Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to concentrate all its resources on Barbarossa, as early as Smolensk in July–August 1941, and certainly no later than Moscow that autumn, Germany found that blitzkrieg had run aground. Not only did it face the prospect of two wars, but Hitler also initiated actions for a third war as well, that against the Jews of the Soviet Union. If the enormous extent of the Nazi project is to be comprehended, it must be understood in its interrelated political, economic, social, cultural, racial, and military contexts, as a grand mission of colonization, economic exploitation, and racial recivilization. Hitler prided himself on being a Raumpolitiker, a geopolitician who thought in imperial terms, rather than merely a Grenzpolitiker, one concerned only with border revisions. Expansion was, thus, intended not just to rectify the injustices of Versailles but also, as he put it to the Reichstag after the conquest of Poland, to create “a new order of ethnographic conditions…, a resettlement of nationalities.” This untangling of ethnic groups, predicated on the establishment of a racially cleansed German community at the heart of a larger European empire, formed the context in which his racial ideas should be understood. The first test case for this racial restructuring was Poland, where efforts began almost immediately to repatriate Volksdeutsche from the Baltic states and the Soviet Union to the Wartheland, the part of western Poland to be annexed to Germany. At the same time, room had to be made for the new arrivals, so ethnic Poles and Jews had to be removed. The Poles could simply be dumped in the General Government, but the Jews, as a perceived racial menace, had to be watched and, thus, were concentrated in a few urban ghettos or, as part of another experiment, sent to the Nisko reservation, an inhospitable border area southeast of Lublin. In all these actions, the Nazis learned a number of things: war legitimized harsh measures against enemies; disentangling populations was a messy, often brutal, business; territorial expansion and ethnic untangling offered vast opportunities for ambitious, ruthless underlings; and Jews had no place in the anticipated New Order.4
As Nazi planners confronted the prospect of further expansion to the east, they recognized another problem, one that defied easy solution: greater success in territorial conquest would bring with it more racial inferiors and Jews, thus intensifying the demographic dilemma. The solution lay not merely in shoving people around on a limited scale but in a truly ambitious and revolutionary socioeconomic and demographic project. This formed the context for Generalplan Ost, which was nothing less than a utopian vision of transplanting ethnic Germans and related Aryan peoples into the vast expanse of European Russia. While Western Europe’s industrial capacity would be integrated into the German economy, Eastern Europe would be the scene of a complete agricultural and demographic restructuring. Urban areas would be greatly reduced, while a neofeudal system of Germanic farms and villages would be established along key transportation routes. The logic of this “settler colonialism” also involved, as it had in North America and Australia, the large-scale removal of the native population from the land: those who could not be incorporated, above all the Jews, but also large parts of the Polish population, were to be expelled across the Ural Mountains into Asia, left to starve, or both. Although efforts were made to implement some pilot schemes, Generalplan Ost largely fell victim to changing developments in the war. In any case, the most grandiose schemes were always intended to take place after a successful conclusion to the war, when Generalplan Ost would be merged within a broad consolidation of all conquered areas in a general settlement plan.5
Although Generalplan Ost had been a brainchild of Himmler’s and important primarily for showing the direction of the Nazi colonial vision, another aspect of the same impulse that had far more murderous consequences was the hunger policy, the genesis of which lay not in the SS but in Goering’s Four-Year Plan, the Reich Ministry for Food, the quartermaster-general’s office in the Wehrmacht, and the military economic-armament office. Behind this lay Hitler’s imprint, influenced as always by the experience of World War I and revolution. The key to Germany’s defeat in the earlier war, the Führer was convinced, was the British blockade, which exposed the key German weakness—lack of economic self-sufficiency, especially in foodstuffs. This problem was accentuated with the upheavals and revolutionary movements of the postwar period, especially in the new Soviet Union, which moved from being primarily a grain-exporting region to being an industrialized society that consumed all its agricultural production. This meant that a reliable food supply for Germany was even more imperiled. In an “age of economic empires,” Hitler had argued as far back as November 1937, “the primitive urge to colonization” had to manifest itself. Bolshevism, the “Guidelines of Economic Policy for the Economic Organization East” asserted in May 1941, echoing the Führer, had caused significant economic disturbances and destroyed the natural balance between food-producing and food-consuming areas. The only solution, reintegrating Russia into this balance, “will necessarily lead to both the industry and a large part of the people in the hitherto food-importing areas [of the Soviet Union] dying off.” The full ramifications of the scheme would have resulted in murder on a breathtaking scale: Nazi bureaucrats estimated that anywhere from 30 to 45 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would have perished, with some believing those figures too low by half.6
In the event, pragmatism (the need for labor) and the practical realities on the ground (lack of available manpower) limited the eventual impact of the hunger policy. If not the tens of millions of useless eaters envisioned by its originators, a few million Soviet citizens nonetheless perished as a direct result of deliberate starvation. Among them were urban populations such as Kiev, Kharkov, and Leningrad as well as roughly 2 million Soviet prisoners of war. Although Hitler’s endless verbal ramblings to his intimates during the euphoric days of midsummer 1941 betrayed a clear sense of the apparent colonial nature of the project, the key point, as Donald Bloxham has stressed, lies outside this historical precedent and in another. In his emphasis on food supply and reversing the racial fragmentation of Eastern Europe, Hitler revealed the influences of a very specific historical, spatial, and economic context. As an Austrian German, Hitler had been influenced by the sense of threatened ethnicity so prevalent among the German population of the Dual Monarchy. He was also acutely aware, as illustrated in Mein Kampf, of the flux and openness for exploitation of the borderland areas of the former Habsburg and Romanov Empires. Moreover, as other statements of the 1930s attest, he recognized that various policies of ethnic cleansing, murderous to a greater or lesser extent, had been carried out before, during, and after World War I—and some with the connivance and encouragement of the victorious Western powers. Finally, the constant allusions to grain supply fit neatly with his fears of a reoccurrence of the food shortages that he believed had crippled and destroyed the imperial German war effort. The earlier war experience confirmed his Darwinistic vision: food resources were both vital and scarce and had to be obtained so that its enemies could not again starve Germany into submission. If Germany was to win, then others had to lose; for the Führer, it was a zero-sum game. His vision for the east, then, was less a classic colonial one of naked economic exploitation and more an attempt to restructure and unify the area racially, then organize it as part of the broader European struggle against the American challenge.7