Hunger Plan
[2][3] In addition to the extensive exploitation of resources to support German war economy, the Hunger Plan intended to create an artificial famine in Eastern Europe, which would have resulted in deaths of around 31 to 45 million inhabitants through forced starvation.
[4][5] Germany in the 1930s, like other European countries, was not self-sufficient and relied on foreign imports to feed its population,[6] a situation worsened with the outbreak of war as the military recruited labourers, requisitioned tractors and horses, and was first priority for fuel.
[1] Together with others, including Heinrich Himmler, Backe led a coalition of Nazi politicians dedicated to securing Germany's food supply.
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 the 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 western regions of the Soviet Union.
[1] A meeting on 2 May 1941 between the permanent secretaries responsible for logistical planning for the invasion of the Soviet Union, as well as other high-ranking Nazi Party functionaries, state officials and military officers, included in its conclusions: 1.)
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.
Great suffering among the native Soviet population was envisaged, with tens of millions of deaths expected within the first year of the German occupation.
[15][1] According to Gesine Gerhard, German agricultural officials saw the Hunger Plan as a solution to the European food crisis and a method for exterminating the "undesirable" Soviet population.
[17] The historian Timothy Snyder estimates that "4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) [were] starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944".
The German planning staffs had reckoned on capturing and thus having to feed up to two million prisoners within the first eight weeks of the war, i.e. roughly the same number as during the Battle of France in 1940.
By the end of 1941, plans to starve the entire civilian population of some areas had been abandoned, due to the failure of the German military campaign[1] and the impossibility of cutting off the food supply to cities without causing major uprisings.
Western Europe was third on the German list for the re-distribution of food, which was also shipped to Germany from France and other occupied territories in the West, but these were never subjected to the genocidal starvation experienced in the East.
