Quick viewing(Text Mode)

The Grand Strategy of Racial War the East

The Grand Strategy of Racial War the East

THE \VAGES OF DESTRUCTION , : The Making and fleet of tractors and trucks to bring in the harv:sr. for v..rhich the ye-1 Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2007). could nly come from the itself. Asronishingly, T!t6mas I4 n1ade n comment on the logistical and operational consi0.e'rations involved ·n e~tending 's invasion 2,000 kil{)£erres to The Grand Strategy of Racial the east. 10-' . , /7~··· Surveying 1is ren1arkable collection of rationalizati9ris three things, at least, are cle r. First of all, Hitler's authority was t9" great, following the success in ance, for anyone to mount a seri-6us challenge to his decision to invad the Soviet Union. Halder bac)<~d away fro1n an open clash. General Th 1as did an about-face to /onforn1 to Hitler's point of view. Beneath the veneer of consensus, Jxtvi.rever, it is clear that there The last four chapters have focused on disentangling the complex mili­ \o..rere deep divisions oth about the d~gn of the operation and its tary-economic considerations that motivated Hitler and his regime strategic ratlon;;i.le. As teas the spr· ,g of 1941, the Foreign Ivfinistry between 1939 and r94r. Once \Vt appreciate rhe scale of the inter­ was still opposing the c ing wa preferring to continue the alliance national escalation that Hitler had set in motion in 1938, reaching its \Vith the Soviet Union ag inst e British Empire. 104 But even more climax in the summer of T 940 with the dran1atic rearmament decisions I povverful than ~he Fuehrer th in silencing debate was the common of the United States, it is possible to reconstruct an intelligible and faith in the Wefurmacht. If ed Army could indeed be destroyed in consistent strategic logic behind Hitler's actions. Though by the late the first weeks Of the ca paign, west of the Dnieper-Dvina river line, 1930s was by far the rnost highly mobilized society in then, as in 194?, the orries tha receded the attack v,rould soon be Western Europe, it \Vas a European economy of modest resources. By forgotten. Ther~ \V uld be no nee for arguments about the relative the summer of 1939 the limits of Germany's peacetime capacity for priorities of ec'6 n1ic as opposed to urely military objectives. The mobilization were fully apparent. The combined economic potential of resources of th '.western Soviet Union wo ld be shackled to the German the European powers arrayed against Germany was daunting enough. war effort Ci ~he Third would fina y be able to i1npose its will Once the United States \i\Tas added to the equation, the disparity \Nas on the e ire c0ntinent of Europe. But this ssumption of imn1ediate completely overwhelming. From I938 onwards the alignment of the milita success' was also the central weakness f all the 's United States with the \Vestern powers \Vas taken for granted in . plan ing. If the shock of the initial assault di not destroy Stalin's From 1939 onwards it was assumed that America would soon be making regime, it vvas 3.lready evident in February 1941 t r the Third Reich a decisive contribution to the armaments effort arrayed against Ger­ \.~.rould find itself facing a strategic disaster. many. If Hitler vvas to realize his dream of fundamentally overturning the global balance of power, he had to strike fast and hard and he had, at all costs, to retain the initiative. This \Vas the consistent if perhaps i1 'mad' logic that irnpelled first his decision to risk a general war over i.n Septen1ber r939, then his decision to press home the attack Ii on France regardless of risk and shortly thereafter ro prepare for an ii assault on the Soviet Union. In the light of the threat posed by the :1 British and i\merican armaments effort, in the light of the frailties of ii the blockaded European economy and in the light of the apparent :I .1 invincibility of the German arn1y, there vvas eYery reason to press onwards as quickly as possihle.

460 46T THE \\'AGES or DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \>:'AR

Insisting on this strategic logic~ ho\vever, is not in any \Vay meant to ?estroying the Jewish population was the first step tO\Vards rooting out obscure the M~lnichaean racial ideology that provided the animating the Bolshevik state. \Vhat was to follo\:v was a gigantic can1paign of land force of Hitler~s government. For Hitler, 'conventional strategy' \Vas Clearance and colonizarion, which also involved the 'clearance' of the inseparably int~rt\i1lined with racial ideology. Strategy for Hitler \;<,.'as the vast majority of the Slav population and the settlement of millions of grand strategy of race struggle. ff it is true that Hitler's decision to drive hectares of eastern Lebensrau1n with German colonists. Con1plementing: against the Soviet Union as early as 1941 \Vas motivated by a strategic this long-term programme of de1nographic engineering was a short-term calcularion centred on the war in the West, this does not make the attack strategy of exploitation, motivated by the 'practical' need to secure the on the Soviet Union any less "ideological'. 1\s \Ve have seen, for Hitlec food balance of the German Grossraum. The attainment of this entirely and the Nazi l~adership 1938 had marked a funda1nenral shift. As it 'pragn1atic' objective required nothing less than the murder, by organ­ vvas understood in Berlin, the \Var in the w·est had been forced on ized , of the entire urban population of the \Vestern Soviet Union. Germany hy the \Vorld Je'-vish conspiracy pulling the strings in London As and had already den1onstrated in rhe and \~ashington. 1 From the Sudeten crisis onvvards, this perverse hidden in the spring of 1940, Hitler and his regime \.Vere linkage ca1ne to be personified by Roosevelt on the one hand and by determined that in this world \var, it \vould not he the \vho Churchill, the a:rch·-opponent of appeasement, on the other. And as we \Vere starved into defeat. have seen, this c;onspiratorial interpretation was maintained consisrelldy throughout _r174,o and r941. L)ocuments captured in the foreign A-1inis­ tries in and Paris only served to confirm the view that Hitler's I decision to start the \Var in 1939 had pre-en1pted a vicious British and American plot to encircle and strangle Gern1any. l'he identification of From the moment that Germany invaded Poland in September .r939, Roosevelt v.rith the 'world Jewish conspiracy' \Vas unrelenting. Seen in the genocidal impulses of Nazi ideology towards borh the Je\vs and the this light) rhe question of whether Hitler was motivated to attack the had taken on concrete form in an extraordinary programme of Soviet Union primarily by rhe need to knock Britain out of the war, population displacement and colonial settlement._) The architects of this thereby forestalling A.n1erican intervention, or by hi~ pursuit of his programn1e were Heinrich Hin1mler and his technical staffs in the long-held ideol<;gical vision of racial struggle, is based on a false alterna­ Reichssicherheitshaupta1nt (RSH_A.) and the offices of the Reichs­ tive. The conqu~st of in the East had of course ahvays been kommissar fuer die Festigung deurschen Volkstums (RKF). The practical Hitler's central strategic objective. The threat posed by the Anglo­ success of this early programme was lin1ited. But it was crucial in estab­ it American alliar'.lce, rnasterminded by world Je\vry, sin1ply made this lishing rhe close connection in SS thinking bet\veen the removal of r 1! n1ore urgent and more necessary than ever. the Je\vs and the wider project of racial reorganization and Germanic 'I There can be no doubt, however, that in its execution, if not in its settlement. 'i lI rationale, Barh~rossa did mark a funda1nental departure. On 22 June As we have seen, the idea of colonial settlement in the East had 11 1_941 the Third.Reich launched not only the most n1assive campaign ir: long been central to radical . In 1939 this v:.ras 1, I! military history, it also unleashed an equally unprecedented campaigr. compounded by two more immediate impulses. The incorporation of a li !f of genocidal violence. The concentrated focus on the destruction of the large part of Polish territory into the Reich faced Germany \Vith the Jevvish population has come to be seen as the truly defining aspect question of \vhat to do with millions of ne\v, non-German inhabitants. of this can1pai~n. l--iowever, in , the epicentre of the On the other hand, agreements reached with the Soviet Union and Italy ti Holocaust, the .Judaeocide was not an isolated act of 1nnrder. -rhe c;er­ in September and October r939 meant that Germany had to accommo­ ii n1an invasion yf the Soviet ljnion is far better understood as the last date the 'return' to rhe Reich of hundreds of thousands of erhnic Ger­ grent land-grah )n the long Jnd bloody history of European colonialism.2 mans fro1n the Baltic and South Tyrol. To make roon1 for this influx,

462 463 THE \'V-AGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL IX'AR

the SS prepare4 to re1nove both the entire Jewish population and the a nevv round of planning, both for a '' to the Jevvish vast majority of the Polish inhabitants from the Polish territory nO\V problem, which in 194 I was still predominantly a Polish-Jewish prob­ annexed to the .Reich.-1 One early version of the General plan specified lem, and for a 1nassive displace1nent of native . His most immediate the goal of deporting r inillion and 3 .4 1nillion Poles.-' The only objective \Vas to find homes for the repatriated ethnic Gern1ans by native inhabitarits who were to ren1ain were the sn1all minority judged displ~cing 770,000 Poles into the (;eneral Government at the earliest fit for incorporation into the German racial community, plus an an1ple possible opportunity. This, however, ran foul of conditions in the Gen­ supply of . This proved v..rildly over-ambitious. In early eral Government and the transport needs of the German army in advance r940 Himmler and Heydrich hoped to drive 600,000 people our of the of Barbarossa. Instead of the 250,000 people that Heydrich had hoped ne\.vly annexed territory and into the c;eneral Government. To do so, to 1nove by May T94r, rhe SS in fact managed to displace only 25,000. ho\vever, v,1ould have produced chaos. By _A_pril 1940 'only' 261,517 These, ho\vever, were merely short-term difficulties. The news of people had bee~ displaced, half Jews, half Polish peasants. By the end Germany's in1pending attack on the Soviet Union unleashed euphoria of 1940 the total had risen to 305,000. Instead of removing the Jews) amongst the SS staffs. The Soviet Union offered the chance to solve the the Gern1an administrators resorted to concentrating rhen1 in large urban problems of territory and population on a scale unimaginable in the con­ ghettos, the la~gest at t6dZ. Millions of Poles, meanwhile, were con­ fines of Poland. Un\vanted bodies could be s\vallowed up in the\vastelands scripted for wo;rk in Germany or for forced labour on formerly Polish of the East, huge tracts could be allocated for German settlement. Here soil. By the end of i940, I8o,ooo ethnic Germans had been settled on finally was the stage on which to resolve the problems of population

! Polish farn1s, a process accompanied by brutal evictions and much and space in a truly radical fashion. On 30 January r94 l Hitler repeated ii publicity. How~ver, the numerical imbalance remained frustrating. By to the ecstatic crowds in the Sportpalast the threat he had made nvo :i 8 11 January 1941 :more than 530,000 ethnic Germans had been repatriated years earlier. ln a speech directed above all towards asserting the futility 11 to the Reich, ha~ving left behind farms and other property in their original of Britain's continued war against Germany, Hitler ended by restating 6 11 homeland valued at no less than 3. 3 r5 billion . But instead his 'prophecy' that 'if Jewry were to plunge the world inro war, the role 11 of taking over Pri1ne agricultural settlen1ents, the majority of the retur­ of Jewry v..rould he finished in Europe'. Unlike in 1939, this was no

11 nees found themselves languishing in SS-run transit camps. longer a conditional threat. It \Vas a firm intention. The agitation of This practical failure, however, did not deflate the enthusias1n of America against Germany vvas after all an established fact. Whether or I-Ieydrich and the SS. As of September r940, the process of racial sifting not Germany was involved in an open world war, it was fighting a global began in earne~t \Vith the introduction of the Volksliste. Of 8. 5 3 million coalition and would soon face the full flood of lend-lease. Hitler could :1 Poles within G~nnany's borders, only l n1illion \Vere dee1ned worthy of therefore assert \Vith some confidence: 'The coming months and year 'I I, inclusion in th1s list. They were ranked into four classes according to will prove that I prophesied rightly in this case too.' A few weeks II I' the speed \Vith 'which the SS 'racial scientists' believed that they could earlier Heydrich had received his first order to prepare for a truly II be assimilated ;into the German fold. The fate of the 7 million other comprehensive solution for the European Je\vish problem.'! Jews from· Poles vi.:as left· uncertain. Their legal status \Vas reduced to that oi all over Europe, fro1n the Reich and from Poland \.Vould be sent to their 11

11 'dependants of the Reich \Vith lin1ited domestic rights' (Sc:hutzangehoe­ deaths on n1arshy construction sites in the desolated territory of the East rige des deutschen mit beschraenkten Inlaenderrechten). By the stripped bare by the German occupying forces. In the Wehrmacht ii end of ·1 940 the Reich Agriculture lviinistry reported that the majority and the SS drafted guidelines calling for the liquidation of all elements !I of Polish peasants in the new Gern1an territories were refusing to plant who could be dangerous to German authority in the newly conquered 'i their fields for the new season, because they di.cl not expect to be in territories, a category that Goering defined for Heydrich as including ii !i possession of t\1eir farms corne harvest time. 7 Given what Heydrich had the 'GPU-organizarion, the political commissars, Jews, etc.'rn By 6 June in 1nind, this was only realistic. In January T941 Heydrich had initiated this had been formalized hy the army high command as the nororious

464 465 THE \VAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL 'IX'AR

Commissar c>rder, which called ·for indiscri1ninate an

~ administratio~ of the SS. Over the following twelve months the evol­ Russian population. ix The Russian territory around Leningrad \\ras to II ution of policy tO\Vards the Jews and the developn1ent of long-tem1 ;! be completely depopulated_ The various drafts of the Genera!plan dif:. ,, planning for the settlen1ent of Eastern Europe \Vere pushed forward in ·1: fered in their estimates as to the actual numbers involved, bot the constant intefchange between the offices of the RSHA, the RKF and lo\vest figure was 3 I million displaced people, not including the Je\vish 14 the SS econ<;>mic adminstration. The first sketch of the so-called minority_ More realistic estimates, which allo\ved for the natural rate of General plan \)st was finished in a matter of weeks by the RKF's settle­ population increase over the period in which the programme \Vould be ment expert, frofessor . It \vas presented -co Hin1mler as implemented, put the number of victims at closer to 4 5 million people. 1 ~ ·early as 15 July 1941. In the autu1nn the order \Vas given to construct a There was still no absolute clarity about the final destination of the nu1nber of b~se camps in Poland from. \:vhich slave-labour colun1ns displaced populations. But what cannot have been in doubt is that the \Vouid begin'. the enormous construction programme called for by process of 'evacuation' would involve mass death on an epic scale. Only Meyer's Gen~ralplan. J'vleanwhile, 's RSHA \Vorked those capable of work were of any interest to the Germans_ By the end both on the o:urline plan for the Final Solution and a second draft of the of x942 the talk was of the possible 'physical annihilation· of entire Generalplan. :A general statement on the outline of the Final Solution~ populations, not only the Jewish minority, but the Poles and 20 to embrace nq:it only the millions of Jews living in Poland and the Soviet as well. i\ny moral consideration had long ago been set aside_ The Union but a!S.o the far smaller communities of Western Europe, was question was one of practicalities_ 15 ready hy De~emher 1941. The n1eeting had to he postponed until The genocidal implications of the GeneralpL:in ()st were clear!~·

466 4fr7 THE \XTAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL WAR

:vealed by a 'tridl run' organized in the summer of r942. On r 8-19 July the settlement of at least 10 n1illion Ger1nans. The ethnic boundary of 24 i 942, at the sani:e time as Himmler com1nun.icated the definitive order the Gern1an race was to be forced 1,000 kilometres to the east. The SS for the killing of the Jews in the General Governn1ent, he also issued planners involved in these discussions \Vere only too aware that by instructions to Odilo- Globocnic to carry out an experi1nental 'evacu­ conjuring up images of the Teutonic knights they were in danger of ation' of the enri:re Polish population of the Zan:10SC region.21 This was appearing outlandishly archaic. In their self-understanding, however, intended as the first step towards widening the process of Germanization rhey were anything but. Not that Konrad Meyer and his sraffers dis­ beyond the borders of the Reich. After completing the 'evacuation' of tanced the1nselves from the tradition of German settlement in the East. the entire Jewishipopulation, Odilo Globocnic began a second round of But to understand this as an archaic attachment was to miss the point. Selektionen, which split the Polish population into four groups, by age, As one official in Frank's General Government explained, the Third sex and political .dangerousness. Men and \Vomen capable of \vork were Reich was resu1ning a historic 111ission of n1odernization. 'In reality the divided into tv.ro· segregated groups, exactly as I-Ieydrich had demanded Masters of the German Order and above all the leaders of the settlement for the Jews at the Wannsee meeting. Polish children were separated [Lokatoren], who built up and settled the villages and farms on a com­ from their famil~es and allocated at rando1n to men and women over mercial basis, were ... anything but Romantics. They were cool calcu­ the age of 60. T:hese ill-matched 'family groups' were then dispatched lators and stemmed in considerable numbers from the con1n1ercial to so-called 'retirement villages', which \Vere in fact the settlements left classes.'25 Nor was the project impractical or 'merely ideological' in its vacant by the gassing of their Jewish inhabitants. The fourth group of intent. The East vvould offer a prosperous future for the hard-pressed Poles, those judged rr1ost dangerous by the German authorities, were German peasantry. For Konrad Meyer, the architect of the General plan dispatched directly to Ausch\vitz and Majdanek, vvhere they \:Vere Ost, it was the chance of a new beginning beyond the overcrovvded executed or \:Vorked to death.22 In practice, the ZamoSt evacuation was confines of the Reich. As he put it in a programmatic article: not a success. ~fhe efforts by the SS to round up the inhabitants met with The land folk of ton1orrow will be a different people from that of yesterday ... intense armed r~sistance and required the rnobilization of thousands of, For our rural population the davvning of this ne\V age means a fundamental Gennan police,· troops and auxiliaries. Tens of thousands of Poles change of character ... The choice between traditional or progressive, primitive 2 escaped into the:forests. -' By the sumn1er of 194 3, c;lohocnic,was forced or modern, can only be resolved in favour of a healthy, communally conscious to abandon the, experiment. Coin pared to the outright murder of the idea of progress and performance. This in1plies a clear decision in favour of Jewish populati?n of the (;eneral Governn1ent, the ZamoSt experiment :] struggle as opposed to those ... \.\'ho see the salvation of the peasantry in the was small in sc~le. However, ir was highly significant in indicating the protection of a naturt> reserve. There can be no return to the 'good old days.'. It 'I full extent of tlte Third Reich's genocidal ambition. The Generalplan is therefore best to give up co1nplaining about the fact that the 'old peasantry' is Ost set a timeta~le for the extinction of the entire population of Eastern 2 ,,i gone and to affirm the new peasantry of the Third Reich and to fight for ir. " Europe. lt should be taken no less seriously than the programme outlined I: by Heydrich at ~he . The vision that ins pi red the German colonial project in the East had 1: Given the sc

468 469 THE \i?AGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \VAR

The c;eneralplan Ost envisioned, not a return to the past1 but a nevv and expansiv~ phase of German economic development. It belongs in rhe o/o of population The SS ideal {Hanover Reich average co1npany of tl)e Gennan Labour Front's enorn1ous housing progran1me reliant on and ) r93 5 announced ln1the autumn of I 940 ·and the pre-war Volksvvagen scheme. ' In the Easti a ne\v abundance of natural resources would be cotnbined Agriculture 35 21 with Gennan: knov;.r-ho\v and capital ro enable a dramatic increase in Crafts 35 39 the standard :of living. The most succinct expression of this ambition Industry and

was populati~n density. In the initial planning for Poland this was set at i commerce l) 17 r oo people p~r square kilometre. ()nee the territory of the Soviet Union Public services 7 8 was incorporated into rhe c;eneralplan Ost, the rarget was reduced to Other 8 r5 80 people per: square kilometre. This target \.vas significantly lovver than the density id Germany in i939, at r33 people per square kilomet:e. Source: C. Madajczyk (ed.), Von1 Generulplan Ost z1nn But it vvas higher than that prevailing in France at the time.:i.s Nor Generlllsiedlungsplon {Munich, r994), 3-r4, doc. I were the agrdnomists working for the SS under any illusion about the ii standard of lifing that could be expected in a society consisting entirely 1 officers. The goal of complete Germanization, however, \Vould never be of peasant farmers. Instead, Meyer's ideal \Vas the population structure achieved if German farmers were forced to rely on native Slavs to do ii of Bavaria ot Hanover, vvhich in the 1930s sustained an uncluttered the bulk of the fieldwork. So land was also allocated to provide allot­ 29 11 balance of agriculture, industry and services. The C;eneralplan pro­ ments for a substantial population of German farm labourers . jected an agritultural share in the workforce of no 1nore than one-third, The settlement in the East was directly coupled with the efforts of the . ~ vvith a similaf share employed in industry, crafts~ commerce and public RNS to bring about the wholesale rationalization of agriculture within ![ services. Placed in relation to the long-run development of the German Germany, announced by Darre at the end of r940.-'0 In the \Nords of an occupational ;structure, the SS vision involved turning the clock back early planning document, it was assumed that 'the constructive effort in :I ., not to the l'vfiddle Ages, but to r900. the East will ... permit the final reconstruction of the areas of partible In light of the problems in the Reich, achieving the correct distribution inheritance in the old Reich. From Wuerttemberg and Baden alone of land \Vas clearly a key question in Germany's colonization in the East. roo,ooo peasant and craftsmen families will be made available. '·' 1 From The majority 1 of German settlers would be provided with self-sufficient the summer of r 940 onwards teams of experts from the Reichsnaehr­ ' homesteads (known as Hufen) of at least 20 hectares. As we have seen, stand, under the direction of the ubiquitous Professor Meyer, undertook ' 1 r 2 farrns of 20-30 hectares \Vere the n1ainstay of the Erbhoefe in the Reich. a comprehensive inventory of rural Germany. .i In painstaking local In those areaS where the quality of land required farn1s of n1ore than 30 enquiries they evaluated a sample of 4,500 German villages with a I hectares, the family farm v;.ras not a viable unit. These territories would combined population of 5 million inhabitants. In every village, every be given ove~~ to larger estates run by veterans of the SS, en1ploying farm was graded according to its viability. In future no farm v;.rould be '11' gangs of Slav~ as farmhands. 1'he initial planning for Poland provided acceptable in Germany that did not yield a n1oney income of at least I that two-thirds of the land was to be divided between I 50,000 Hufen, 3,000 Reichsmarks per annum, placing the farming family comfortably I ' each supporti~ng a c;erman peasant fa1nily. One-third of the land was to above the n1edian point in the national income distribution. In practice be given ove~ to r :2.,ooo large \Xlehrhauernhoefe, to he reserved for SS this n1eant that farms would need to have a minimun1 size of T 8 hectares,

470 47r THE \~TAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \VAR

in some regions clbser to 3 o. In areas of partible inheritance such as the provide at least .r5.67 billion Reichsn1arks from the national budget; , upwards of 30 per cent of all farms were designated for 4.29 billion would corne from a special fund at the disposal of Heinrich consolidation or l:iquidation. If it had been possible to disregard local Him1nler as RKF; German local government vvas expected to provide sensibilities altoge~her, the rate of consolidation would have been closer 3.04 billion. These public funds would be concentrated above all on to 50 per cent. -'-i\.nd 1'.1eyer's teams graded not only the far1ns but also forestry, infrastructure, road building and agricultural amelioration. the farming population. Hard-\vorking farmers who lacked land were The Reichsbahn was expected to contribute ar least 1. 5 billion rovvards to be assisted by the consolidation of smaller holdings taken from expanding the raihvay infrastructure. Finally, in excess of 20 billion was part-time farmers. or less adequate cultivators. Young families of good expected to be raised on n1ore or less commercial terms for industrial German stock would be encouraged to take up the opportunities for and urban development. If the Generalplan Ost had ever been carried settlement in the F,ast. The final version of the Generalplan completed out, it v\rould have involved a massive reallocation of German national by Meyer in r942 called for no less than 220,000 families to be drawn capital towards the east. rn from the overpopulated rural areas of the Reich. In addition, the SS It was through the issue of costing and the consequent decision to rely hoped to be able tO attract 220,000 young couples starting life in agricul­ heavily on forced labour that the General plan was linked directly to the 33 9 ture and at least 2· rnillion colonists frorn the urban areas of Germany. Final Solurion.-' As Himmler put it to a meeting of senior SS leaders in But the agraria:n planners did not merely intend to seize land and the summer of 1942: redistribute popul1ation. The goal of creating a 'high-intensity' (hochin­ If we do not fill our can1ps with slaves - in this roo1n I mean to say things very tensiven) Lebens11aum could only be achieved by substantial invest­ firmly and very clearly - with \Vorker slaves, who V1.'ill build our cities, our ment."14 i\n enor1n:Ous flow of Gern1an capital would have to follow the 11 villages, our farms \Vithour regard ro any losses, then even after years of \\'ar \Ve German settlers in;to the East. The farn1s would need to be well equipped \Vill not have enough n1oney to be able to equip the settlen1ents in such a n1anner Ii vvith livestock and machinery. But most irnportant of all was the need that real Germanic people can live there and take root in the first generation.~ 11 to i1nprove the trtnsport infrastructure. Modern agriculture could not prosper without liinks to the to\vns and the cities. Meyer's initial costing Planners such as l(onrad Meyer and the SS building chief Hans l(amm!er for the Generalplan Ost can1e to 40 billion Reichsmarks, which was expressed themselves in less drastic language, but their intent was no soon inflated, on Himmler's insistence, to 67 billion Reichsmarks.35 This less clear.41 The total labour demands of the Generalplan Ost \vere \:Vas as much as Oermany had spent on rearmament het\veen I930 and estimated to he in the order of 400,000-800,000 for the first phase. At 1939. It was mote than the combined total of all investment in the a minimurn, the number of forced labourers \vas ,set at r75,ooo - 'Jews, German economy: betvveen r933 and 1938. It \Vas approximately two­ Poles and Soviet prisoners of war'.4-'- On average, Meyer estimated, !i thirds of (;ermany's GDP in 1941.36 Half a million marks was to be e1nploying slave labour would reduce the cost of construction by 40 per ii sunk into every sq)Jare kilometre of Germany's vast new Eastern empire. cent in cash terms. I-Ialf of this saving, however, \VOuld be offset by the 11 il Assuming the territory was populated at the density of 80 persons per cost of maintaining the vvorkforce with food and clothing, a debit item 'I !! square kilo1netre,-this implied an investment of 6,250 Reichsn1arks per that Meyer added ahnost as an afterthought. Ji inhabitant. Here too there is no rrace of backv:.rard-looking nostalgia. For the future of the SS concentration camp system, these figures had " 4 ]: On the plans endPrsed by both Himmler and Hitler, land remediation important implications. -' In the first half of 194 I the population of the ! :I and agriculture vvbuld claim only 3 6 per cent of Germany's investtnent camps numbered no rnore than 60,000. Clearly there needed to be a in the East. The r~st was earmarked for investments in transport infra- dramatic expansion. To provide for the needs of the Generalplan, the 37 structure, industry' and urban settlement. And this \Vas only the state- SS building staff on 27 ordered rhe construction of tV1ro directed element in Eastern econornic development. Huge sums were new camps, each to house 50,000 inmates. One \Vas to be sited in the expected to floVlr from private industry. The Reich, it \Vas hoped, would -Majdanek. The other \Vas to he built at Birkenau, a hamlet

472 475 Table 15. Proposed investment priorities of Generalplan Ost (spring 1942 version)

billion of <;;(, of Purpose: Rcichsn1arks which: total invested

Landscape ainelloration: J.3 7 Forestry o.6 r 1,000 square kilotnetres to be afforested Land sea pe restructuring o.6 Protective hedging and afforestation of agricultural area

Technical land in1prove1nent 2.2 2-o,ooo sqtiare kilo1netres of agricultural land need proper drainage

Agriculture: I 3· 5 JO Agricultural reconstruction 8.6 Co111plcte reconstruction of agriculture in 111ost of Poland Rural crafts o.8 40,000 s111all-scale crafts and other businesses required by population Rural industry 0.4 Large-scale fooJ processing, lun1ber industry, etc. Rural cultur8l facilities r.o Con1111unity centres) schools, I-Iitlcr Youth centres, \velfare centres, l(~ndergartcn) sports facilities Other rural housing 0.9 For farn1ing population and for teachers, doctors, civil servants, \.'i'Jrken;

Village infrastructure I. 8 Local infrastructure: roads, tracks, local electricity and telephone connections

Transport and infrastructure: 7.8 r7 Road building 1. 2. Ai1n is to reach the density of roads of East

Autobahn building I.O Two north-south and two east-west routes

Railway construction I. 5 Narrow-gauge systen1 to be built up to connect agriculture to trunk lines Waterways 2.6 FICJod regulation and navigation on \X'eichsel and Warthe

Electricity supply 1. 5 Electrification to be raised to level of Industrial 5.2 11 650,000 industrial jobs at c. 8,ooo Rcichsn1arks invest1ncnt per job

Urban: I 5·4 34 Urban housing 9.0 l million large apartn1ents for urban population of 4.3 rnillion

Urban cultural facilities 2.0 Mini1nun1 provision with educational facilities, cultural facilities Jnd hospitals, the n;st to be built with own funds

Urban crafts o.8 4 5,000 craft and other businesses for needs of popul'ation Urban utilities 3.6 Local infrastructure plus gasi sevverage and local transport facilities

Equipn1ent for construction 0.5

Total 45-7 JOO

Source: C. Madajc~yk (ed.), \10111 Gc11eralp/,1n ()st zun1 Ge11('ra/siedlu11gspla11 (Munich, 1994), 9r-123, doc. 23 THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RAClAL WAR

adjacent to the existing concentration camp at Auschwitz.44 By the end by the SS, for fear, amongst other things, of antagonizing the local of the year the SS had raised its targets to envision camp populations of population, the second programme, which openly envisioned the killing 125,000 at Majdanek and 150,000 at Auschwitz. Both facilities were of tens of millions of people within tl1e first twelve n1onths of the German originally intended' to house Soviet prisoners of war, but for reasons that occupation, was agreed benveen the Wehrmacht, all the key civilian will soon becon1-e apparent the v_ast majority of the billets at Auschwitz Ministries and the Nazi political leadership as early as the spring of ended up being occupied by Jews. In any case, the instrumentalization 1941. Nor can the so-called '' be described as secret. It was of the concentration camps as a sollrce of forced labour was well under referred to in official instructions issued to thousands of subordinates. way in the last Week of January 1942 when Hi1n1nler wrote to the SS And, perhaps most importantly, no effort \Vas made to hide the wider office in charge :of camp administration to inform them: rationale of the individual acts of brutality that the programme required. On the contrary, all German soldiers and occupation administrators in Since Russian pri~oners of war can no longer be expected in the near future, I Soviet territory were enjoined to understand and to commit themselves intend to send to l:he camps a large number of Jews and Jewesses who are being to its strategic logic. This genocidal plan comn1anded such \vide-ranging emigrated [sic] otit of Germany. Please get ready to receive in the concentration support because it concerned a practical issue, the importance of which, can1ps in the next four VI.reeks Ioo,ooo male Jews and up to 50,000 Jevvish follo\ving Germany's experience in , \Nas obvious to all: the women. Major ecpnomic tasks will be addressed to the concentration can1ps in need to secure the food supply of the German population, if necessary rhe coming weeks~ 4 ' · at the expense of the population of the Soviet Union. A week earlier, Heydrich had hosted the meeting at the \x;'annsee confer­ As we have discussed, the 'bread basket of the Ukraine' played a key ence centre, at Which a key group of civil servants \Vas inducted into the role in all the various military-economic assessments of the Barbarossa SS vision of the Final Solution. At the Wannsee meeting Heydrich campaign prepared over the winter of 1940-41. For Hitler, it was the referred neither to gassing nor shooting as means of disposing of the key priority, to be achieved prior IO any other military consideration, Jewish populatiOns of Poland or Western Europe. Instead, he proposed the importance of which was only reinforced by the alarming decline in that they should be evacuated eastwards in giant construction columns: the German grain stocks. By December I _940 the entire military and 'Under suitable :command, Jews are no\v to be deployed for labour in political leadership of the Third Reich \Vas convinced that this was the the East as part of the final solution. In large labour columns, under last year in which they could approach the food question "vith any separation of the sexes, Jews capable of labour are to be led, building confidence. Nor was this simply a German problem. All of the Western roads~ into rhe territory, in the process of which, without doubt, a large European territories vvhich had fallen under German domination in 46 part will drop dut due to natural wastage.' As we have seen, .tv1eyer's 1940 had substantial net grain deficits. Generalplan Ost had specified new roads as the first requirement; Unless additional sources of feed grain could be secured, the only r.2 billion Reichsmarks had been earmarked for their construction. solution was a mass slaughter of Europe's animal herds reminiscent of the famous 'pig massacre' of 1916. Given the isolation imposed on the European continent by the British blockade) only the Ukraine could II provide Western Europe v,rith the millions of tons of grain it needed to sustain its animal populations. Not surprisingly, therefore, \Vhen Hitler The. full extent of- the SS's genocidal an1bition is staggering and for gave the definitive order in early December r940 to begin preparing for obvious reasons: it has held the historical centre stage. However, what an attack on the Soviet Union, State Secretary Herbert Backe in the is less widely apJ?reciated is that the Wehrmacht entered the Soviet Unio.n Agriculture Ministry reacted with alacrity. intent upon not, one, but two programmes of mass murder.47 Whereas For Backe this was a moment of considerable personai significance. the Final Solution and the General plan Ost were secrets closely guarded Ever since the r92os he had been fixated on the conquest of Russian

476 477 THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \VAR territory as the.ultimate solution to the problems of the 'people vv:ithout reasons for supporting Backe's proposal. In early 194 T~ the German space' (Volk of1ne Raum).48 Now the first requirement was that Ger­ army \Vas increasingly concerned with the logistical preparations for many's Army ira the East- numbering 3 1nillion men and 600,000 horses Barbarossa. The map exercises conducted by the quartermaster's staff - should be fed from the territory of the Soviet Union. As Backe well revealed a glaring discrepancy between the supply needs of the German understood, h~wever, the Ukraine was not the limitless granary of army and the limited railway capacity running eastward into the Soviet imperialist clicbe. The Ukraine, in fact, produced only a smalt net surplus Union. Even under the n1ost optimistic assumptions it was hard to see of grain for export outside the Soviet Union. This \.Vas due, on the one how sufficient food, fuel and ammunition could be pushed through this hand. to the backwardness of Russian agronomy and on the other hand bottleneck. If,. on the other hand, the Wehrmacht could satisfy its to the extraor(qnarily rapid grovvth in the Soviet urban population. Since den1and for food and animal fodder from local sources, then this \VOuld r928 Stalin hacl stamped an urban civilization of 30 million inhabitants allow all available transport capacity to be concentrated on rhe \XTehr­ out of the ground. The food for this vast new urban proletariat came macht's chief priorities - fuel and ammunition. from the Ukraine. To conventional economic analysts in Berlin this On 2 May I94 I the State Secretaries representing all the major lvlinis­ imPlied that even if the Ukraine were successfully conquered, Germany terial agencies met in conference \Vith General Thomas to draft plans for could expect little immediate benefit. 49 It would, after all, take years the occupation. The result is one of the n1ost extraordinary bureaucratic before produc~ivity could be substantially increased. Herbert Backe, records in the history of the Nazi regime. In far more unvarnished however, drevv;radically different conclusions. To enable the grain sur­ language than \Vas ever used in relation to the je\vish quesrion, all of plus of the Ukraine to be directed immediately towards German needs, the major agencies of the German state agreed to a programme of mass it was necessarfy simply to cut the Soviet cities out of the food chain. murder, which dV1rarfed that which Heydrich \Vas to propose to the After ten years; of Stalinist urbanization, the urban population of the Wannsee meeting nine months later. According to General Thomas's western Soviet Union was now to be starved to death. secretariat the meeting concluded as follo\vs: That such a scheme should come from the pen of Herbert Backe can r.) The v.. ·ar can only be continued, if the e1!tire \Vehrmacht is fed from in come as no surprise. He \Vas a doctrinaire racial ideologue, a long-time the third year of the W3r. associate of Walther Darre and a personal friend of Reinhard Heydrich. 2.) If we take \vhat '\Vt need out of the country, there can be no doubt that many As \Ve have se~n, he had already demonstrated his willingness to use . millions of people will die of starvation. food as a meap_s of in Poland in the first year of the war. 3.) The most important issues are the recovery and removal of oil seeds, oil cake What is perhaps more surprising is the alacrity with which Backe's and only then the re1noval of grain.'° breathtaking s?ggestion \Vas taken up by the rest of the Ministerial bureaucracy in Berlin, above all by the chief economic expert of the The minute did not specify the number of millions that the Germans Oberkommando Wehrmacht (OKW), General Thomas. At tin1es, as V\'e intended to starve. However, Backe's imprint on the discussion is unmis­ have seen, Thdmas had toyed with opposition to I-fitler's \var. But at takable.51 Backe himself put the figure for the 'surplus population' of heart, the C~en~ral' \Vas a ruthless pragmatist. Germany's future as a the Soviet Union at between 20 and 30 n1illion, and over the follo,ving great power vvas Thomas's only real concern. The raison d'etre of his months these numbers established themselves as a common reference office in the OK\XT \Vas to prevent the kind of domestic crisis that had point. In mid-June, a week before the invasion of the Soviet Union, crippled the G~rman war effort in World War I. Thomas was fully Hin1mler addressed SS Gruppenfuehrer on the forthcoming 'race \var' apprised of the:precariousness of Gern1any's food situation and sa\v no (Volkstumskampf). It would, he opined, be a fight to the death in the reason to quibble with Backe's calculations. Furthermore, Hitler's mind course of Vl'hich 'through military actions and the food problems 20 to was clearly 111a~e up on the issue. He had set his heart on the Ukraine. 30 million Slavs and Jews will die'.-'2 In November, Goering boasted And to clinch. the argument, Thomas also had specifically n1ilitary to Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister, that the starvation of

478 479 THE \VAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \VAR

20-30 million Soviet citizens was an essential elen1ent of Germany's the inost devastating. It was responsible for the destruction of the great occupation polity. Following Backe's thinking to the letter, the guide­ Jewish communities of and , starting on 25-6 June with lines issued by ;the OKW for the managen1ent of agriculture in the a horrific at . By the spring of I942, Einsatzgruppe A occupied Easterb. territories - the so-called 'Green Book' - called for all had claimed n1ore than 270,000 victims, the overwhelming majority of of the industria~ and urban centres of western Russia, including the whom were Jewish, more than half the total killed by all four Einsatz­ wooded region between Moscow and Leningrad, to be cut off from their gruppen. Like the other SS teams, Einsatzgruppe A murdered by hand, food sources.53 :As a result, the Ger1nan occupation authorities were using rifles, pistols and machine guns. Local helpers sometimes resorted instructed to prepare themselves for a human catastrophe on an unprece­ to clubs and pickaxes. Amongst a defenceless and largely docile popu­ dented scale. "Many tens of millions of people in this area will beco1ne lation this \Vas enough to wreak havoc. The Judaeocide thus rapidly surplus to requi:rements and will die or will be forced to einigrate to took on an a\vful and concrete reality. Indeed, so intense was this .'54 In case the occupying authorities should be inovecl to alleviate experience that it set in motion a learning process, which by the end of the situation, th~ guidelines reaffirmed the essential connection between I94r was leading to the first experiments \Vith gas vans, a inethod mass starvation and the continuation of the German war effort: considered more adequate to the humanity of the perpetrarors. Hov.rever, the vans never caught on. They were improvised and slow-working Efforts to save the Population from death by starvation by drawing on the surplus contraptions and were subject to the same limitations encountered by of the black earth regions can only be at the expense of the food supply to Europe. the rest of the Wehrmacht's motorized transport in Russia. As a means They diminish the: staying po\ver of Germany in the war and the resistance of of killing, asphyxiation by carbon monoxide vvas simply too slow. Whilst Gern1any and Eur9pe to the blockade. There 1nust be absolute clarity about this experiments began in Poland with more efficient stationary gassing ... A claim by the [locall population on the German adn1inistration ... is rejected facilities, execution by hand remained the favoured practice in the Soviet right fro1n the star~. Union even in the second sweeps in r942, which claimed the lives of at least another 360,000 Jews in the Ukraine and Belorussia. In , where it is estimated that as many as 500,000 Jevvs were killed in the III course of the German occupation, shooting and gassing were combined, as Heydrich had intended, with 'destruction through labour' (Vernich­ After months of talk, on 22 June r94r the invasion of the Soviet Union tung durch A·rbeit). 56 The opportunity for the latter was provided by the began. Never, bdfore or since, has battle been joined with such ferocity construction of a major strategic highway necessary to secure the supply by so many mein, on such an extended battlefront. As the Ger1nan lines for . spearheads plun~ed deep into the western Soviet Union, immediately By contrast with the immediacy of the Einsatzgruppen, Backe's behind the line of the Wehrmacht's advance the Einsatzgruppen of the Hunger Plan had a n1ore abstract quality. The German authorities seen1 SS began their work of murder. In total, the four Einsatzgruppen (A to have imagined that millionfold starvation could be induced si1nply Baltic, B Belorussia and central Russia, C Ukraine, D Ro1nania and the by requisitioning all available grain and 'shutting off' the cities. In Cri.mea) nun1bertd only 3,000-3,200 n1en. But the SS rapidly gathered practice, this vision of mass starvation as a result of systematic inaction around them teQs of thousands of local militia.55 In addition, from the turned out to be naive.57 The Soviet population did not wait to be autumn o.f r941 the Einsatzgruppen vvere reinforced by fresh contingents starved. The only large groups that it proved possible w kill simply of German persJnnel - Waffen SS and numerous battalions of ar1ned by not feeding them were recognizable minorities within the urban German police. Jhe rate at which the Einsatzgruppen killed depended population and people confined in captivity: in other \Vords, the urban on the speed at \lllhich 'their' Army Group advanced and the density of Je\vish population and Soviet prisoners of war. hnmediately after the Jewish populatio[n that they encountered. Einsatzgruppe A was certainly arrival of the German troops, those Jews who \Vere not executed by

480 481 THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \\'AR the Einsatzgruppen were banned from food n1arkets or from dealing The rest died of 'natural' causes. Six hundred thousand died benveen directly vvith farmers. They were also banned from purchasing the December 194 r and February I942 alone. If the clock had been stopped scarcer forms Of food such as eggs, butter, milk, ineat or fruit. In in early 1942, this programme of mass murder would have stood as the Belorussia with~n the sector of , the 'ration' allocated greatest single committed by Hitler's regime. to Jevvish inhabitants of and otl1er cities was no more than 420 Destroying the urban population of occupied Russia turned out to be calories per day.58 In most places less was available. Over the winter of far inore difficult. To have completely shut off Minsk, Kiev or KharkoY 1941-2, tens af thousands of Jewish men, women and children suc­ from their agricultural hinterland \Vould have required a security oper­ cumbed to hunger and hunger-related illnesses. ation of very substantial proportions.01 \'X'ith severe fighting continuing But it was the Soviet prisoners of war from whom the Hunger Plan on all fronts, the Wehrmacht lacked the necessary 1nanpower. Further­ exacted the heaviest toll.59 In the first phase of Barbarossa no less than more, harassed occupation officials could see no logic in unnecessarily 3. 3 million Red: Army soldiers fell into the hands of the German army. antag9nizing the civilian population by implementing an immediate The Wehr1nacht could not claim that it lacked experience in dealing progran1me of genocide. It \Va-s necessary to make at least a sho\V of \Vith prisoners of war. On the Western Front it had coped quite feeding the population. Though the Germans always avoided any talk adequately vvith 2 million men taken in the space of only two months. of official rations, for fear that this would i1nply a degree of enritle­ But in advance of the Barbarossa campaign an order was given to exempt ment, food did begin to be distributed. The result \Vas a messy com­ Soviet prisoners from the normally accepted standards of the Geneva promise, recorded with astonishing sangfroid by one local Wehrmacht Convention. Special guidelines were laid down for the isolation and ad1ninistrator: execution of those judged to be politically dangerous. The prisoners were In the last rnonths for the first ti111e anJ then ever n1ore frequently there has be~n to be separated ~nto distinct ethnic categories. No adequate preparations mention of the civilian food supply in rhc course of the working d::ty. Th::lr the were inade for housing the1n over the winter months. In so far as any are still here too, \Ve never really consiJcred. No, that is not quite right. thought \Vas gi'fen to the matter, the assumption seems to have been Follovving the official instructions \Ve 'A'ere ... not supposed to consider rhem. that they \vould dig mud dugouts. Special rations were prescribed pro­ But the v-.rar has taken a different turn ... Under thc~e circun1stances v-.;e cannot viding far less ~utrition than for any other category of prisoner. Even afford not to ..::on.sider the population in food terms. But \vhere arc \Ve supposed well-managed p,risoner-of-war ca1nps are not healthy places. Many Red to get anything from?h! Army soldiers were in a poor condition when they were captured. Many \Vere wounded ?r suffering fron1 shock and exhaustion. Many had not 1-his question was never satisfactorily ansvvered. The urban popu­ eaten for days. to add to their misery they were forced to march out of lation of \.Vestern Russia survived by resort to the black n1arket and the combat zone in treks stretching over hundreds of kilometres. Given increasingly by abandoning the cities, returning to live \Vith family normal inortality rates, one would have expected tens of thousands of members who were still resident in the countryside. The Wehrmacht for deaths. But the .statistics leave no doubt that, aside from this 'normal its part did its hest to feed itself from the land. Within weeks of the attrition', the Wehrmacht was systematically starving its prisoners to invasion, the principal task of large parts of the German arrny was the death. By the e~d of December 1941, according to the Wehrmacht's requisitioning of food. 63 The troops plundered huge quantities of grain, 60 own records, the prisoner count had reached 3. 3 5 million. Of these1 livestock and dairy produce. Nevertheless, the German armies were not only r.r milliori were still alive and only 400,000 \Vere in sufficiently able to sustain themselves at the levels they expected. Especially in good physical state to be capable of work. Of the 2.25 million that had Belorussia, where the bulk of German forces were concentrated, local died, at least 6~0,000 had been shot, falling victim to the Kommissar­ sources proved inadequate in every respect. Large quantities of extra 6 befehl, which gave the German army and the SS Einsatzgruppen the food had to be shipped easrvvards from Gern1any. -1 But given tbe inad­ licence to execute any Soviet citizens thougl1t to be politically dangerous. equacy of the transport infrastructure even this vvas not enough. Army

482 483 THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION THE GRAND STRATEGY OF RACIAL \VAR

Group Centre n~ver suffered hunger to compare with that which haunted cerned that the exodus from Leningrad might degenerate into a public the Soviet force~ opposing them. But during the winter of 1941-2, with relations disaster. Tens of thousands of civilians would clearly die en the transport sySte1n in disarray, many German soldiers did go Without route to the Soviet lines. The one option that was never even considered rations for days :and sometimes, weeks on end.65 was the possibility of feeding the Soviet population from German stores. Fundamentall&', however, the Hunger Plan was never implemented in By December r94r Leningrad was in the grip of a severe famine. Over its full horror, because the German zone of occupation never included the Christmas period and into January I942 men, women and children 68 the two largest Urban concentrations of the Soviet Union, M.oscow and died at the rate of nearly 4,000 per day. According to the best available Leningrad. Though they were key targets in the planning of Barbarossa, evidehce, 653,000 Leningraders died in the :first eleven months of the the Wehrmacht never captured either city. Indirectly, however, this did siege. 69 By 1944 hunger and hunger-related disease may have claimed as fulfil the objectiVe of the Hunger Plan. The front lme severed millions many as 700,000 lives. of Soviet citizen~ from their main sources of food, thereby freeing the Ukrainian harvest for German use. The Soviets were forced to feed their war effort from :what little remained of Soviet agriculture. The result,' behind the Sovi~t lines, was ever-present hunger and in many cases, outright starvatipn, a situation exemplified most dra1natically by the besieged city of Leningrad. 66 The German and Finnish pincers closed around Leningrad in early October r94r. Two and a half_million civ­ ilians and soldieDS were trapped in a giant encirclement. Uncertain about the situation of the Soviet defenders, the German r8th Army, which had responsibility fo~ the siege, began canvassing options for dealing with the population. 6 ~ The army's staff proposed three possibilities: encircle the city and 'st~rve the lot' (alles verhungert); evacuate the civilians westwards into tl1e German zone of occupation; or arrange for their evacuation behi11d Soviet lines. The n1emo presented no decision, but set out the advantages and disadvantages of each option. Starving the population of L~ningrad to death would eliminate a large number of Communists and would relieve the Germans of the burden of feeding millions of peopl~. The only real disadvantage was propaiandistic. The foreign media would have a field day. In addition, the I feared the psychological impact on its soldiers of watching at close quarters as 4 million civilian':S starved to death. Evacuating the civilian population westwards, into ~he German-controlled rear areas, would deprive the Allies of their 'hPrror story'. But it would force the Germans to find food for 4 million extra people and there could be no illusions on that score: 'A large part of the people .coming out of Petersburg will starve in any case.' Thip too would upset the troops. Finally, there was the possibility of arranging \¥ith the Soviets for them to accept the evacuees. This \Vould have 'propaganda' advantages, but the Wehrmacht was con-

484 485

Top View