@amanntai:
I am alarmed that you apparently justify Hitler’s mass murders by saying it was due to food shortages! Hitler made it pretty clear that his actions were racially based. Even if Germany was suffering from food shortages, Hitler still chose to use those shortages to justify genocide. Famine should never be a justification for genocide.
Remember that Hitler also starved thousands of Russians (especially in Leningrad) as part of his policy of wiping out the Russians. And this article (http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/mobile/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007183 ) seems to indicate the starving of Soviet POWs was intentional!
Furthermore, I would like you to provide a source for your claim that 30 million Germans could have died to hunger. This seems rather inflated, as my research indicates Germany only had about 80 million people in 1940. I do not believe that 37.5% of the German population was at risk of starvation! The highest figure I have found is that 3 million Poles were at risk of starvation, and 3 million Soviet POWs starved.
Thanks for the post and the link. While I am not familiar with some of the link’s secondary assertions, its primary assertion (that large numbers of Soviet POWs starved to death while in German captivity) is consistent with my own research.
Furthermore, I would like you to provide a source for your claim that 30 million Germans could have died to hunger.
Adam Tooze’s book Wages of Destruction was praised by The Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Boston Globe, and a number of other major media outlets. The book was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. Below are some quotes from it:
After 1939 the supply of food in Western Europe was no less constrained than the supply of coal. . . . Grain imports in the late 1930s had run at the rate of more than 7 million tons per annum mostly from Argentina and Canada. These sources of supply were closed off by the British blockade. . . . By the summer of 1940, Germany was facing a Europe-wide agricultural crisis. . . . By 1941 there were already signs of mounting discontent due to the inadequate food supply. In Belgium and France, the official ration allocated to ‘normal consumers’ of as little as 1,300 calories per day, was an open invitation to resort to the black market.
Pp. 418 - 419
According to General Thomas’s secretariat the meeting concluded as follows:
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 many millions of people will die of starvation.
3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake, and only then the removal of grain.
The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans intended to starve. . . . Backe himself put the figure for the ‘surplus population’ of the Soviet Union at between 20 and 30 million, and over the following months these numbers established themselves as a common reference point. . . .
[A memorandum stated:] Efforts to save the population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. They diminish the staying power of Germany in the war and the resistance of Germany and Europe to the blockade. There must be absolute clarity about this.
Pp. 479 - 480. However, the plan to starve 20 - 30 million people to death largely failed. As a result of that failure–and the consequent lack of food freed up for shipment to Germany–the following occurred.
When the order to ship large numbers of Eastern European workers to Germany was first given, Backe protested vigorously. The 400,000 Soviet prisoners of war already in Germany were more than he could provide for. Goering had spoken casually of feeding the Eastern workers on cats and horse-meat. Backe had consulted the statistics and reported glumly that there were not enough cats to provide a ration for the Eastern workers and horse-meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population. If the Russians were to be given meat, they would have to be supplied at the expense of the German population.
P. 539
Backe was in an impossible position. The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers [Soviet POWs] be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand. What was called for was a reduction in consumption, not additional provisions for millions of new workers. The seriousness of the situation became apparent in the spring of 1942 when the Food Ministry announced cuts to the food rations of the German population. Given the regime’s mortal fear of damaging morale, the ration cuts of April 1942 are incontrovertible evidence that the food crisis was real. Lowering the rations was a political step of the first order, which Backe would never had suggested if the food situation had not absolutely required it. . . . When the reduction in the civilian ration was announced it produced a response which justified every anxiety on the part of the Nazi leadership.
P. 541. In response to all this, the following measures were taken.
Entire groups were to be excluded from the food supply, most notably the Jews. As Goebbels noted in his diary, the new regime would be based on the principle that before Germany starved ‘it would be the turn of a number of other peoples.’
P. 542.
[German-occupied Poland was] an agricultural deficit territory. In the first year of the German occupation, Backe and Governor General Frank had agreed on food imports from the Reich that were sufficient to give food to those Poles working for the Germans. The majority of the Polish population was left to fend for themselves. The result was an epidemic of malnutrition and outright starvation, particularly among the Jewish population confined to the ghettos. Faced with Germany’s food shortage in 1942, Backe went much further. He now demanded that the Governor General should reverse the flow. Rather than receive food supplements from Germany, the General Government [of Poland] was to make sizable food deliveries. . . . Backe predicated his demands on the elimination of Polish Jews from the food chain. . . . Eliminating the Jews would . . . reduce the number of people that needed feeding.
Pp. 544 - 545
By the end of August 1942, this extraordinary series of measures spread a palpable mood of relief throughout Berlin. Backe, Himmler, and Goering had staved off a disastrous downward spiral in the food supply. . . . Total European deliveries of grain [into Germany] doubled from 2 million tons per annum to more than 5 million tons in the harvest year of 1942-3. Of those deliveries that did enter the Reich [as opposed to being consumed in the field by the Wehrmacht], the General Government [of German-occupied Poland] supplied an astonishing 51 percent of German rye imports, 66 percent of oats and 52 percent of German potato imports. This was directly at the expense of the local population. . . . In the summer of 1942 it was the concerted extermination of Polish Jewry that provided the most immediate and fail-safe means of freeing up food for delivery to Germany.
P. 549.
