The military reverses of the winter of 1941–1942 also meant a setback for the policy of immediate economic exploitation of the conquered eastern territories in order to sustain the war effort. Not only would German industry be unable to obtain and utilize important Soviet raw materials, but also, and just as crucially, it left Germany facing once again the nightmare of 1914–1918: a severe food crisis. Frustrated in their attempt to obtain sufficient quantities of foodstuffs from the Soviet Union, Nazi officials now faced the bleak prospect of an expansion of the war into the indefinite future. With the outbreak of war in 1939, the Nazi regime had imposed strict rationing on the population, but this Spartan regimen had been tempered by the promise of a secure, if monotonous, diet. The German and European grain harvest in both 1940 and 1941 had been disappointing, however, which meant that Nazi officials had been unable to import enough food to cover domestic deficits. Meat rations had already been cut in June 1941, and the bread ration had been sustained only by drawing on reserve stocks of grain. By the end of the year, these had largely been exhausted, and now food officials faced the task of feeding the additional hundreds of thousands of foreign workers to be sent into Germany. When Herbert Backe protested to Goering, the latter suggested cynically that the Ostarbeiter could be fed on cats and horse meat. Backe, however, checked the statistics and reported back to Goering that there were not enough cats to provide a ration and that horse meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population.44
Although German authorities initially attempted to stretch scarce food resources simply by providing the Ostarbeiter with starvation rations, this was clearly a counterproductive strategy. It served no purpose to import workers into the country only to starve them so that they could perform little useful labor. Nor, given the “crushing impact” and “deterioration in morale” among Germans at the regime’s ration cuts in the spring of 1942, could Nazi officials seriously countenance further deep reductions in consumption. As early as mid-February, on learning of the need for ration cuts, Goebbels worried that the situation was resembling that of World War I. Given Hitler’s near-pathological anxieties about a food crisis triggering domestic unrest, the propaganda minister had little difficulty persuading his Führer to act in a radical manner against privilege so that the hardships of war would be seen to fall equally on all. Indeed, as early as April, the Nazi state proclaimed the death sentence for anyone engaged in black market activity. That same month, Hitler was granted special new powers by the Reichstag to take action against anyone harming the Volksgemeinschaft, which, given the powers he already possessed, had to be seen as a populist warning.45
Nazi officials also drew the logical, if radical, conclusion from the brewing food crisis: if not enough food was available to sustain everyone, the optimal solution would be to concentrate rations on those who did productive labor while reducing the population of those who did not. The Führer, after all, had long made it clear that it was unacceptable for anyone to starve in Germany while the Wehrmacht controlled Ukraine; German authorities would simply have to find better ways to utilize the meat and grain of the occupied areas. Although the hunger policy had not produced the desired results in 1941, Backe, put in charge of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture in April, in essence returned to its basic principles in 1942: food had to be distributed from east to west on a massive scale; the Wehrmacht would have to feed itself completely from the eastern territories as all food shipments from the Reich would cease; and entire groups, most notably the Jews, were to be excluded completely from the food supply. Backe, who combined in his person the ice-cold technocrat and the ideologue with close ties to Himmler and Heydrich, recognized the intersection of ideology and opportunism. The hunger policy was now to be directly coupled to the strategy of racial genocide; if the decision to accelerate the killing of the Jews had been taken for other reasons, the food crisis now supplied a powerful additional incentive. The German food supply would be secured at any price.46
By early summer, Backe made the connection between food policy and genocide specific. There were, he indicated in response to protests from administrators in Poland about the reduction in rations, “in the General Government… still 3.5 million Jews. Poland is to be sanitized within the coming year.” In mid-July, Himmler communicated orders that all Jews in Poland not needed for work were to be killed by the end of the year; the food crisis had helped accelerate the Final Solution. Indeed, the hunt for grain was to be pursued with utter ruthlessness whether the victims were Jews or Slavs. After a tense meeting on 5 August with the Gauleiter, who gave vent to the growing resentment of the German population at the uncertain food situation, Goering the next day, in a meeting of the Reichskommissars and military commanders of the occupied areas, gave full scope to Backe’s plan, authorizing a fundamental rearrangement of the food supply in Europe. To Goering, it was inconceivable that the Third Reich controlled “regions… such as we never had during the last world war, and yet I have to give a bread ration to the German people…. The Führer repeatedly said… if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans, but other peoples.” It was time, Goering emphasized, to reassert basic priorities:
God knows, you are not sent out there [to the east] to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them so that the German people can live…. It makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German faints from hunger…. We conquered such enormous territories through the valor of our troops, and yet our people have almost been forced down to the miserable rations of the First World War…. I am interested only in those people in the occupied regions who work in armaments and food production.
In former times, Goering noted, the matter had been simpler: “Then one called it plundering.” Perhaps unnecessarily, Gauleiter Koch, the Reichskommissar for Ukraine, assured Goering that the grain from his area would be obtained at any price.47
The radical demands formulated by Backe and Goering meant that anyone not working for the German war effort would be cut off from the food supply. The first group to disappear, as always, was the Jews. By the autumn of 1942, the gas chambers at Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, and Auschwitz were operating full bore, and a palpable sense of relief descended on Berlin. Not only had the food crisis been averted, but rations for both Germans and foreign workers had also been increased substantially. Total European deliveries of grain more than doubled, while there was a huge increase in deliveries of potatoes, meats, and fats, especially from France, Poland, and the occupied Soviet territories. Nor, despite expectations, had the food ration been completely cut in the General Government, where there had been an unexpectedly good harvest. By year’s end, however, virtually all the 3 million Jews residing there had been killed; if the harvest had not been so good, millions of Poles would have joined them. The desperate German effort to improve the dismal food situation had created a functional connection between the accelerated extermination of the Jews and the improvement in the food rations that would sustain the Nazi labor force. Sauckel’s mobilizations had provided Germany vital labor, while the synthesis of racial and food policies had resolved the food crisis; in both cases, those left on the outside were the Jews of Europe.48