Belorussia in the scheme of German occupation

Introduction

The German-Soviet War was a Total War, with the German state seeking the total destruction of the Soviet state, the killing or expulsion of its inhabitants beyond the Urals, and even the favoured populations who were allowed to remain, were to become helots to serve their German colonial masters. This was colonialism formed from a Spartan mould, with the aim of providing enough food and raw materials for Germany to fight and defeat the richer nations of the Atlantic world. Viewed from the point of view of the realist school of Total War, the aims of the occupiers combined two contrasting elements, the maximal mobilisation of people and resources, contrasted with the destruction and inefficiencies of colonialism and racism. Which leads to the question of why was this war so destructive to the indigenous population when Germany was seeking to gain the maximum resources from the region?

The historiography of the occupation is quite poor with the main source being Dallin’s 1957 study supported by a handful of more modern, regional studies and a limited range of Holocaust studies. One issue with these studies is that there is little consensus between historians as to the motivation of the Soviet populations. Dallin has argued that given good treatment, the Soviet peoples might have turned against the Soviet government.[1] A similar but more nuanced approach has been put forward by Enstad,[2] yet others such as Merridale[3] and Gerlach[4] have stressed the power of nationalism and propose that there was little real prospect of the Soviet population turning towards the German occupiers.

Another issue with the historiography is that the occupation was regional in character, with widely differing experiences for inhabitants under different forms of administration.[5] The occupation can be divided into five broad zones, the Baltic states and Transistria (occupied by the Romanians) suffered the least, the Russian Federation under control of the Commander Army Group Rear Areas (Koruck) escaped many of the worst effects of the occupation and the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (imperial administrative area) benefited to an extent from being a food production area. The zone to suffer the most heavily from occupation was the Generalbezirk Weißruthenien (general district White Russia), the Soviet republic of Belarussia, which was both a food deficit area and peopled by Slavs and Jews. By contrast, Southern Russia and the Caucasus escaped a German occupation of any duration.

This essay will analyse the effect of German policies on the occupied civilian population by looking at six factors that caused civilian deaths; the Holocaust, the Hunger Plan, prisoners of war, occupation policies (Generalplan Ost), forced labour and anti-partisan operations. These factors will be assessed as to whether they arose from Germany’s Total War aims or as a result of other factors such as racial or colonial attitudes. The study will utilise the ‘realist’ model of Total War as being a simpler test to apply to a complex and nuanced scenario. For reasons of space and simplicity, it will concentrate on the Soviet republics of Belarussia and Russia.

A major issue facing this study is the wide range of mortality statistics on the occupied territories. The overall figure for Soviet excess deaths of 26.6 million[6] is widely accepted with broad estimates of 8-12 million military deaths [7] , 14-18 million civilian deaths of whom it is estimated 7.5 million were under occupation[8] of whom 4.1 million died of famine/disease deaths and 3.4 million died violently with an additional 2.1 million dying as slave labourers[9] often far from home. Alternatively, 13.6 million died of whom 7.4 violent deaths (inc 2.6 million Jews), 4.1 from famine/disease and 2.2 million from forced labour.[10]

Holocaust

When German forces occupied Poland, France and the Netherlands, the majority of the Jewish population was rounded up and forced into ghettos. The German invasion of the Soviet Union was different in that the Germans had a plan of mass extermination and the units assembled in the form of four Einsatzgruppen A-D (deployment groups) to carry out that plan. They started their work immediately, enlisting the help of antisemitic locals, rear area police and army units and shot Jews close to their homes.[11] Large populations in towns and cities were concentrated into ghettos and scheduled for later extermination.[12] Of the 2.7 million Jews in the occupied Soviet Union, the Germans would murder 2.6 million, leaving just 119,000 survivors.[13]

On the face of it the Holocaust looks like a straightforward racial policy of ethnic cleansing and one that had little to do with German Total War aims. The resources devoted to the extermination of the Jews was surprisingly small and although they did provide labour for the economy, little of it was efficiently organised with a view to maximising production. Moreover, historians have tended to view any labour as being simply another form of extermination as opposed to gainful productive employment.[14] In contrast to European historiography, the Soviet one does not distinguish between a Jewish Holocaust and the wider killing of civilians, Roma and other ethnic groups.[15] Perhaps this is understandable, when it is considered that at least fifteen million civilians died of whom under 3 million were Jewish.

A similar change of perspective has been argued by Herf, who makes the point that the Nazi leadership had a world view based on an international Jewish conspiracy.[16] They believed that Britain and America were dominated and influenced Jewish financiers, yet in the Soviet Union, the Russian Revolution had allowed Jews to take control of the entire state. So, the Nazi leadership believed that they had to fight Jews as well as their philosophical fellow travellers, the Bolsheviks, in order to destroy the Soviet state. This would leave them with a politically naïve, Slavic helot class.

From this perspective, the Holocaust, the Commissar Order, the whole war in the East was a holistic Total War against Jewish domination in Nazi eyes. At this point, historians run up against the problem of the Holocaust ‘intentionalist/functionalist’ debate; the Holocaust planned or resulting from the circumstances of the war.[17] However more recent assessments by historians such as Browning, have shown that the German invasion of the Soviet Union planned to have mass Jewish killings right from its inception,[18] yet it was the events of the German-Soviet War that led to the decision to implement the Final Solution in its ultimate form.[19] Given this the Holocaust in the Soviet Union must be counted as one of Germany’s Total War aims.

Burial party during the siege of Leningrad

Hunger Plan

During the First World War, Germany had experienced hunger resulting from the British naval blockade and from this grew a determination to avoid this scenario in the Second World War. The potential for this scenario grew as Germany occupied Europe, the mouths to feed increased and access to the world market in fertilisers and imported foodstuffs was denied by a second British blockade.[20] While substitution could alleviate some of the shortages,[21] the German leadership saw the agricultural and mineral potential of the Soviet Union as a way out of this constraint.

There was a dual nature to German food policy in the Soviet Union, on the one hand it was seen as a Total War aim in securing food supplies to continue the war, while on the other hand it was seen as tool of ethnic cleansing and social reordering, paving the way for German colonists.[22] However there was a lack of a clear policy towards the occupation before the invasion, with Hitler and Reichskommissar Kube favouring total subjugation and Rosenberg and the Ostministerium favouring accommodation with some ethnic groups such as the Ukranians.[23]

Historians are divided as to whether the Hunger Plan was a broad out-line of ideas, a formal policy, or an agreed administrative plan and there are no surviving documents to confirm the state of its development. The plan probably originated in November 1940 when Goering, as head of the Four-Year Plan announced the invasion of the Soviet Union.[24] The crucial meeting was between the Staatssekretäre (chief civil servants) in May 1941 where it was decided that the German armed forces in the east would be fed from local resources and that as a result tens of millions of civilians would starve to death or flee. The author of this plan is debated, Gerhard and Kay state that it was Reich Food Minister Backe[25] while Dallin assigns the decision to General Thomas of the Wirtschaftsstab Ost (Economic Staff for the East).[26]

The reality on the ground was that the city dwellers who were targeted for starvation, had long since fled to the countryside or interior of the country, in front of the German advance, nonetheless the German army and occupation forces did attempt to put elements of the plan into operation. The food deficit area of Belarussia, whose main produce was timber and pig fattening was selected for culling by General Bach-Zelewski.[27] Similarly, Browning links the Holocaust in Lithuania with food supply issues and Streit and Gerlach argue that the deliberate policy to murder civilians and POWs resulted from food redistribution.28 So while the Hunger Plan has a strong Total War element, nonetheless a large part of the way it was implemented was due to a racial policy.

Prisoner of War

The USSR had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war (POW) and so Germany argued that ‘We are not bound by any international obligations to feed Bolshevik prisoners. Their rations must therefore be determined solely on the basis of their labour performance for us.’[29] Their treatment was worsened through being viewed as Untermenschen (sub-humans)[30] and a combination of German army indifference and later SS slave labour policies resulted in the deaths of 3.3 million out of 5.7 million Soviet POWs by shooting, starvation, disease and overwork.[31]

Therefore, at first glance this topic appears to be beyond the scope of this essay. However, the way in which it was implemented and the loose German definition of POW status, allowed large numbers of civilians to be swept up into the system.

There troops of the AOK 4 (GFM v. Kluge) "on a space of about the size of [Wilhelmplatz] in Berlin" had fenced off a camp for about 100,000 prisoners of war and 40,000 civilian prisoners - almost the entire male population of Minsk: ‘The prisoners who are crammed into this square can barely move and are forced to relieve themselves in the place where they are standing. The camp is guarded by a command of active soldiers in company strength. The guarding of the camp is only possible with the strength of the watch command, using the most brutal force. The prisoners of war, for whom the food problem can hardly be solved, are sometimes without food for six to eight days….’[32]

Whole categories of civilians were treated as POWs by the German army in the east, and many of these were not counted as such by German armies in other parts of Europe, for instance, France. Similarly, the British and Americans would not have counted these categories as military POWs. Civilians could find themselves swept up into the Dulags (POW camps) because they were Jews, Party members, civil servants, teachers, saboteurs, agitators, suspected partisans and innocent bystanders including women and children as young as 12.[33] Communist Party members and Jews were filtered out and handed over to the SS for immediate shooting or were later sent to concentration camps.

What is worse, is that this policy was carried out in the area under Commander Army Group Rear Area (Koruck) deep with the army zone of occupation, in the examples given by Cohen around Smolensk.[34] This was an area in which military priorities took precedence, the writ of the SS and Nazi civilian officials was weaker and tempered by army authority. The genesis of the policy of poor treatment has been linked with both the Hunger Plan and the wider racial and antisemitic views of army officers.[35] Given this, the assessment must be that that the killing of ‘civilians’ under the guise of POWs was both a Total War aim, in terms of food production, yet at the same time a racial policy, culling ‘lesser’ human beings.

German officers and soldiers prepare to execute Maria Bruskina and Vladimir Shcherbatsevich, members of the anti-Nazi resistance in Minsk in October 1941

Occupation

The other major plank of German occupation planning was the Generalplan Ost which dealt with treatment of the civilian population, the removal of some 31 million inhabitants and their replacement with some 10 million German, Volksdeutsche and Volga Germans colonists.[36] The Soviet population was to be either killed by starvation and mistreatment or driven over the Urals into the wastelands of Siberia. In addition, Soviet cities were to be demolished, industry eliminated except for raw material extraction and the land turned into a German pastoral, colonial idyll.[37] This was ethnic cleansing on a vast scale and would have left a much-diminished population of agricultural workers and miners, with only the helot status of a colonised people.

While a copy of the plan itself does not exist, nonetheless lawyers at the Nuremberg trials were able to discern its contents from secondary documents.[38] However, like other examples of Nazi policy such as the Hunger Plan and the Wannsee Conference, it is not clear whether it represented a formal plan, an established policy or a statement of intentions. Nor does the Nazi system of government help in this regard, as it was established on the basis of personal fiefdoms or centres of power, such as Goering’s Office of the Four-Year Plan, which could rise or fall in influence over time.[39]

What is clear is that the Hunger Plan represented an immediate Total War aim to be carried out straight after the start of the invasion and as a prerequisite before the start of the war with the America.[40] By contrast, the Generalplan Ost represented a longer-term Total War aim to be started within 10 years.[41] Nonetheless the wide distribution of the plan and the desire of some of the Nazi elite to make a start on it, meant that it informed general occupation policies, even within the relatively benign Koruck area.[42]

The sheer brutality of this is illustrated by the town of Smolensk which in 1939 had a population of 157,000 with 24,000 minorities, Jews, Belorussians, Ukrainians, Poles, etc.[43] The German military occupation resulted in the population of the town dropping to 20,000, 90% of the buildings destroyed and 50,000 troops quartered in those that were left. The local area saw 135,000 deaths and 87,000 men and women deported to Germany as slave labourers, with 120,000 towns folk fleeing to the countryside.[44] The only members of the population given food were those working for the German administration.

So once again we have a Total War aim; the gaining of food production and raw materials for further wars of conquest, tainted by a deeply racist outlook that envisaged ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. Moreover, this policy drew legitimacy by using the American experience in the West as its rationale. As Hitler said ‘Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’[45]

Forced labour

Its clear that Germany had no plans for forced labour when it invaded the Soviet Union as the war would be over before winter and most of their soldiers would return home to take up their industrial jobs once more. Tooze explains that there were supposed to be regular flows of manpower between the industry and military to meet the changing strategic circumstances.46 Instead, in the Soviet Union, the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost would govern the conduct towards the local population, who would provide agricultural and mining labour or be starved or driven from their homes.[47]

The German army’s failure to obtain a decisive conclusion to the war after August 1941 led to a shift in policy as the Soviet Union started to be regarded as a source of short-term labour to replace German soldiers who were needed at the front. It is important to remember that 'German wartime policy (in the east) was neither uniform nor efficiently coordinated'.[48] There were at least four separate power bases all tugging in different directions. Kay identifies the key policy shift as Hitler’s order of 31 October 1941 on the deployment of Soviet prisoners of war in the German war economy:

‘The Führer has now ordered that the labour of the Russian [i.e., Soviet] prisoners of war should also be utilized extensively through large-scale assignment for the requirements of the war industry. Prerequisite for production is adequate nourishment.’[49]

Yet many of the POWs were already dead and the remainder in poor condition, while as early as September, Soviet POWs, particularly commissars were being killed in SS concentration camps as far away as Dachau (shot), Sachsenhausen (lethal injection) and Auschwitz (first gassings with Xyklon B.)[50] One of the first customers for this labour force was SS Leader Himmler who needed manpower for gigantic construction projects associated with the concentration camps and resettlement projects in occupied Poland and Soviet Union. In September 100,000 POWs were transferred to Majdenek and Auschwitz,[51] yet the SS camp guards could not break their habits of brutality and by the Spring most were dead.[52]

There were other customers for labour particularly the armaments industry[53] and in March 1942 Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel was appointed as ‘Plenipotentiary General for Labour Allocation’ (Generalbevollmächtigter für den Arbeitseinsatz, GBA), under Goering’s Four-Year Plan and given the task to scour Europe for additional conscripted labour.[54] To the 972,388 POWs employed in German industry must be added an estimated 4 million conscripted forced labourers.[55] In addition there were workers within the occupied territories working on German projects including over a million Soviet citizens working on the railways56 and around 400,000 Hiwis (literally ‘helpers’,) in the Army and 150,000 in the Luftwaffe by 1942.[57]

Only a tiny proportion of these workers were voluntary and by Spring 1942 even this source had dried up.[58] The forced labourers were rounded up by both the Reichskommissariats and the Army Koruck and placed in work camps attached to factories in Germany, with the Extraordinary State Commission on the Crimes of the Fascists estimating that 380,000 forced labourers were taken from Belorussia alone.[59] Those in the occupied territories were paid in food and if they did not work, then they did not eat. Given that force labour was unplanned it does not meet the criteria of a Total War aim however it does fit within Total War mobilisation, even though it is clear that the policy was implemented in a deeply racial way.

Partisan war

The partisan war had never figured in German plans. They thought that given sufficient terror the local population would be cowed into submission. Yet in large part the partisan war was a creation of German decisions and policies in the Soviet Union as the Soviet authorities had suppressed all planning for partisan warfare during the Purges.[60] So the first partisans were Red Army soldiers who escaped encirclement by hiding the woods and supported by the local population. That support increased as the population saw the German treatment of POWs who were being starved and shot in their local area. The Red Army started to send out ‘official’ partisan groups who in turn linked up with the unofficial ones. In addition to the armed groups of partisans in the woods, resistance groups formed in the towns which carried out intelligence work and sabotage, including the murder of Reichskommissar Kube in Minsk in 1943.[61]

The German answer to these forms of resistance was military force and a terror campaign, with reprisals taken against the local civilian population for even minor acts of resistance.[62] An example of these is 15 Police Regiment in September 1942 which carried out two days of operations against three villages for the crime of being suspected of ‘infected by bandits.’ The police killed 1,163 people, relocated five families, removed large amounts of livestock but found no weapons or partisans.[63] Later in the occupation these operations grew into large military operations, involving regular troops, police units and SS security units, which swept entire areas, looking for signs of partisan activity. The scale of these reprisals was huge, 9,200 villages in Belorussia were burnt to the ground during the period of the occupation.[64] In January 1943 Army Group Centre claimed to have killed 100,000 partisans in its area alone, though in reality most were civilians.[65]

Given the German Total War aims of the Hunger Plan and the Generalplan Ost which envisaged removal of large parts of the population, did the partisan war move some way towards these goals? Unlikely, as the real problem was that partisan war was chaotic, unplanned and disruptive. It displaced the other goals of gaining food and raw materials from the countryside and it diverted German military forces to defending the towns and vital communications routes with the racial aspect of the occupation policies made the situation worse as time went one.[66] As a result, in Belorussia the Germans lost control of large parts of the countryside. It was the classic case of one set of German aims was pitted against another set of aims and the winner was determined by racial policy, rather than rational assessment of outcomes.

Heinrich Himmler and other senior Nazis look at a plan for ethnic German rural settlements on Soviet territory in March 1941

Conclusion

The German invasion of the Soviet Union had it succeeded and the plans carried through in full, would have resulted in the total destruction of the Soviet state and a large proportion of its inhabitants. However, the German military campaign failed and many of those plans were never carried out, even in part.

So why was the German occupation of the USSR so destructive towards the civilian population? Was it a function of Germany’s Total War aims and mobilisation or was it due to Germany’s racial outlook or a combination of the two, or some other factor? As we have seen Soviet citizens subjected to a wide range of repressive measures and any given location would have experienced a number of these during the war. The Soviet countryside was subjected to the Holocaust, the partisan war, forced labour and general occupation policies. Townsfolk suffered the Holocaust, forced labour, the Hunger Plan and occupation. Escape one threat to your life and you might easily be caught by another. In the same way, there is no clarity in causes of death, even given that agreed, reliable statistics are rare. The majority of citizens died violently either through the Holocaust or antipartisan operations or occupation (7.4 million), or from starvation and/or disease resulting from the Hunger Plan and Generalplan Ost (4.1 million), or from forced labour, some of whom were Holocaust victims (2.2 million) and then there were the many civilians who died counted as POWs under military losses.

The German occupation was so violent that civilians died from a whole variety of reasons that merge and blend into one another. Nor is it possible to fully unravel Germany’s Total War aims from its racial policies. The Holocaust may appear at first sight to be a straight forward racial policy, without an obvious Total War aim, yet when viewed from the Nazi perspective, it was entirely a Total War aim. In five out of the six sections of this essay, it has proved difficult to separate the Total War from the racial, only the partisan war can be considered without Total War aims and purely racial in character.

In many cases, pursuing racial policies obstructed Total War aims such as in the case of forced labour, where the brutal German occupation, meant that recruiting willing workers was difficult and after the stories came back from Germany of the brutal treatment of Ostarbeiter, impossible. German actions and responses positively hindered their own goals. It is as if they were incapable of rational decision-making in their own best interests and were purely driven by racial hatred.

Perhaps this gives us an insight into the German decision-making process. Rational Total War aims succeeded in being implemented in the occupied Russia, only if they met racial criteria. Those who promoted Total War aims that did not meet racial criteria failed. A good example of this is the failed attempt by the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories (Reichsministerium für die besetzten Ostgebiete RMfdbO), Alfred Rosenberg to obtain better condition for the Ukrainians, on the basis that they would work for the Germans if promised an element of self-rule. Yet Hitler favoured the more brutal regime of Reichskommissar Koch.

Ultimately all policies in Nazi Germany only succeeded if they ‘worked towards the Fuhrer’ and gained Hitler’s approval. In the case of the Soviet Union, Hitler’s view was that only the most extreme measures were necessary and killing was the only answer to any question. Given the colonial style of Germany’s Total War aims and the racial outlook of the Germans, the influence of Hitlers opinions generated a downward spiral in the brutality of the German occupation of the Soviet occupied territories. The Soviet people were caught between Germany’s Total War and its racist implementation, that was amplified over time by functionaries interpreting Hitler’s views. The result was between 9 and 13 million dead.

Images Operation Barbarossa: The Nazi Invasion Of The U.S.S.R. 80 Years Ago (rferl.org)

Endnotes

1 Alexander Dallin and Rand Corporation, Odessa, 1941-1944: A Case Study of Soviet Territory under Foreign Rule (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corp., 1957)

2 Johannes Enstad, Soviet Russians under Nazi Occupation : Fragile Loyalties in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

3 Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945 (London: Faber & Faber, 2007)

4 Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde.: Die Deutsche Wirtschafts- Und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 Bis 1944 [Calculated Murder: The German Economic and Food Policy in White Russia 1941-44], 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition HIS, 2013)

5 Alex J. Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and Their Implementation, 1941–1944’, in Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953, ed. Timothy Snyder and Ray Brandon (Oxford : New York: Oxford UP, 2014), p.165

6 E.M. Andreev, L.E. Darskii, and T.L. Хarʹkova, Demograficheskai͡a istorii͡a Rossii: 1927-1957 [Demographic history of Russia: 1927-1957] (Moskva: Informatika, 1998); Mark Harrison, ‘Counting the Soviet Union’s War Dead: Still 26-27 Million’, Europe-Asia Studies 76, no. 1 (2019): 1036–47 7 G.F. Krivosheev, Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century (London: Greenhill Books, 1997)

8 Merridale, Ivan’s War, p.252

9 Merridale, p.252

10 M.V. Philiomoishin, ‘Razdel III. Poteri Grazhdanskogo Naselenii͡a: Ob itogakh ischislenii͡a poterʹ sredi mirnogo naselenii͡a na okkupirovannoĭ territorii SSSR i RSFSR v gody Velikoĭ Otechestvennoĭ voĭny’ [Section III. Losses of the Civilian Population: On the results of the calculation of losses among the civilian population in the occupied territory of the USSR and the RSFSR during the Great Patriotic War], in Li͡udskie poteri SSSR v period vtoroĭ mirovoĭ voĭny: sbornik stateĭ, ed. Rostislav Evdokimov (In-t rossiĭskoĭ istorii RAN, 1995), p.127 Table 3. This figure is accepted by the Cambridge History of Russia., https://www.twirpx.com/file/1843456/

11 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, The Comprehensive History of the Holocaust (Lincoln: Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press ; Yad Vashem, 2009), pp.133

12 Barbara Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, 1st ed. (University of California Press, 2008), pp.82

13 Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, p.525 Table.7

14 Wolf Gruner and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jewish Forced Labor under the Nazis: Economic Needs and Racial Aims, 1938-1944 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp.276

15 Lucjan Dobroszycki and Jeffery S. Gurock, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union: Studies and Sources on the Destruction of the Jews in the Nazi-Occupied Territories of the USSR, 1941-45 (Routledge, 2016), pp.6, http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315288123

16 Jeffrey Herf, ‘The “Jewish War”: Goebbels and the Antisemitic Campaigns of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, no. 1 (3 January 2005): p.52, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dci003; Richard J. Evans, Third Reich Trilogy, Limited edition boxed set, vol. 3 (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p.726 Hitler’s final testament

17 Dan Stone, The Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.180

18 Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, pp.54

19 Stone, The Historiography of the Holocaust, p.188

20 E. M Collingham, The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p.35

21 Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, ‘The Economics of the Second World War: Seventy-Five Years On’, VoxEU.Org (blog), May 2020, p.63 8 Economic warfare: Insights from Mançur Olson, https://voxeu.org/article/economics-second-world-war-seventy-five-years-new-ebook#.XrbWkCDIRmc.twitter

22 Gesine Gerhard, ‘Food and Genocide: Nazi Agrarian Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union’, Contemporary European History 18, no. 1 (2009): p.49 & 55

23 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945: A Study in Occupation Politics, 2nd ed (London: Macmillan, 1981), p.56

24 Gerhard, ‘Food and Genocide: Nazi Agrarian Politics in the Occupied Territories of the Soviet Union’, p.56

25 Gerhard, p.47 & 53; Alex J. Kay, ‘Germany’s Staatssekretäre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941’, Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (2006): p.685

26 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945, p.38-9

27 Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and Their Implementation, 1941–1944’, p.174

28 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde.: Die Deutsche Wirtschafts- Und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 Bis 1944, p.60-65

29 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945, p.419; Horst Boog et al., Germany and the Second World War, ed. Ewald Osers, trans. Dean S. McMurry and Louise Wilmott, vol. 4 part 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp.297

30 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945, p.69

31 Laurie R Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis: Everyday Life in Occupied Russia (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013), p.261; Merridale, Ivan’s War, p.251

32 Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen 1941-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), p.313

33 Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis, p.104-6

34 Cohen, p.104-106

35 Alex J. Kay, ‘“The Purpose of the Russian Campaign Is the Decimation of the Slavic Population by Thirty Million”: The Radicalization of German Food Policy in Early 1941’, in Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization, ed. Jeff Rutherford and David Stahel (Rochester, NY: Rochester UP, 2012), p.116; Omer Bartov, Eastern Front 1941-1945 ; German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp.84-85

36 Czeslaw Madajczyk, ed., Vom Generalplan Ost zum Generalsiedlungsplan, Reprint 2010 ed. edition (München ; New Providence: De Gruyter, 1994), p.15; Czeslaw Madajczyk, ‘General Plan East Hitler’s Master Plan for Expansion’, Polish Western Affairs III, no. 2 (1962), http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/GPO/gpoarticle.HTM; ‘Crimes of the Nazis and Their Accomplices against the Civilian Population of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945.’, Russian Federal Archives Project, 2020, https://victims.rusarchives.ru/index.php/iz-generalnogo-plana-ost-pravovye-ekonomicheskie-i-territorialnye-osnovy-razvitiya-na-vostoke-iyun, https://victims.rusarchives.ru/

37 Kay, ‘“The Purpose of the Russian Campaign Is the Decimation of the Slavic Population by Thirty Million”’, p.108; Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and Their Implementation, 1941–1944’, p.173

38 William Donovan, ‘The Spoilation of Russia’, Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection, accessed 22 June 2022, https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/nur00896_1

39 Evans, Third Reich Trilogy, 3:pp.509-513

40 J. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Penguin Books, 2007), p.282 & p.476

41 Madajczyk, ‘General Plan East Hitler’s Master Plan for Expansion’

42 Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, pp.466

43 Cohen, Smolensk under the Nazis, p.39

44 Cohen, p.59

45 Tooze, The Wages of Destruction, p.469

46 Tooze, p.436

47 Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia, 1941-1945, p.355

48 Alexander Dallin, p.20

49 Kay, ‘German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and Their Implementation, 1941–1944’, p.179

50 Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2015), p.265

51 Wachsmann, p.278

52 Wachsmann, p.283

53 International Military Tribunal, Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10.: Nuremberg, October 1946- April, 1949., vol. 2 (Washington : U.S. G.P.O., 1949), p.393 Keitel order on use of POWs, http://archive.org/details/trialsofwarcrimi02inte

54 International Military Tribunal, 2:p.405; Rolf-Dieter Muller, Hans Umbreit, and Bernhard R. Kroener, Germany and the Second World War, vol. 5 part 2 (Clarendon Press, 2000), p.229

55 Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern: The Soviet Home Front During World War II (Oxford University Press, 2021), p.339; Muller, Umbreit, and Kroener, Germany and the Second World War, 5 part 2:p.230 Table I.II.8

56 Hans Pottgiesser, Die Reichsbahn im Ostfeldzug 1939-1944. [The Imperial Railway in the Eastern Campaign 1939-1944], Die Wehrmacht im Kampf, Band 26 (Vowinckel Verlag, 1961), p.140-142 Data Tables

57 Muller, Umbreit, and Kroener, Germany and the Second World War, 5 part 2:p.896

58 Muller, Umbreit, and Kroener, 5 part 2:p.859

59 Presruplenija Nemetsko-Fasiskich okkupantov v belorussii 1941-1945 [Crimes of the Nazi occupiers in Belarus 1941-1944] (Minsk: Belarus, 1965), Introduction and documents 34, 43, http://militera.lib.ru/docs/da/belorussia1941-1944/index.html

60 Alexander Hill, The War Behind the Eastern Front: The Soviet Partisan Movement in North-West Russia, 1941-1944, 1st ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), pp.69

61 Epstein, The Minsk Ghetto 1941-1943, pp.110

62 Hill, The War Behind the Eastern Front, pp.113

63 Presruplenija Nemetsko-Fasiskich okkupantov v belorussii 1941-1945, pp.45 & documents 22-25

64 Goldman and Filtzer, Fortress Dark and Stern, p.338

65 Presruplenija Nemetsko-Fasiskich okkupantov v belorussii 1941-1945, p.11 & document 39

66 Muller, Umbreit, and Kroener, Germany and the Second World War, 5 part 2:pp.56

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