Hunger Plan
The Hunger Plan was a Nazi German policy devised in May 1941 under the direction of Herbert Backe, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, to systematically seize and redirect food resources from the Soviet Union toward sustaining German armed forces, occupation administration, and the home front by accepting the induced starvation of tens of millions in occupied territories.[1][2] The plan, integrated into preparations for Operation Barbarossa, targeted urban populations, "non-productive" elements, and Soviet prisoners of war, with explicit projections for the elimination of 20 to 30 million people through famine as a means of racial reconfiguration and economic exploitation in pursuit of Lebensraum.[1][3] Implementation began with the invasion on June 22, 1941, involving the requisitioning of grain and livestock from Ukraine and other fertile regions, while enforcing blockades that prevented food distribution to Leningrad, Kiev, and other cities, exacerbating pre-existing shortages into deliberate demographic reduction.[1][2] Although military setbacks limited full execution—such as the prolonged siege of Leningrad and failure to capture Moscow—the policy's core mechanisms operated effectively in rear areas and camps, resulting in the starvation deaths of over 3 million Soviet prisoners of war and an estimated 4.2 million civilians in occupied zones, primarily Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, through enforced caloric deprivation below subsistence levels.[1][3] These outcomes reflected not logistical failures alone but intentional prioritization of German nutritional needs over Slavic survival, as documented in internal directives equating famine with a "biological necessity" for wartime provisioning.[4] The plan's architects, including Backe and Heinrich Himmler, viewed starvation as an efficient tool for population control and resource reallocation, bypassing slower extermination methods and aligning with Generalplan Ost's vision of agrarian colonization, though postwar accountability largely evaded key figures due to incomplete documentation and suicides like Backe's in 1947.[2][3] Its partial success in diverting approximately 7 million tons of grain to Germany underscored the regime's causal logic: trading "surplus" lives in the East for metropolitan stability amid blockade-induced shortages.[1]Origins and Context
Pre-War German Food Insecurities
Prior to the Nazi era, Germany relied on imports for roughly one-third of its foodstuffs, fodder, and fertilizers, rendering it acutely vulnerable to disruptions like the Allied blockade during World War I, which caused severe malnutrition and over 500,000 deaths from hunger-related causes.[5][6] This historical trauma, combined with the economic fallout from hyperinflation, the Great Depression, and Treaty of Versailles restrictions on trade and territory, heightened pre-war anxieties about food security, as limited arable land supported only about 80% of basic caloric needs domestically by the early 1930s.[7] Upon assuming power in 1933, the Nazi regime prioritized autarky through the establishment of the Reich Food Estate (Reichsnährstand) on September 13, which centralized control over agricultural production, pricing, and distribution, offering subsidies for fertilizers and machinery while imposing quotas to curb imports and boost output.[8] Policies such as the "Battle for Production" campaigns in 1934–1935 targeted increased yields in grains, potatoes, and sugar, achieving near self-sufficiency in these staples by 1939, with agricultural productivity rising through state-directed incentives that raised prices by about 20% and stabilized farmer incomes.[9][10] However, rearmament expenditures diverted resources from agriculture, and foreign exchange shortages curtailed imports of high-value items, leading to documented nutritional declines: per capita consumption in 1937 showed 14% less fats, 18% less meat, and reduced proteins compared to earlier baselines, contributing to a mortality crisis with infant death rates rising 14% from 1933 to 1936.[8][11] These shortcomings persisted in fats and oils, where pre-war consumption remained approximately 50% import-dependent, as domestic synthetic substitutes and crop shifts proved insufficient amid growing population demands and ideological rejection of reliance on overseas trade.[12][8] The Four-Year Plan of 1936 under Hermann Göring intensified efforts toward synthetic fat production and import substitution but failed to eliminate vulnerabilities, fostering a strategic consensus among Nazi planners that war-time blockades could precipitate famine without access to additional territory, thus framing food insecurity as a core rationale for expansionism.[9][13]Ideological Foundations in Nazi Expansionism
![Herbert Backe, key figure in Nazi food policy]float-right The Nazi Hunger Plan emerged from the ideological imperative of Lebensraum, the doctrine articulated by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf as necessitating the conquest of Eastern territories to provide agrarian resources and settlement space for the German Volk. This expansionist vision portrayed the Soviet Union as a vast reservoir of fertile land capable of resolving Germany's chronic food shortages, with the subjugation and exploitation of its populations seen as a prerequisite for autarky. The plan's architects rationalized mass starvation as a means to redirect food surpluses westward, aligning with the broader goal of transforming occupied lands into a German breadbasket.[14] Central to this framework was the Nazi racial hierarchy, which deemed Slavic peoples and Bolshevik elites as Untermenschen inherently unfit to utilize the East's resources efficiently, justifying their sacrificial elimination to prioritize Aryan needs. Influenced by pseudo-scientific eugenics and anti-Slavic sentiments, Nazi theorists envisioned depopulating urban centers and industrial workers—deemed "useless eaters"—through deliberate famine, thereby freeing agricultural output for German civilians and the Wehrmacht.[15] This genocidal logic extended the regime's pre-war agrarian policies, which emphasized racial purity in food production under figures like Richard Walther Darré, evolving into wartime expansionism.[14] The Hunger Plan intertwined with Generalplan Ost, the SS-orchestrated blueprint for ethnic reconfiguration of Eastern Europe, which projected the starvation and displacement of tens of millions to facilitate German colonization. Drafted under Heinrich Himmler, this plan complemented the Hunger Plan by targeting "surplus" populations in food-deficit regions like Ukraine for reduction, estimating up to 30 million deaths to achieve demographic balance for settlement.[16] Herbert Backe, as State Secretary and de facto food policy chief after 1933, embodied this synthesis, advocating ruthless exploitation rooted in his racialized view of Soviet agriculture as Bolshevik-corrupted and redeemable only through German overlordship.[4] These foundations reflected a causal prioritization of German survival over occupied lives, with expansionism not merely territorial but a racial imperative to secure caloric self-sufficiency amid blockade vulnerabilities exposed in World War I. Backe's May 1941 guidelines explicitly framed the invasion as an opportunity to "feed Germany" by "starving Russia," institutionalizing ideological contempt for Eastern populations as expendable in the pursuit of a self-sustaining Reich.[14]Wartime Pressures Leading to Planning
The declaration of war in September 1939 triggered the Allied naval blockade, which drastically curtailed Germany's access to overseas food imports that had comprised roughly one-third of pre-war consumption, compelling a shift toward autarky amid intensifying resource strains.[17] Ration cards were distributed starting August 27, 1939, limiting civilians to allocations averaging approximately 3,000 calories daily, comparable to Allied levels but increasingly reliant on ersatz substitutes and black-market supplements as supplies dwindled.[18] Domestic agricultural output, which covered only 80% of needs even in peacetime, faced further erosion from labor shortages and prioritization of industrial war production over farming inputs.[14] By early 1941, as Nazi planners anticipated the invasion of the Soviet Union, these deficiencies loomed larger with the projected mobilization of over three million troops and integration of millions of forced laborers from occupied Europe, straining an already taut logistical network.[17] Winter shortages of staples like potatoes afflicted major cities such as Berlin and Frankfurt, underscoring the regime's vulnerability and prompting calculations that Germany required an additional 7 to 8 million tons of grain annually from Soviet territories to sustain the war economy and civilian morale.[17] Extraction from Western occupied areas, such as France and Poland, proved insufficient, as those regions' populations also demanded rations, leaving the fertile Ukrainian and Russian breadbaskets as the critical target for offsetting home-front deficits.[14] Herbert Backe, acting State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, centralized these imperatives, advocating a policy of deliberate deprivation in the East to redirect surpluses westward and avert collapse in the Reich.[14] This calculus, formalized in spring 1941 under Hermann Göring's economic oversight, reflected not ideological abstraction but pragmatic response to blockade-induced scarcity, failed synthetic alternatives, and the exponential demands of total war expansion.[17]Formulation and Key Elements
Primary Architects and Documents
Herbert Backe, State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture from 1933 and de facto head of food policy after 1941, served as the primary architect of the Hunger Plan.[14] [2] Backe, who succeeded Richard Walther Darré as the dominant figure in Nazi agrarian policy, developed the strategy to address Germany's food shortages by seizing Soviet agricultural output, calculating that diverting surpluses from southern regions like Ukraine would require accepting the starvation of 20 to 30 million urban Soviet inhabitants.[14] [19] The plan's core elements emerged from a conference of state secretaries (Staatssekretäre) on 2 May 1941, convened by Hermann Göring's Four-Year Plan office, where Backe presented the food diversion policy alongside military and economic officials, including General Georg Thomas of the Wehrmacht's War Economy and Armaments Office.[20] [21] The meeting's protocol documented agreement on prioritizing German food needs over Soviet civilian survival, framing starvation as an inevitable outcome of reallocating "surplus" production from deficit urban centers to the invading armies and Reich.[20] [22] Subsequent formalization occurred through the "Economic Policy Guidelines for the Agriculture Group" issued on 23 May 1941, which detailed mechanisms for exploiting Soviet territories by partitioning them into "deficit" zones (targeted for depopulation via hunger) and "surplus" zones (for extraction to Germany), signed under Göring's authority as Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan.[20] [23] These guidelines integrated the Hunger Plan into Operation Barbarossa preparations, emphasizing rapid seizure of harvests to prevent local consumption.[23]