The "artificial" famine in the German-occupied USSR

[wm]

Dark brown means 100% of the arable land is dedicated to crops, as the land there is of sufficient quality to do that. So it shows quality of the soil, and willingness of the population to make use of it.
The place is essentially the largest breadbasket of this world.

The sheer size of the territory preclude any natural famines there, even the Russian Empire famines were localized and preventable - the Empire produced 36.4% of the total world export of wheat (in 1910), total production was 70.9 million tons, 3760 calories per person per day from wheat alone.

During the WW2 that region was under German control - separated from the rest of Russia, so the surplus had to be enormous, most of the Russians were on the other (relatively "wheatless") side of the frontline.

[Gorque]

A news report from 1941 might help:

Axis Food Resources.pdf

[Gorque]

Didn't the retreating Soviet armies engage in a scorched earth policy?

[wingray]

Didn't the retreating Soviet armies engage in a scorched earth policy?

The Soviet Union was putting a lot more energy to dismantle and evacuate the factories, than evacuate the kolchozs. The speed of the German advance and the lack of roads (especially railroads) made it impossible to evacuate the countryside. Maybe some tractors and machines were blown up but nothing more.

[wm]

Exactly, according to Karel Berkhoff, Everyday Life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine the agricultural scorched earth policy wasn't successful, and the 1941 harvest was excellent anyway.

The actual Stalin's order there was:

"Birds, small cattle, and other food-stuffs, which are necessary for the remaining population" should not be killed, and destruction should only take place in a zone of seventy verst (about 74 kilometers) from the front, after "all adult males, working cattle, grain, tractors, and combines" had been taken away.

[Gorque]

The Soviet Union was putting a lot more energy to dismantle and evacuate the factories, than evacuate the kolchozs. The speed of the German advance and the lack of roads (especially railroads) made it impossible to evacuate the countryside. Maybe some tractors and machines were blown up but nothing more.

I agree for the most part dealing with the western reaches of the S.U. in that crops and factories fell mostly into German hands. However, as the primary German thrust was towards Moscow and many of the crops in the non-western areas of the Ukraine would still be available for harvesting. The Soviets had reported that their harvest of winter wheat had been essentially completed in the Ukraine by mid-August.

Soviet Harvest.pdf

[Gorque]

Exactly, according to Karel Berkhoff, Everyday Life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine the agricultural scorched earth policy wasn't successful, and the 1941 harvest was excellent anyway.

The actual Stalin's order there was:

"Birds, small cattle, and other food-stuffs, which are necessary for the remaining population" should not be killed, and destruction should only take place in a zone of seventy verst (about 74 kilometers) from the front, after "all adult males, working cattle, grain, tractors, and combines" had been taken away.

I concur, much of the areas under German control in July became available for harvesting as did some of the larger industries. However, one still needs to take into consideration that the plans for Barbarossa called for the Heer to forage as much as possible.

[little grey rabbit]

A lot to go through.

wm suggests that 350 000 tons of grain for Greece represents only 17% of daily calorific intake and thus not significant. That was 1 order, Paul Brassley in his study of agricultural trading over the war period said the annual intake was about 500 000 tons - that is one third of the grain consumption was imported. Rightly or not, Greece's dependence on food imports was well understood in 1939
http://newspapers.nl.sg/Digitised/Artic ... 2.137.aspx

Others suggest that Netherlands was a net exporter - terms of value yes. Anne Frank's father, for instance, exported pectin for jam making to the Wehrmacht. But its exports were mostly in terms of dairy, eggs and meat and this was dependent on imports of feedstocks. The agricultural sector concentrated on growing coarse grain for feedstocks while grain for human consumption was largely imported. According to the US Wheat board they exported 15.7 million bushels of wheat to the Netherlands annually in 1937 and 1938 (around 430 000 tons). This compares with 35 million for the UK and 2 million bushels for Germany.
Germany was heavily involved in the exports of coarse grains for feedstocks, particularly to Scandinavia.
According to this book
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=-Y8 ... &lpg=PA117
only 3% of calorific value of food produced in the Netherlands during the war years was exported.

Paul Brassley again suggests that before the war France and occupied western Europe imported 3.5 million tons of wheat and 4 millions tons of coarse grain (ie feedstocks) annually.

LWD asks if any of the grain in Ukraine was actually routed to the Netherlands. In the end this is not essential as occupied Europe represented a single market. But I do recall reading in Normal Davies Uprising '44 one person described setting up a business exporting vegetables after leaving Warsaw and describes packing goods trains with food for Denmark, Belgium, France and Germany.

wm, joined by Gorque, has since done a 180 degree turn and decided that the Ukraine was so bounteous that a famine there was impossible. This at least absolves Germany of genocidal intent in pre invasion planning of declaring the Ukraine a food surplus region.

However, this rests on undocumented assumptions.
This is what Stalin ordered in July: ""In the case of a forced retreat, all rolling stock must be evacuated and the enemy must not be left a single engine, a single railway car, not a single pound of grain or gallon of fuel."
The Soviets did their best to evacuate much of the harvest as possible, once agriculture has become dependent on mechanisation destroying equipment or a fuel drought has to cut yields. I have seen plenty reports of Germans entering into a town and finding warehouses or stores burning.
While it is nice that Stalin said scorched earth tactics should only be undertaken to a depth of 70 kms of the front line, if the front line is continually being pushed back, so is the zone of destruction.
I am not of the opinion that destruction was as complete as the Soviet leadership would have liked, I haven't seen compelling evidence presented here that it was totally insignificant.

My original point was that conflating food export figures in 1943 with food shortages in the winter of 1941/1942 was dishonest and I return to that. My reading of original documents leads me to believe that there was a generalised shortage both in the freshly conquered territory and in German occupied Europe in the winter 1941/1942 more generally.

These are calorie values of German rations provided a history lecturer at the University of Warwick

Value of food rations for a German worker’s family member:
Calories
1939/40 2,435
1940/41 2,445
1941/42 1,928
1942/43 2,078
1943/44 1,981
1944/45 1,671
Source: Abelshauser (1998)

This seems to support the idea of generalised shortage that was partially alleviated as the Ukraine began producing again.
Basically there wasn't a lot of food around.

[wm]

I think you are confusing the peacetime caloric needs of a country with calories needed solely for not to die.

A country needs calories for a comfortable living of the population, for its industry, for feeding draught and slaughter animals.
In hard times people's caloric intake can be reduced by half, non-essential industrial activity stopped, animals slaughtered.

Those countries should have survived years of hardship on their own easily, even if that meant a tulip bulbs, tomatoes and olive oil salad sometimes, so the true cause of the famines had to be external and it was.

Of course Ukraine was a land of plenty, the very reason it was invaded by Hitler.
The only problem was the people living there, they had to go. The Hitlerian Empire, rivaling the US could only be built on bones of the natives.

The Empire:

h-empire.jpg (61.3 KiB) Viewed 610 times

[wm]

These are calorie values of German rations provided a history lecturer at the University of Warwick

And this is the price paid by the Ukrainians at the end of 1941, 1000 calories per day for heavy physical work - the famine in Kiev and the Babi Yar massacres were the direct results of these allowances:

maximum.jpg (45.76 KiB) Viewed 608 times

source: Karel Berkhoff, Everyday Life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine

[Gorque]

These are calorie values of German rations provided a history lecturer at the University of Warwick

And this is the price paid by the Ukrainians at the end of 1941, 1000 calories per day for heavy physical work - the famine in Kiev and the Babi Yar massacres were the direct results of these allowances:

maximum.jpg

source: Karel Berkhoff, Everyday Life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine

Hi WM:

The chart provides maximum amounts of foods, in grams, allowed in various food groups to city-dwellers on a weekly basis; Please correct me if I'm wrong, bit isn't there 4 calories per gram of carbohydrates? Bread and potatoes alone total 6,000 grams on a weekly basis for people engaged in "heavy work". Of course, per your chart, these are weekly maximum amounts and doesn't necessarily mean that these amounts were always achieved.

[Gorque]

Hi Little Grey Rabbit:

I believe one item that seems to be overlooked is the fact that the Heer had sufficient transport capabilities for either munitions or food, both not both. This being the case, wouldn't it be rational to conclude that whatever crops the Heer did capture in the Ukraine would be kept, for the most part, within the Ukraine as it wouldn't make sense to ship the crops to the Reich only to have foodstuffs shipped back into the Ukraine and in competition with armaments shipments. An additional factor to consider would be the need for having to rebuild the tracks as well as converting them to Reich gauge standards.

[wm]

Let's not muddy the waters with carbohydrates .
The first "heavy" line is 5 (low quality) brotchens plus 3 potatoes per day.
The last "Jews and children" is 2 small brotchens and a small potato.
And potatoes are low calories food...

[Gorque]

Hi WM:

I was checking out the caloric values. I've rounded the numbers down. There is about 3000 calories in 3500 grams of potatoes. There is about 6000 calories in 2500 grams of bread. There is about 1000 calories in 150 grams of fat (butter) and finally about the same amount of calories in 200 grams of lean meat. For a person engaged in heavy work that equals about 11,0000 calories in a week or around 1575 calories per day. Definitely a sparse diet, calorie-wise.

[wm]

Scorched earth in Ukraine: fields not destroyed, machines repairable:

The impact of the call for evacuation and destruction varied from West to east. In the western Volhynian countryside, neither the NKVD nor other officials had enough time to undertake either a comprehensive evacuation or destruction.

In the central-western region of Ukraine, known as the Right Bank, the destruction was on a limited scale. A German army report from Ukraine, dated 17 July, stated that the agricultural machines had been made useless because of the removal of parts, although they had not been damaged even them. This removal of parts was not necessarily meant to destroy them. There must have been many cases where people refused to demolish the machines and merely hid their disassembled parts.

Further to the east, many peasants ignored the government order to harvest the fields both during the day and night. As with the demolition, it is very difficult to quantify the evacuations (of people, cattle, horses, grain, and tractors). In fact, much of the evacuated cattle was merely abandoned on either banks of the Dnieper. Later many villagers went out to catch hem.

The destruction of grain and cattle which could not be taken eastwards mostly affected villages located close to main roads. Here harvested grain was collected, cattle were driven across the Dnieper, and machines were taken away or destroyed. The destruction of the crops was often done by chasing cows across the fields. But the villagers tried to save the crops, and, they were convinced, themselves from starvation.
source: Karel Berkhoff, Everyday Life in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine