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The Hunger Plan () was a partially implemented plan developed by Nazi Germany bureaucrats during World War II to seize food from the Soviet Union and give it to German soldiers and civilians. The plan entailed the genocide by starvation of millions of Soviet citizens following Operation Barbarossa, the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union (see Generalplan Ost). The plan created a famine as an act of policy, killing millions of people.
The Hunger Plan was first formulated by senior German officials during a Staatssekretäre meeting on 2 May 1941 to prepare for the Wehrmacht (German armed forces) invasion and the Nazi war of extermination ( Vernichtungskrieg) in Eastern Europe. Its means of Mass killing were outlined in several documents, including one that became known as Göring's Green Folder. As part of the plan, Nazi military forces were ordered to capture food stocks in occupied territories, redirect them to supply German troops and fuel the German war economy. In addition to the extensive exploitation of resources to support the 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 Mass starvation.
The original plan was orchestrated by Herbert Backe, who led a coalition of Nazi politicians dedicated to securing Germany's food supply. He was politically allied with Heinrich Himmler, who was a member of the same coalition. The plan is estimated to have killed 4.2 million Soviet citizens between 1941 and 1944, but most of its victims were Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians. The plans to starve the entire civilian population of the occupied territories had been abandoned by the end of 1941, because the goal was considered to surpass the capability of the German military forces.
German leadership, especially Hitler, was very concerned about the impact of reductions in food consumption on civilian morale. They believed the Allied blockade of Germany during the First World War had been a key cause of Germany's defeat in that war. Thus the preservation of food supplies for Germany itself was considered essential, even at the cost of civilian lives in occupied countries. The combination of German leadership's strong racism against Jews and Soviet civilians and the pressing wartime food crisis proved a deadly combination – the Hunger Plan was based on both practical and ideological needs.
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:
The minutes of the meeting exemplify German planning for the occupation of the Soviet Union. They present a deliberate decision on the life and death of vast parts of the local population as a logical, inevitable development.Christopher Browning (2026). 9780803213272, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem. ISBN 9780803213272 Three weeks later, on 23 May 1941, economic policy guidelines for the coming invasion were produced by Hans-Joachim Riecke's agricultural section of the Economic Staff East, which had direct responsibility for the economic and agricultural exploitation of the soon-to-be occupied Soviet territories:
The perceived grain surpluses of Ukraine figured particularly prominently in the vision of a "self-sufficient" Germany. Hitler himself had stated in August 1939 that Germany needed "the Ukraine, in order that no one is able to starve us again as in the last war". 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:
Discussing the plan, Backe noted a "surplus population" in Russia of 20 to 30 million. If that population were cut off from food, that food could be used for the invading German Army and the German population. Industrialization had created an urban population of many millions in the Soviet Union. Great suffering among the native Soviet population was envisaged, with tens of millions of deaths expected within the first year of the German occupation. Carefully planned starvation was to be an integral part of the German campaign, and the German planners believed that the assault on the Soviet Union could not succeed without it. 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.
The most reliable figures for the death rate among Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity reveal that 3.3 million died of a total of 5.7 million captured between June 1941 and February 1945, most of them directly or indirectly from starvation., esp. 244–246; Christian Gerlach: Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland, 1941 bis 1944. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999, pp. 788–855 (for Belarus). Of these 3.3 million, 2 million had already died by the beginning of February 1942. The enormous number of deaths was the result of a deliberate policy of starvation directed against Soviet POWs. 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.; Alex J. Kay: "Ausbeutung, Umsiedlung, Massenmord. Die NS-Zukunftspläne für den Osten: Hungerplan und Generalplan Ost", in: Predigthilfe und Materialien für die Gemeinde, Ökumenische Friedensdekade 2012, pp. 44–50 47–48. The number of French, Belgian and Dutch POWs who died in German captivity was extremely low compared with deaths among Soviet POWs.
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 and the impossibility of cutting off the food supply to cities without causing major uprisings. Except in isolated cases, the Germans lacked the manpower to enforce a 'food blockade' of the Soviet cities; neither could they confiscate the food. The Germans were able to significantly supplement their grain stocks, particularly from the granaries in fertile Ukraine, and cut off the Soviets from them, leading to significant starvation in the Soviet-held territories (most drastically in the Siege of Leningrad, where about one million people died).On the Leningrad blockade see Alex J. Kay: "Hungertod nach Plan". In: Der Freitag, 23 January 2009, p. 11. Germans also tried to starve Kiev and Kharkiv in German-occupied Ukraine. During the German occupation, about 80,000 residents of Kharkov died of starvation. The lack of food also contributed to the starvation of forced labor and concentration camp inmates in Germany.
By mid-1941, the German minority in Poland received per day, while Poles received and Jews in the ghetto . The Jewish ration supplied a mere 7.5 percent of human daily needs; Polish rations only 26 percent. Only the rations allocated to Germans fulfilled the full needs of their daily caloric intake.
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