Hunger Plan - Outline of The Plan

Outline of The Plan

The architect of the Hunger Plan was Herbert Backe. Together with others, such as Heinrich Himmler, Backe spearheaded the coalition of radicals among the Nazi politicians, dedicated to securing Germany's food supply at any cost. The Hunger Plan may have been made almost as soon as Hitler announced his intention to invade the Soviet Union in December 1940. Certainly by 2 May 1941, it was in the advanced stages of planning and was ready for discussion between all the major Nazi state ministries and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW) office of economics, headed by General Georg Thomas. The lack of capacity of Russian railways, the inadequacy of road transport and the shortages of fuel, meant that the German Army would have to feed itself by living off the land in the territories they conquered in the eastern regions of the Soviet Union. One of the meetings for the logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union included in its conclusions:

1) The war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.
2) If we take what we need out of the country, there can be no doubt that tens of millions of people will die of starvation.

The minutes of the meeting exemplifies German planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union. It camouflages a deliberate decision on the life or death of vast parts of the local population as a logical, almost inevitable development. Three weeks later, on 23 May 1941, economic-political guidelines for the coming invasion appeared that had been produced by the agricultural section of the Economic Staff East, which was directly responsible for the economic and agricultural exploitation of the soon-to-be occupied Soviet territories:

Many ten of millions of people in this country will become superfluous and will die or must emigrate to Siberia. Attempts to rescue the population there from death through starvation by obtaining surpluses from the black earth zone prevent the possibility of Germany holding out till the end of the war.

The perceived grain surpluses of Ukraine were particularly important in the vision of a self-sufficient Germany. Yet Ukraine did not produce enough grain for export to solve Germany's problems. Scooping off the agricultural surplus in Ukraine for the purpose of feeding the Reich called for: 1. the annihilation of what was perceived by the German regime as a superfluous population (Jews, the population of Ukrainian big cities such as Kiev which did not receive any supplies at all); 2. the extreme reduction of the rations allocated to Ukrainians in the remaining cities; 3. a reduction in the foodstuffs consumed by the farming population.

In the discussion of the plan, Backe noted a 'surplus population' in Russia of about 20–30 million. If that population was cut off from food, that food could be used to feed both the invading German army and the German population itself. Industrialization had created a large urban society in the Soviet Union. The Plan envisioned that this population, numbering in many millions, would be cut off from their food supply, thus freeing up the food produced in the Soviet Union, now at Germany's disposal, to sustain Germans. As a result, great suffering among the native Soviet population was envisaged, with tens of millions of deaths expected within the first year of the German occupation. Starvation was to be an integral part of the German Army's campaign. It preceded the invasion and was in fact an essential condition of it; it was believed that the assault on Russia could not succeed without it.