Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940-1941 (review)

On January 18, 1941, one month to the day after Hitler issued "Directive No. 21: Case Barbarossa," an optimistic Chief of the German Military High Command Operations Staff, General Alfred Jodl, forecast that the USSR would "be proved to be a pig's bladder; prick it and it will burst." As Alex J. Kay demonstrates, many influential Nazi economic and political functionaries were convinced that when pricked, the Soviet Union would issue forth a veritable gusher of grain and other agricultural products, enough for the Reich to withstand the rigors of blockade and to defeat its remaining adversaries. At its very core, Kay argues, the forthcoming war was not so much an anti-Bolshevik, anti-Jewish Weltanschauungskrieg based on a "purely ideological impulse on the part of Hitler" (p. 6) as a war for grain, grain, and more grain. By late May 1941, with the invasion just weeks away, "the central aim of the campaign against the Soviet Union—to obtain as much as possible in the way of agricultural produce from Soviet territories—had been clearly established and approved by Germany's supreme leadership" ( p. 158).

Kay focuses his meticulously researched study on the twelve months of German planning, covering the emergence of the first concrete proposals for (what became known as) "Operation Barbarossa" in July 1940 and the post-invasion conference held at the "Wolf's Lair" on July 16, 1941—during which Hitler and the top Nazi brass discussed and confirmed the basic contours of future administrative and economic policy in conquered Soviet territory. Though they were the result of extensive preparation, broad interagency collaboration, and a detailed calculation of economic and political objectives, their designs came largely to naught. As we know, and as Kay readily admits in the very first pages of his work, the hallmark of German rule in the Soviet Union was near-fathomless administrative mayhem, a lawless mire of competing authorities that quickly precluded the establishment of an orderly government of occupation and the realization of the regime's "rational"—albeit implicitly murderous—original intentions. But this should not, Kay maintains, obscure the significance of the blueprints for occupation and exploitation developed prior to the invasion. "Perhaps the roots of the anarchy witnessed in German occupation policy," he posits, "can be found in the planning phase" (p. 2). Kay explores this phase chronologically, and he does so laudably.

No doubt the reader has gathered that Kay is a member of the "primacy of economics" school of thought, a historian who, like Götz Aly, Susanne Heim, and Rolf-Dieter Müller (and in the interest of full disclosure, myself ), tends to place economic motivations in the formulation of National Socialist policy over and above racial-ideological aims which, as he puts it, "have so long been given the role of principal causal factor" (p. 4). While long-standing Nazi racial-political theory was certainly an important factor in the decision to invade the Soviet Union and in the development of schemes for occupation policy that followed, Kay argues that very real economic concerns, primarily agricultural-economic concerns, were ultimately the driving force behind both the decision for war and subsequent German planning. With no end to the war with Britain in sight, anxiety over Germany's food supply intensified during the latter half of 1940. Unable to import foodstuffs from the western hemisphere due to the naval blockade, the Reich was overly reliant upon deliveries from the Soviet Union. Though significant, these did not offset Germany's grain deficit (calculated at five million tons in early 1941). If Soviet deliveries stopped, the authorities knew, the Reich would find itself in a gravely untenable situation. "The supreme leadership," Kay writes, "was not prepared to run the risk of Stalin pulling the plug on these supplies at a crucial moment" (p. 144); furthermore, "it...