Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

by Anne Applebaum

Like every occupying power in Ukraine, the Nazis ultimately had only one real interest: grain. Hitler had long claimed that “the occupation of Ukraine would liberate us from every economic worry,” and that Ukrainian territory would ensure “no one is able to starve us again, like in the last war.” Since the late 1930s his government had been planning to transform that aspiration into reality. Herbert Backe, the sinister Nazi official in charge of food and agriculture, conceived a “Hunger Plan” whose goals were straightforward: “the war can only be won if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war.” But he also concluded that the entire Wehrmacht, as well as Germany itself, could only be fed if the Soviet population were completely deprived of food. As Backe explained in his “Economic Policy Guidelines” issued in May, as well as in a memorandum circulated to a thousand German officials in June 1941, “unbelievable hunger” would soon grip Russia, Belarus and the industrial cities of the USSR: Moscow and Leningrad as well as Kyiv and Kharkiv. This famine would not be accidental: the goal was for some 30 million people to “die out.”12 The guidelines for the Economics Staff East, which was to be responsible for exploiting conquered territory, put it starkly: