The Reich's forgotten atrocity [View All]

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/21/secondworldwar-russia

Timothy Snyder

The Reich's forgotten atrocity

The Nazi plan to starve 30 million people in the east went unrealised. But more than 3 million Soviet POWs were murdered

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In the east, Nazi plans were worse even than Nazi reality.

As German leaders prepared for the invasion of the Soviet Union in spring 1941, they agreed a quick summer victory would be followed by the starvation of some 30 million people. A Hunger Plan foresaw the "extinction of industry as well as a great part of the population". Soviet cities would be destroyed, Soviet industry destroyed, and eastern lands reduced to depopulated prairie ripe for German agrarian colonisation.

But the Red Army resisted and Stalin remained in the Kremlin. It proved difficult to starve large numbers of civilians without total control of territory. Stalin had managed to starve millions of his own citizens in these same lands a few years before, but he had at his disposal, then, an apparatus of terror and a loyal party organisation that the invading Germans could not match.

Though the Hunger Plan proved impossible, it provided the moral premises for the Wehrmacht's treatment of civilians and prisoners of war after the invasion of June 1941. Starvation proceeded where German soldiers had total control of land and people. Kharkiv, Kiev and, above all, besieged Leningrad were starved, killing more than 1 million Soviet civilians.

The main victims of the starvation policy were Soviet soldiers taken captive. Huge numbers of Red Army men (and women) were taken prisoner in that summer of 1941, largely because Stalin opposed retreats. In one engagement near Smolensk, 348,000 prisoners were taken; after the Battle of Kiev, the figure was 665,000. The wounded and sick were shot where they were found. Most of the prisoners who reached German camps would be dead by 1942.

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