossa. Germany was later to suffer from crippling fuel shortages and one might expect planners to have focused on capturing sources of mineral oil. But even General Thomas, who was assigned the task of assessing ‘the military-economic consequences of invasion in the East’, began his memorandum of that title with several pages on agricultural production. When he argued that the capture of the oil region of the Caucasus would be essential, he referred to the needs of agriculture, not to Germany’s petrol shortage. Ukrainian farming was, he argued, highly mechanized, using 60 per cent of the Soviet Union’s oil supplies, and it would be essential to secure the supply in order to ensure a plentiful grain harvest.96 When Göring met with Rosenberg, Lammers, Keitel, Bormann and Hitler at military headquarters on 16 July 1941, he reiterated ‘we must first of all think about the securing of our sustenance, everything else can be dealt with only much later’.97 Once the attack began, the commander of Security Division 403, General-Major Wolfgang von Ditfurth, complained that the wild plunder of the eastern peasants’ farms indicated that it did not seem to be universally understood among the troops and their officers ‘that the war against Russia is not exclusively caused by a world view, but rather is supposed to simultaneously secure our supply zones, for greater Germany … that we must possess during the final conflict with England (USA)’.98
The Hunger Plan was never fully implemented but this was not because it was the pet project of an unimportant agrarian official. The scheme involved all levels of the regime from Hitler, to Göring and the officials of the Four Year Plan, to Rosenberg and the administrators in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Even the Wehrmacht, which preferred to be seen to distance itself from the more gruesome of the regime’s plans, accepted it with alacrity because it solved seemingly insuperable logistical problems. If food could be taken directly from the occupied territories this would relieve pressure on overburdened supply lines. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, commander for the army in central Russia, coldly calculated that at least 20 million people would starve in his area.99 The plan foundered and, as will be seen in a later chapter, was only implemented in a piecemeal, chaotic fashion. This was because co-ordination between the different organizations charged with administering the eastern territories was lacking and, despite the involvement of an array of political and economic bureaucrats in its conceptualization, the practical details of exactly how it was to be realized on the ground were never properly worked out.100
The attack on the Soviet Union has rightly been characterized as a war of annihilation. The exceptional brutality of the fighting on the eastern front, as well as the introduction of Einsatzgruppen (mobile task forces), which followed behind the army murdering Bolsheviks, the intelligentsia and Jews, have gained it this reputation. But if the Hunger Plan had been successfully executed then these acts of annihilation would have been overshadowed by the implementation of mass murder on an even larger scale. When he heard of the plan Franz Six, leader of one of the Einsatzgruppen, excitedly told a friend in the military that as the front pushed forwards along a line stretching from Baku to Stalingrad to Moscow to Leningrad, ‘all life would be extinguished. In this strip of land about thirty million Russians would be decimated by hunger … all those who took part in this action would be forbidden on pain of death to give a Russian even a piece of bread. The large cities of Leningrad and Moscow would be flattened.’101 It was with these plans for utter devastation in mind that the German army invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.
By the end of 1941 the Wehrmacht had taken the Baltic states and had reached Leningrad in the north, in the centre Belorussia had fallen and they were just a few kilometres from Moscow. In the south they occupied the Ukraine and then pushed into the Crimea, reaching the Caucasus by 1942. As soon as the attack started Himmler began making his own plans for the future of Germany’s new empire in the east. He commissioned what has become known as the General Plan for the East from the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of the German Race. The plans which these academics and bureaucrats produced, and the initial implementation of the scheme in Poland, demonstrate the way in which food and agrarian issues generated militancy within the National Socialist regime and resulted in murderous acts of aggression on the ground.
The architect of the General Plan for the East was the plant geneticist Konrad Meyer. Typically for the National Socialist power structure, he held a multitude of positions, as head of an office for environmental planning, as director of an academic agricultural institute, a position at the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and he was also head of an SS planning department for settlement in the east. He was responsible for co-ordinating teams of German academics and agrarian experts, who worked on the details of the plan. A mass migration of Germans into the east was expected, one-third being designated to work in agriculture, made efficient by the application of modern technological advances, especially in plant and gene technology.102 The rest would provide a support network of craftsmen and commercial and public servants. They would live in agricultural towns in German-style houses, surrounded by German plants and trees. Even the herbs and flowers growing in the cottage gardens were to be German, and the rubbish dumps were to be beautified.103 This attention to seemingly innocent detail distracts from the fact that the General Plan for the East was one of the most atrocious plans hatched by the National Socialists. The idyllic new towns and ideal agricultural communities were to be built in a country which would have been subjected to a programme of terror and violence.
The academics who worked under Meyer were enthused by the task they had been given. On the clean slate of the east they could try out ideas without any of the limitations and intractable problems that faced them within the old Reich. Echoing Hitler’s thoughts in his ‘Second Book’, an SS brochure outlining the planned agricultural reform described the east as a potential paradise, a ‘European California’ that had been left as a desert by the ruling system of the Slav sub-humans (Untermenschen).104 The use of this term betrays the sinister attitudes underlying the misleadingly idyllic vision. The plans spoke euphemistically of ‘resettlement’, ‘evacuation’ and ‘Germanization’ of the indigenous population. Despite post-war denials, it was common knowledge among the hundreds of bureaucrats, officials, scientists and academics who worked on the plans that this would mean the death by extermination of millions. Indeed, the planners themselves urged the complete destruction of existing towns and villages as this would provide them with a truly blank canvas.105 The justification for such brutal actions was provided by Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, a professor at the Institute for Landscape Design at the University of Berlin, and Himmler’s special representative for questions concerning landscape formation. In his Landscape Primer of 1942 he described the Slavs as a quasi-ecological obstacle to the proper cultivation of the eastern landscape. If the environment was an expression of a people, their abilities and spirit, then, he argued, the murderous cruelty of the Slavs was written in their countryside. His book was filled with photographs of scruffy, poverty-stricken peasant huts to demonstrate his point. The Slavs had to be removed for the good of the land. The SS brochure took up the theme, arguing that the Germans would finally bring order and harmony to the ‘impenetrable thickets of the steppes’.106
The General Plan for the East makes plain the fact that the Jews, together with the Soviet population in the cities who were the targets of the Hunger Plan, were to be only the first in a long line of peoples whom the Nazis intended to annihilate. It was decided that a few of the indigenous inhabitants in the eastern areas could be integrated into German society and another 14 million would be used as slaves; the rest would be deported.107 In a secret speech in Prague about the plan Reinhard Heydrich, head of the powerful Reich Security Head Office, and later one of the architects of the Holocaust, outlined how, as soon as the war was won, un-Germanizable elements throughout eastern Europe and Russia would be sent to the Soviet Arctic zone to join the 11 million European Jews who it was anticipated would already be there. Indeed, the idea was that as the Jews died from overwork they would be replaced by waves of deported Slavs.108 At the end of December 1942 the plan calculated that this would mean deporting 70 million people. It was expected that, like the Jews, the Slavs would also eventually die as a result of their labours. Once the regime acquired a taste for mass annihilation there was some discussion about whether it would be simpler just to execute them. Hitler extended the comparison of Germany’s bid for the eastern territories to the western expansion of America by likening the fate of the Slavs to that of America’s ‘Red Indians’.109 It is the genocidal intent that sets the German plans for colonial settlement apart from the Italian and Japanese plans for Libya and Manchuria.
Some of the most violent and brutal men in the east made the General Plan for the East their own. Hans Ehlich, a surgeon and racial eugenicist, was head of special security service groups in Poland charged with co-ordinating deportation, immigration and settlement. He trained a band of officials, all of whom believed in the project, who were then posted across German-occupied western and eastern Europe from France to the Crimea. Ehlich was impatient for the plan to be put into action even before the war was over and suggested that deportations should immediately begin of racially undesirable elements in the occupied territories to an unspecified area in the east. In October 1941, the equally impatient Heydrich argued that they should begin the work of categorizing the Czech population into those who could be Germanized and those who would be deported.110
The first eastern territory to be cleared of its inhabitants was the annexed part of Poland, known as the Warthegau. The plan was to Germanize the region by replacing the Poles with ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche). In the eighteenth century thousands of Germans had emigrated east, repopulating lands that had formerly been occupied by the Ottoman Empire. German minority communities were dotted throughout the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia, and there were a few German communities in Russia itself. No matter how long they had been settled in the east the National Socialists regarded these people as racially German. Under the 1939 Treaty of Non-Aggression they were encouraged to return to Germany and, fearful of oppression under the Soviet regime and hopeful that they would find a better life in the new greater German Reich, many did so.111 The intention was that these settlers would establish a thriving agricultural community in the Warthegau, which Hitler and Göring planned would produce ‘grain, grain and again grain’, in fact become ‘a grain factory’.112 Ehlich’s ambitious plans to deport 600,000 Jews and 3.4 million Poles from the Warthegau to the eastern half of Poland, known as the General Government, had to be scaled down once it became clear that it would be undesirable to create a sink state of the dispossessed between Germany and the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, throughout 1939–40, 365,000 Poles (one-third Jews) were rounded up, put on trains and deposited in the General Government.113
Zygmunt Klukowski, a doctor in charge of the hospital in the town of Szczebrzeszyn in the General Government treated some of these evacuees. A member of the Polish resistance, he kept a diary in which he recorded the criminal actions of the German occupiers. The story the evacuees told him was always the same. The Germans arrived in the village at night and gave the population less than an hour, often only fifteen minutes, to pack up a few necessities before they were rounded up, and loaded on to unheated railway cars for the journey east.114 As time went by the conditions became increasingly harsh. The first evacuees to arrive in Szczebrzeszyn in December 1939 were allowed to bring 200 zloty with them, by July 1940 all money was confiscated. The group that Klukowski met in July 1940 were small farmers from Gostyn. ‘They had been forced to leave their homes where their families had lived for hundreds of years. They were herded like cattle, pushed and beaten on the road from their villages to the railroad station. People who were too slow were shot.’115 They were kept for one week in Lodz where the young teenagers and able-bodied men and women were selected out and sent to labour camps in Germany. The rest, a motley crowd of women, old men and small children, arrived in Szczebrzeszyn after another week on a train. They lay on the straw in their temporary accommodation, some too weak to sit up, virtually all the children suffering from diarrhoea, all of them ‘pale, tired, and dirty, and … full of hatred toward Germany and the Germans’.116 Klukowski wondered what was to become of them. The Germans had ordered that they should be relocated to the surrounding villages but here their welcome was uncertain. ‘Our own farmers do not have enough even to feed themselves and many times have refused help.’117 He was horrified by the way in which people who had been relatively prosperous farmers had become ‘beggars in one hour’.118
In the autumn of 1940 there were 530,000 ethnic Germans living in miserable conditions in SS-run transit camps.119 Something had to be done with them. Each of the planners in the four districts of the Warthegau was asked to choose a typical area where the ideas for the General Plan for the East could be tested. Saybusch (Zywiec), on the southern border with Slovakia, was eventually chosen. Between September and December 1940 17,000 Poles were deported from the area. Most ended up in concentration camps in the General Government. Fit young men were sent to the Reich as forced labourers. By the end of the year the Germans had seized 9.2 million hectares of land from Polish farmers in the Warthegau and 180,000 ethnic Germans from Galicia had taken over their farms.120 However, the violence and dispossession did nothing to improve food production in annexed Poland. The farms lacked machines, fertilizer and labour, and the following year’s harvest was jeopardized as those Poles who had not been evicted from their farms often did not plant crops as they feared they would be deported before the harvest.121 Hitler’s and Göring’s vision of mountains of grain never became a reality.
In the autumn of 1942 German policy towards the General Government changed. It was no longer seen as an area in which to deposit the dispossessed and was redesignated for Germanization. The district of Zamosc in the eastern corner of the General Government was chosen as the first area where the General Plan for the East would be realized. Centred on Lublin, this was an important area for the SS. Here they had factories and concentration camps, and a magazine for SS troops. The area was fertile and it was hoped that the new German farms would be bountiful.122 On 27 November the SS began rounding up Poles. They were given only minutes to collect together a few belongings. The town of Szczebrzeszyn, where Zygmunt Klukowski ran his hospital, was not far from Zamosc and on 2 December 1942 he noted in his diary that he could hear horse-drawn wagons rumbling through the town, carrying villagers who were fleeing their homes before the Germans arrived.123 By the summer of 1943, over 100,000 Poles had been driven out of about 300 villages. Klukowski visited some of the evicted villagers in a nearby camp. They were ‘barely moving, looking terrible’. In the camp hospital sick children lay ‘like skeletons’.124 Tens of thousands were sent to Germany as forced labourers, more than 4,000 children were chosen for Germanization in the Reich, where they would have been placed with childless families, 18,000 faced the horrors of the extermination camps at Majdanek and Auschwitz.125 The operation backfired because the area became one of the most active for partisans. In December 1942 Klukowski reported that fighting units were forming in the forests around Zamosc. ‘They are very well armed. Some try to burn down and completely destroy evacuated villages before the new owners, mostly German settlers from eastern Europe, take possession of them.’126
The empty farms were taken over by about 9,000 ethnic Germans and 4,000 Germans from the Reich. But Germanization was not the success the agronomists expected. The new farmers had little experience with the climate and soil conditions they found in Poland, and productivity on the seized land declined.127 Klukowski observed that many of the new Volksdeutschen settlers from Bessarabia fled the villages for the safety of the towns, fearful of the vengeful return of escaped evacuees who sometimes returned to burn down their old houses and kill the new occupants.128 Frieda Hagen, a twenty-nine-year-old agricultural teacher from Thuringia arrived in Zamosc in May 1943 to set up a school to train German women as village advisers. Their job was to refashion the ethnic German women into fine, upstanding examples of the Aryan race. They would go out to the settlers’ villages and teach them the German arts of housekeeping, childcare and hygiene. They also ran German-language classes, schools and kindergartens. But Frieda found disappointment and disillusion among the settlers. They were depressed by the primitive conditions. Frieda was shocked to find that some of the clothes they had been given were ‘dreadful, often still dirty, bloodstained from the ghetto and originating from Jews’.129 Most of all they were resentful of their treatment as second-class citizens by the Reich Germans and angry that they were not given better protection from the vengeful partisans.130
Within Germany the majority of farmers rejected the idea of resettle-ment in the east. They did not want to move to a place which had been presented to them as cold and primitive. When anti-German farmers from Luxembourg were forcibly resettled in the General Government, resettlement became strongly associated with punishment. The 4,500 farmers who did apply to move in the first two and a half years of the war fell far short of the 40,000 who were expected according to the documents of the General Plan for the East.131 Once it became clear there would not be enough German settlers the planners turned to Holland and Denmark for recruits. Hermann Roloff, a former eastern planner, now in charge of space in Holland and Belgium, began preparing figures for how many Dutch could be resettled. Again the figures were ambitious. He came up with a figure of 3 million but only 600 Dutch farmers went east between November 1941 and June 1942. Those who did not fall victim to partisans returned bitterly disappointed.132 Those willing to move were certainly too few to create the ‘blood wall’, a swathe of territory settled by the racially pure, which Konrad Meyer envisioned.
Despite these difficulties on the ground, the experts in their offices lost none of their enthusiasm. In 1943 one of the scientists working on the plan wrote excitedly, ‘the conquest of the east has brought into our possession those territories which will be of decisive importance for the future nutrition of the German people’.133 Nor did lack of enthusiasm among German farmers have any impact on the planned number of deportations. However, the chaos which followed in the wake of the operation in Zamosc led the SS to speak of improving their methods, and the genocidal aspect of the plan began to be discussed more openly. In fact, the partisan activity in the area of Zamosc made the SS reconsider their intention of extending the operation into the district of Galicia. In January 1943, 5,000 Polish and Ukrainian families were expelled from the Rawa Ruska area and replaced by 1,500 Volhynian ethnic Germans and 200 Bosnians. But the massive operation which had been planned was never undertaken.134 While lack of planning and the chaotic German administration of the eastern occupied territories prevented the full implementation of the Hunger Plan, the full realization of the General Plan for the East was thwarted by the turning tide of the war. By 1943 those ethnic Germans who were arriving in Poland were coming from the Volga, Caucasus and Donetz regions. They were no longer arriving in order to re-settle Polish farms but to escape the advancing Red Army.135
*
The extent of the agrarian radicalism of the Nazis is rarely fully appreciated because much of what they were planning remained on paper. There should be no doubt, however, that if the Germans had succeeded in defeating the Soviet Union they would have conducted a far more extensive and terrible genocide than that which they were able to carry out under the limitations of occupation while they were still fighting the war.136 The full significance of the Nazi plans was certainly not realized by the lawyers at the Nuremberg trials. This is unsurprising given that it has taken many decades in the archives for historians to unravel the Nazi agrarian plans and their horrific implications.
Walther Darré was tried and found guilty of ‘plunder, spoliation, enserfment and the expropriation’ of land from Polish and Jewish farmers, as well as of depriving Jews of basic foods through ration cuts. He was imprisoned for five years but released three years before his death in September 1953.137 Herbert Backe hung himself in his cell in April 1947, afraid that he might be sent to the Soviet Union for trial.138 But many of the bureaucrats and officials involved in the projected programme of agrarian violence were overlooked. Given what we now know of the extent of Hans Ehlich’s involvement in the genocidal aspect of the plan, his sentence of one year and nine months was uncomfortably lenient. He then moved to Brunswick, where he worked as a physician. He died in 1991.139 Konrad Meyer’s position in the SS Race and Settlement Office meant that he was captured and tried. However, by referring to one of the least incendiary early versions of the General Plan, and arguing that this was simply an academic study, not a plan which he expected to be implemented, Meyer successfully diverted the attention of the American prosecutors. He was set free in 1948, having already served his sentence of two years and ten months while awaiting trial.140 Heinrich Wiepking-Jürgensmann, Himmler’s special representative for questions concerning landscape formation, having served as a defence witness for Meyer, suffered no ill effects from his association with the murderous plan and became professor for horticulture and land culture at Backe’s old university, the Technische Hochschule in Hanover. He was joined by Meyer in 1956, who took up a chair in land cultivation and land planning. Chillingly, Meyer turned his attention to the problem of Third World food supply and global over-population. In a 1953 publication he revealed that his thinking had changed little since his days in the Race and Settlement Office by suggesting that the strain on the world food balance could be relieved by redistributing people into what he sinisterly termed catchment areas. Wiepking-Jürgensmann was acclaimed as a conservationist and in 1952 the culture minister for Lower Saxony asked him to design a memorial for Bergen-Belsen.141
*A quarter of a ton or eight bushels.
*Prussian landed aristocracy.
*The codename given to the invasion of the Soviet Union.