On 2 May 1941, seven weeks before the invasion started, the plan was formally adopted, officials assuming that ‘umpteen million people will doubtless starve, if what we need is taken out of the country’. By the time Ukraine was in German hands in the autumn, the Gauleiter of Thuringia and Reich Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation, Fritz Sauckel, had been told repeatedly that ‘at least ten to twenty million of these people’ would starve to death in the coming winter. Backe’s own estimates were that 20–30 million ‘Slavs’ would die. The ‘Hunger Plan’ became a central element of German
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