Hunger Plan

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hunger Plan was a blueprint for murder by starvation, drafted not by soldiers in the field but by bureaucrats at a conference table in Berlin. On the 2nd of May 1941, senior German officials sat down for what the documents call a Staatssekretäre meeting, a gathering of permanent secretaries, to prepare for an invasion that had not yet begun. Their minutes record the conclusion with chilling calm: if Germany took what it needed from the Soviet Union, tens of millions of people would die of starvation. The officials wrote that down and moved on.

  The plan had a name, and it had an architect. Herbert Backe, a Nazi agricultural official, designed what became known as the Hunger Plan, or the Backe-Plan. Behind it lay a calculation about German survival rooted in a memory of defeat. And what followed its partial implementation was one of the most deliberately engineered famines in the history of warfare. The questions worth asking are not only how this happened, but how it was argued for, how it was carried out, and how far its reach extended beyond the Soviet Union.

• 2. A Memory of Defeat

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  Germany in the 1930s imported food to feed its population. By 1941, that vulnerability had deepened. Reserve grain stocks had been consumed. The occupation of large parts of Europe had not helped, because most of those countries were also net food importers, not surplus producers.

  German leadership, particularly Hitler, believed that the Allied naval blockade of Germany during the First World War had been a decisive cause of Germany's defeat in that conflict. That belief shaped everything that followed. Feeding the German civilian population was not treated as a logistical problem, it was treated as a strategic one. Hitler stated in August 1939 that Germany needed Ukraine so that no one could starve Germany again as in the last war.

  The fear of hunger on the home front drove planners toward a conclusion they were prepared to state openly: that civilian lives in occupied territories were expendable. The combination of wartime food pressure and the regime's racism against Jews and Soviet civilians created, according to the historian Gesine Gerhard, a plan that served both practical and ideological ends simultaneously.

• 3. Backe and the Blueprint

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  Herbert Backe worked alongside Heinrich Himmler and others in a coalition of Nazi politicians whose common goal was securing Germany's food supply at any cost. The plan may have been decided on almost as soon as Hitler announced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940. By the time the Staatssekretäre meeting convened on the 2nd of May 1941, it was in advanced stages of planning, ready for discussion among all major Nazi state ministries and the economics office of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, headed by General Georg Thomas.

  Three weeks after that May meeting, on the 23rd of May 1941, economic policy guidelines for the invasion were produced by Hans-Joachim Riecke's agricultural section of the Economic Staff East. That section held direct responsibility for exploiting the Soviet territories Germany intended to conquer. Its guidelines stated plainly that many tens of millions of people would become superfluous and would die, or must emigrate to Siberia. Any attempt to rescue those people from starvation, the document argued, would prevent Germany from holding out until the end of the war.

  Backe identified a "surplus population" in Russia of 20 to 30 million people. If that population were cut off from food, that food could supply the German Army and the German public. The plan envisioned deaths of tens of millions within the first year of occupation. Göring's Green Folder was one of the documents through which its means of mass murder were circulated.

• 4. Ukraine as the Target

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  Ukraine's perceived grain surpluses sat at the heart of the Hunger Plan's geography. German planners divided the Soviet Union into two zones: a southern grain surplus zone, where Ukraine lay, and a northern grain deficit zone, where the cities and industrial centers were concentrated. The surplus zone would feed the Reich. The northern zone would starve.

  Achieving this required eliminating what the German regime labeled a superfluous population: Jews, and the inhabitants of Ukrainian cities such as Kiev, which under the plan would receive no food supplies at all. Those Ukrainians remaining in cities would face extreme ration reductions. Farming communities would also see their food consumption cut. Rations for Jews in Minsk and other cities within Army Group Centre's control were set at no more than 420 kilocalories per day. Jews were prohibited from purchasing eggs, butter, milk, meat, or fruit. Tens of thousands died of hunger and hunger-related causes over the winter of 1941-1942.

  During the German occupation of Kharkov, about 80,000 residents died of starvation. The Siege of Leningrad, while not identical in origin, produced related consequences: about one million people died there. The Germans also attempted to starve Kiev.

• 5. Soviet Prisoners of War

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  The most reliable figures available show that 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in German captivity out of 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945. Of those 3.3 million dead, 2 million had already perished by the beginning of February 1942, within eight months of the invasion.

  German planning staffs had expected to capture up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war, roughly the same number as had fallen prisoner during the Battle of France in 1940. The number of French, Belgian, and Dutch prisoners who died in German captivity was extremely low by comparison. The disparity was not accidental. The enormous death rate among Soviet POWs resulted from a deliberate policy of starvation directed at them specifically.

  The historian Timothy Snyder estimates that 4.2 million Soviet citizens, largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, were starved by the German occupiers between 1941 and 1944. That figure encompasses civilians and prisoners together, a toll that reflects both the intent of the plan and the scale of its partial execution.

• 6. Limits and Reverberations

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  By the end of 1941, the most sweeping version of the Hunger Plan had been abandoned. The German military campaign had not gone as expected, and enforcing a total food blockade of Soviet cities proved impossible. The Germans lacked the manpower to seal off cities or confiscate food supplies without triggering major uprisings. The plan was partially implemented, not fully.

  Yet its effects spread beyond the Soviet Union. In occupied Greece, more than 300,000 people died during the Great Famine. In the General Government of Poland, Raul Hilberg estimated that 500,000 to 600,000 Jews died in ghettos and labor camps, in part from starvation. In early 1943, Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, estimated that three million Poles would face starvation as a result of the plan. Warsaw was cut off from grain deliveries in August of that year. Only the bumper harvest of 1943 and the collapsing Eastern Front in 1944 spared the Poles from a larger catastrophe.

  The caloric accounting from mid-1941 in occupied Poland makes the hierarchy visible in raw numbers: the German minority received 2,613 kilocalories per day, Poles received 699, and Jews in the ghetto received 184, a mere 7.5 percent of basic human daily needs. The food blockade also contributed to the starvation of slave laborers and concentration camp inmates inside Germany itself. Western Europe sat third on the German redistribution list and never faced genocidal starvation, though as many as 22,000 people died during the Dutch famine of 1944-1945 when the Germans placed an embargo on food transports into the country.