Would the Siege of Leningrad and the mass death of Soviet prisoners of war have occurred if Germany had enough food?

[PODS96]

There generally seems to be some consensus that Germany was on the verge of mass famine in late 1941.

If Germany had had a food surplus, would the death of Soviet prisoners and the siege of Leningrad have occurred?

[wm]

It wasn't mass famine but rather severe cuts to food rations, engendering Germans' health and, even more, creating an existential political threat to the Nazi regime.

Starving the enemy into submission was an elementary tactic of siege warfare, so it had to happen.
But I see no reason why the Soviet POVs would have to die.

[Rob Stuart]

The siege of Leningrad occurred because the Germans were able to invest Leningrad but couldn't capture it outright. The domestic German food supply situation had nothing to do with it, and in any case I do not agree that Germany was on the verge of mass famine in late 1941. What sources can you cite to back up your claim that mass famine was a possibility?

[Yuri]

There generally seems to be some consensus that Germany was on the verge of mass famine in late 1941.

For the first time I hear (read) about the existence of a consensus that at the end of 1941 Germany was on the verge of famine. This is completely contrary to the facts.

If Germany had had a food surplus, would the death of Soviet prisoners and the siege of Leningrad have occurred?

The food situation inside Germany has nothing to do with starvation besieged Leningrad. Leningrad was not captured, but the Leningrad region was occupied. There were as many residents in the Leningrad Region as in the city of Leningrad. At the same time, in the Leningrad region, more people died from hunger and hard work, which the occupiers obliged the local population to perform, than from hunger in besieged Leningrad.
The Spanish "Blue Division" (250th Infantry Division) took an active part in this.
The death of 30 million Russians from starvation was envisaged at the planning stage of Operation Barbarossa.

[Carl Schwamberger]

There generally seems to be some consensus that Germany was on the verge of mass famine in late 1941.

For the first time I hear (read) about the existence of a consensus that at the end of 1941 Germany was on the verge of famine. This is completely contrary to the facts.

One source I found interesting was Joseph Harsch's book 'Pattern of Conquest' Harsch a journalist working for the Christian Science Monitor spent part of 1940 and up to April 1941 living in German occupied Europe. In one of the chapters he examined the food situation in Germany. What he describes there is a rationing system that favored first the nazi party members, then the German 'volk', and least the non Germans. If you were not a favored "German" you suffered a food shortage. Otherwise the rationing system provided a adequate basic diet. This was supplemented with a robust black market that Harsch implied was encouraged by the nazi party members, tho technically against official policy. This is contrasted with the situation in France, Belgium, and Netherlands, where required transfers to Germany, inability to import from outside Europe, and German policy towards agriculture was creating a European wide shortage of some specific items. ie: Beef, Pork, and Poultry, some types of fruit, and vegetables. Fish was still available, tho increasing in cost.

The general picture painted for the spring of 1941 is 'Germany' had no shortage of food. Even luxury items were common on the robust black market. All "Germans" had access to the favored rationing levels and the black market. The rest of occupied Europe was seeing a general shortage and increasing enforcement of rationing.

[James A Pratt III]

in the planning for operation Barbarossa the German Army was expected to live of the land. As for the locals they were expected to starve. As for the 3 million Soviet POWs captured in 1941the Germans could not feed them so most of them starved as well.

[wm]

German civilians were allocated only 2500 calories of food at the beginning of the war (the soldiers 4000 calories), and that was reduced to 2000 calories in 1944.
The German grain harvest in 1940 and 1941 was poor. By the end of 1941, German grain stocks were exhausted, and the swine herd was reduced by 25 percent due to a lack of feed. So the scare was real.

The seriousness of the situation became apparent to the wider public in the spring of 1942 when the Food Ministry announced cuts to the food rations of the German population. Given the regime’s mortal fear of damaging morale, the ration cuts of April 1942 are incontrovertible evidence that the food crisis was real.
Lowering the rations was a political step of the first order, which Backe would never have suggested if the situation had not absolutely required it.
The Wehrmacht had prepared the way in 1942, by decreeing a ration cut for the fighting troops.

When the reduction in the civilian ration was announced it produced a response which justified every anxiety on the part of the Nazi leadership. On 23 March 1942 the SD reported that news of the impending cut was causing extreme disquiet amongst German civilians. It was, reported the SD’s informants, ‘devastating’ like ‘virtually no other event during the war’.

The reduced ration prevailing since the start of the war had had a serious impact on the population’s reserves of body fat. The tendency of factory workers doing heavy manual labour to gain weight in middle age had been completely negated.

This was cause for alarm, because the fat reserves in the bodies of the labour force had acted as a buffer in the first years of the war. It was now to be expected that any further reduction in the ration would result in a precipitate decline in performance, particularly in industries such as mining.
The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze

[Peter89]

There generally seems to be some consensus that Germany was on the verge of mass famine in late 1941.

For the first time I hear (read) about the existence of a consensus that at the end of 1941 Germany was on the verge of famine. This is completely contrary to the facts.

If Germany had had a food surplus, would the death of Soviet prisoners and the siege of Leningrad have occurred?

The food situation inside Germany has nothing to do with starvation besieged Leningrad. Leningrad was not captured, but the Leningrad region was occupied. There were as many residents in the Leningrad Region as in the city of Leningrad. At the same time, in the Leningrad region, more people died from hunger and hard work, which the occupiers obliged the local population to perform, than from hunger in besieged Leningrad.
The Spanish "Blue Division" (250th Infantry Division) took an active part in this.
The death of 30 million Russians from starvation was envisaged at the planning stage of Operation Barbarossa.

I wouldn't count on the planning stage of Barbarossa too much. It was full of wishful thinking and contradictions. Like Georg Thomas wrote:

Das Gesamtergebnis wird deshalb ausschlaggebend davon abhängen, ob es gelingt, durch die Schnelligkeit der Operationen die zur Vernichtung der MTS, Getreidespeicher usw. mit Sicherheit vorbereiteten Organisationen zu zerschlagen und damit MTS und Vorräte vor der Vernichtung zu bewahren. Eine weitere nicht zu unterschätzende Voraussetzung ist die rechtzeitige Versorgung der MTS mit Treibstoff (die Landwirtschaft hat 1938 60% = rd. 9 Mill. t des verarbeiteten Mineralöls verbraucht.

The Wehrmacht fought Barbarossa under the delusion that the destruction of the production assets were not going to be destroyed. Were they destroyed, the whole economic sense fell apart. When the Hungarian Minister of Defence visited Hitler in the summer of 1942, Hitler briefed him that the Soviets are deprived of manganese, etc. (source: Fateful Years) but these things are irrelevant. The whole idea of Barbarossa was to gain the necessary assets to defeat the Anglo-Saxons and remove the only a potential threat. Starving millions came up repeatedly at the meetings of the Staatssekretäre, continously and rapidly rising numbers as their imagination went off charts. In reality, the Soviet Union could hardly yield the expected amount of raw materials. It was a twice as large country as Germany, and war was about to destroy a lot of stuff. Germany did not have the resources to rebuild it. Romania and Hungary, both oil exporting countries with underdeveloped motorization sent about 50% of their oil to Germany... There was no way the Soviet Union could yield the expected raw materials. And well, there was the Red Army, too.

I've been arguing forever that the German idea to take food from the Soviet Union is an imbecile one. It made much more sense to invest into the agriculture of countries from Hungary down to Iran.

[James A Pratt III]

I think in the Goebbels diaries from the 1941-43 period he does mention the food situation in Germany a number of times. One of the main reasons for the German collapse in WW I was a shortage of food. This I would say is why he was worried about this.

[wm]

It needs to be noted that Germans' 1940-1941 gloomy predictions and fears and what actually happened later are two different things.
Their forecast was mostly correct but two bumper crops (1942, 1943) in occupied Poland (and the Soviet parts of Ukraine and Belarus) partially saved them from the worst.

[ljadw]

I think in the Goebbels diaries from the 1941-43 period he does mention the food situation in Germany a number of times. One of the main reasons for the German collapse in WW I was a shortage of food. This I would say is why he was worried about this.

The German food fears were very exaggerated .
And Goebbels'fear was founded on the official food stats,who were much too low .

[wm]

I think in the Goebbels diaries from the 1941-43 period he does mention the food situation in Germany a number of times. One of the main reasons for the German collapse in WW I was a shortage of food. This I would say is why he was worried about this.

May 21, 1942
The food situation is causing us great worry. According to a report by the Food Ministry the question of seed is especially depressing.
During the next autumn, we shall lack the necessary grain so that we shall again be compelled to revise the bread rations considerably downward. That is a reduction that hits the broad masses of the people hardest. It would help matters if we at least had an abundance of potatoes, but if this swinish weather continues, as at present, there isn't a ghost of a chance of this either.

As regards bread, we won't be able to avoid mixing barley into it to a large extent. That will further reduce both the quality and the nutritive value of the bread. In short, we are faced with a problem which human intelligence and talent for organization are powerless to solve.

Every day we look to heaven with fear and trembling to see whether the right mixture of rain and sunshine will come. We are surely a poor people, and if we continue to exist at all as a nation this is owing solely to our industry and intelligence.
The Goebbels Diaries, 1942-1943

[Sid Guttridge]

I have asked this before, without receiving a reply - Did any German starve to death within the bounds of Germany throughout the war? (I phrase it this way to exclude deaths in prolonged military encirclements like Stalingrad).

Many civilians, noticeably Greeks (1941-42) and Dutch (1944-45), starved to death while under German occupation, but they themselves seem to have escaped this fate completely.

Cheers,

Sid.

[wm]

The answer is no - because the rule (straight from Hitler) was, "The less valuable people [i.e., non-Germans] shall suffer first."
Although many Germans suffered from the health consequences of their low-quality diet.

[Peter89]

The answer is no - because the rule (straight from Hitler) was, "The less valuable people [i.e., non-Germans] shall suffer first."
Although many Germans suffered from the health consequences of their low-quality diet.

Yes.

I am very much skeptical towards official food statistics. The more rural a country is, the less plausible the numbers are.

Also the German worries about the food situation sparked when the yield of major types of grain were low (1940, 1942).



European food stockpile levels suffered a drop in 1940/1941, but they were nowhere near critical. In fact, they were higher than the average of the 1930's.



In our age, when obesity is the most common health problem, it's hard to imagine how many people in Europe actually starved in peacetime.

For comparison. After the war, Hungary produced much less grain than ever before, and even though people were generally starving, they did not die of hunger in significant numbers.