Black Earth(83)

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If the war had gone as Hitler had expected, the winter of 1941 would have brought massive starvation throughout the western Soviet Union. Instead, Jewish children were being gassed in vans as war continued. The war of colonization against the Slavs, though it continued, was yielding to the war of elimination of the Jews.

In nature, thought Hitler, conflict was over food, and the weaker races were to starve. The objective of the Hunger Plan was precisely the starvation of supposedly inferior Slavs. After the defeat of the Red Army and the collapse of the Soviet state, food from the fertile parts of the western Soviet Union, above all Soviet Ukraine, was to feed German civilians. This reorganization of the European political economy was to make Germany self-sufficient and Germans secure and comfortable. Some thirty million Soviet citizens were supposed to starve in the winter of 1941, among them six million inhabitants of Soviet Belarus. This failed. Soviet citizens did indeed starve, and in large numbers: three million in prisoner-of-war camps, a million in Leningrad, tens of thousands more in Soviet Ukrainian cities such as Kharkiv and Kyiv. Yet the result was barely sufficient to feed the German soldiers fighting on the eastern front, and it did little to bring a new bounty home to Germany.

The German invasion of the USSR did create the possibility of distributing the hunger. As German soldiers were ordered to feed themselves and their animals (the Germans invaded with some 750,000 horses) from the land “like in a colonial war,” the allocation of the foodstuffs that remained became a political problem. The result was the invention of a new politics in 1941 and 1942: the redistribution not of food in western and central Europe but of hunger in eastern Europe. Unable to reward civilians in Germany with plentiful food, German policy used food shortages to motivate peoples under their control and to enforce their own racial hierarchies. As early as September 1941, the Germans were no longer seeking to transform an entire region through starvation, but rather to allocate hunger in such a way as to help them win the war. People wanted Jewish property; they also wanted food rations better than those of the Jews.

Like the politics of Judeobolshevism, the politics of relative deprivation subdued resistance and generated collaboration. In the most drastic cases, people killed quickly in order to avoid dying slowly. Once released from starvation camps, Soviet prisoners of war were willing to do anything to stay out, including aiding Germans in the policy of the mass murder of Jews. Someone had to dig all of those pits. On December 7, Soviet prisoners of war were digging pits in the Letbarskii Forest so that Germans could shoot the Jews of Riga. Perhaps the Germans on the scene regarded this as the control of the Judeobolshevik menace. And yet, no matter how many battles the Germans seemed to win, and how many prisoners they took, starved, or exploited, the Red Army kept fighting.

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The autumn of 1941 was eventful for ten-year-old Yuri Israilovich German. He was growing up in Kaluga, a city in Soviet Russia, about 190 kilometers southwest of Moscow. Two years earlier his father had disappeared in the middle of the night, arrested by the NKVD on charges of sabotage. A few weeks after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, his father returned, emaciated and exhausted, from hard labor in the Soviet north. In September 1941, Yuri’s father was mobilized, despite his condition, for the Red Army. With his father gone again, this time to fight the Germans, Yuri began to feel, for the first time, that he was being stigmatized as a Jew. A Russian neighbor said that the Germans would “deal with” people like him when they arrived. When German troops did reach the city in October 1941, Kaluga residents greeted them with bread and salt. Very quickly a local administration, following German orders, established a ghetto inside a cloister that had been closed under Soviet rule. Yuri and other children were forced to work in the fields, and to dig pits for murdered Jews. Some of the Jews inside the ghetto were shot, including those regarded as disabled and a kind teacher who had tried to help the children. Then, to everyone’s surprise, shells began to burst around the city, and gunfire was heard. It was December 1941, and the Red Army had returned. In haste, the Germans tried to liquidate the ghetto, burning its buildings and shooting with machine guns at the Jews who tried to escape. Yuri and his mother were among the few survivors. They returned to their house, which had in the meantime been taken by an Orthodox priest.

The battle for Kaluga was part of the astonishing counterattack of the Red Army. In early December 1941, Soviet soldiers turned the tide at Moscow. Operation Typhoon had failed. On December 7, a German general, Hellmuth Stieff, wrote to his wife that he and his men were “fighting here for our own naked lives, daily and hourly, against an enemy who in all respects is far superior.”