Pictured: Herbert Backe, the Hunger Plan’s architect.

Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’, pages 53–5:

The [Third Reich’s] long‐term vision for ‘the East’ was a radical and massive ‘depopulation’ and ‘repopulation’ scheme, which required the ‘depopulation’ and expulsion of tens of millions of Slavs (who would be forced into desolate areas, allowed to die of disease or starvation, or turned into slaves for the [Fascist] empire) and millions of Jews (who were to ‘disappear’ altogether), to make ‘space’ for ‘repopulation’ by ‘Aryan’ settler pioneers.⁴³

[Fascist] spatial and racial fantasies were embodied in three colonial plans: (1) Hungerpolitik (Hunger Plan or starvation policy); (2) Generalplan Ost (General Plan East); and Endlösung (Final Solution). Taken together, these colonial plans constituted a broad‐based ‘population policy’ for [another Fascist] empire, driven by a genocidal imperative to ‘cleanse’ metropolitan, colonial and conquered ‘living space’ of [Fascism’s] political and racial ‘enemies’.

[Axis] fantasies of ‘depopulation’ were reflected in the so‐called Hunger Plan (Hungerpolitik), a policy mandating the deliberate starvation of millions of Slavs in ‘the East’, in order to feed [Axis] soldiers as well as citizens of the Greater German Reich and [Fascist]‐occupied western Europe.⁴⁴ In the first weeks of 1941, a ‘starvation policy’ was tentatively agreed to by the Reich Ministry of Food and the Wehrmacht military–economic staff.

Formally agreed between the Wehrmacht, key civilian ministries and the [Reich’s] leadership, in the spring of 1941, it envisaged the death by deliberate starvation of some 20 to 30 million Soviet civilians in the western Soviet Union, within the first 12 months of [Axis] occupation. Under the plan, all industrial and urban centres of western Russia, including the region between Moscow and Leningrad, were to be deliberately cut off from their food sources.

As a result, the plan stated, ‘Many tens of millions of people in this area will become surplus to requirements and will die or will be force to emigrate to Siberia.’⁴⁵ Under this colonial‐style ‘starvation policy’, the [Axis] would use the denial of food to non‐combatants as a means of [extermination].

The [Axis] agenda for further Germanization of ‘the East’ was outlined in various wartime drafts of what was called the Generalplan Ost (General Plan East, or GPO),⁴⁶ commissioned by Himmler on 21 June 1941 (the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union). In line with the Führer’s wish, it envisaged a ‘Germanization’ of the land (but not its inhabitants).

In the GPO, Himmler’s SS planners — drawing deeply ‘from a geographical imagination that was stimulated for decades by visions of the American frontier’,⁴⁷ — put forth far‐reaching proposals for what they called the ‘opening up of the East, aimed at ‘the building up of these [conquered] eastern areas in the shortest possible time into full‐fledged Reich Gaus’.⁴⁸ Tied to past notions of ‘space and race’, the General Plan East was ‘clearly derived from colonial precedents’.⁴⁹

Addressing itself to the non‐Jewish populations of Poland and the Soviet Union, it called for the ‘depopulation’ (by deportation and death) of some 30–40 million Slavs and a ‘repopulation’ by some 10 million German settlers, over a period of 20 to 30 years. As a SS design for a ‘blood and soil’ utopia in ‘the East’, it was a ruthless vision of a radicalized twentieth‐century settler colonialism.⁵⁰

In addition, the GPO linked, both ideologically and practically, the [Axis] drive to ‘Germanize’ eastern Europe with the evolving [Axis] goal to destroy the Jews. The murder of the Jews, moreover, provided an important precedent for the eventual displacement and destruction of other ‘unwanted’ ‘native’ populations.⁵¹ It was, to be sure, a ‘grand design for exterminatory colonization’.⁵² After consultation with Hitler, it was [officially] approved by Himmler in mid‐July 1942.

On 31 July 1941, Himmler’s deputy, SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, had been given a directive by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to develop a plan for a ‘complete solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. In late November, Heydrich invited 15 top [Axis] civil servants, SS officials and [NSDAP] representatives to an SS guest house on the shore of Berlin’s Lake Wannsee for a ‘general discussion’ of ‘this final solution’.⁵³

At the meeting, held on 20 January 1942, he announced that, ‘with the prior permission of the Führer’, the ‘evacuation of the Jews to the East’ had replaced ‘emigration’ as a ‘further possible solution’. After time in ‘transit ghettos’, the Jews would be ‘transported further to the East’ where they would face annihilation by a combination of forced labour and mass murder.

In effect, Obergruppenführer Heydrich announced a ‘gigantic deportation programme’,⁵⁴ possibly involving some 11 million European Jews (including millions of Jews living in Poland and the Soviet Union, as well as thousands in the smaller Jewish communities in western and southern Europe). It was, to be sure, a [Fascist] fantasy of a Europe ‘cleansed of Jews’ (judenrein).

Various complications meant that the plan underwent only partial implementation, and the casualties were (thankfully) not as high as the Axis anticipated. Even so, the results were nevertheless disturbing. Quoting Professor Catherine A. Epstein’s Nazi Germany: Confronting the Myths, page 142:

In fall 1941, the [Axis] lay siege to Leningrad, eventually killing 700,000 inhabitants, mostly from starvation (today, Leningrad is known by its pre‐1914 name, St. Petersburg). [Axis] administrators also tried to starve the Ukrainian cities of Kiev and Kharkiv. They never, however, fully implemented the Hunger Plan. They worried that it would spark too much resistance. They did not want to battle the Red Army and quell uprisings behind the front lines.

As Joseph Goebbels cynically noted, Germans were “digesting” the occupied areas. Germans, mostly soldiers, consumed prodigious quantities of food produced in the east. At least nine million tons of grain and tens of millions of cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats raised there ended up in German stomachs. This, in turn, meant that German civilians never experienced hunger during wartime. Meanwhile, some 4.2 million individuals in Soviet lands starved to death under [Axis] occupation (including Soviet POWs, excluding Jews).

(Emphasis added in all cases.)