Kiril Feferman. War in History. Volume 15, Issue 1, January 2008.
During the Second World War some German decision-makers and strategists (particularly at the lower and middle level) regarded the destruction of the Jewish population in the territories under their control as a necessary measure to get rid of ‘surplus mouths’ in the regions suffering from starvation and undernourishment. On 2 December 1941 a report by Professor P.H. Seraphim, a logistics expert in the Ukraine, was forwarded to General Thomas (Wehrmacht Economic Department). The report read as follows:
The creaming-off of agricultural surpluses from the Ukraine as food supplies for the Reich is only conceivable if trade in the Ukraine is pushed down to a minimum. Efforts to achieve this will be made by:
- Eradicating surplus mouths (Jews, and the population of the large Ukrainian cities, which, like Kiev, will receive no quota of supplies).
Some contemporary scholars reiterate the idea that there was a connection between the worsening food situation in the territories under German control on the one hand, and the problem of supplying foodstuffs to the Reich and Wehrmacht on the other. It is claimed that such a link accelerated the pace of annihilation of the Jewish population: ‘Facing a war that was claiming many victims, the National Socialist occupation authorities now confronted the question of whether foodstuffs should be placed at the disposal of the Jewish population … or whether they should be sent to the soldiers fighting at the front.’ Christian Gerlach formulated this approach in the following fashion: ‘Economic interests and crises had far more influence on the tempo of the liquidation of the Jews, especially in the phases of acceleration. The various liquidation programmes in Belorussia … were largely in response to pressures related to food economics.’
This article attempts to explore whether this connection existed in two different regions of the former Soviet Union – the Crimea and the North Caucasus. In order to know whether this argument holds water we need to know how much food was available in these areas on the eve of the German takeover and, after the conquest, what was the German policy with respect to the requisitioning and distribution of food to the local population, among them Jews. It is equally important to evaluate how many people, most specifically local inhabitants, were in the Crimea and the North Caucasus when the Jews were killed, and what was the share of the Jews in their midst. The study is based on wartime German documentation; testimonies from postwar West German trials of Nazi criminals; testimonies by Holocaust survivors; and Soviet primary and secondary sources.
Crimea
The Soviet Period
One of the consequences of the German blitzkrieg was that in the areas close to the border, the Soviets could not evacuate up to 70% of their strategic stocks and thus lost them to the Germans. It should be remembered, however, that the Crimean peninsula was captured more than four months after the outbreak of the war in June 1941. As a result, the Soviets would have had sufficient time to remove their food resources from the Crimea, including cattle, had they so desired. Large-scale food evacuation could have benefited the overall Soviet war effort. Yet, such a move would certainly have placed the remaining population in dire straits, and would have been at odds with one of the tenets of Soviet policy and propaganda: the people who stayed in the occupied territories were still considered Soviet citizens and efforts should have been made not to alienate them.
Fluctuations in Soviet policies with respect to ‘relocation’ of food resulted also from Moscow’s general war strategy concerning the Crimean peninsula. It wished to hold the Crimea and was ready to invest huge resources in order to do so, but was uncertain whether it was feasible at this stage of the war. As a result, the harvest was collected and stockpiled in the Crimea well into September 1941. This may testify to the Soviet resolution to hold the peninsula and, to that end, have there more food reserves. On 10 September 1941, local Crimean authorities issued a directive to begin the autumn sowing. At the same time, this decision was not extended to the sovkhozes of the People’s Commissariat for Agriculture, directly subordinated to the central Soviet government. It seems that these sovkhozes were already engaged in moving their food stocks away from the Crimea. Unfortunately, it has proved impossible to establish how many kolkhozes/ sovkhozes worked for the ‘evacuation’ of food and how many were ordered to continue the conventional agricultural programmes, and thus to assess the dimensions of the food stock relocation from the peninsula.
Yet, when the front lines began rapidly to approach the Crimea, all talk of harvest plans was discontinued. By late October 1941, it was already clear that the Germans would soon enter the peninsula. What did the Soviet authorities do under these circumstances? On 29 October, all Crimean ministries and supply organizations were urgently ordered to ‘sell all available food … in the storehouses of Simferopol’. The local inhabitants were supposed to be the ‘buyers’, but it is doubtful whether there was time to carry out this decision. However, it is clear that, at the time of the German occupation, important food reserves were still available in the Crimean storehouses.
It seems that at least a part of these resources passed into the hands of the local people, as on the eve of the Red Army retreat from the Crimea in late October 1941 the Soviets distributed food (either for payment or free of charge). In addition, local people looted Soviet food storehouses in the interim period before the entry of the German troops, as recorded in the diary of a Russian witness in Simferopol: ‘On 31 October, 1 November and today, there has been looting of shops and storehouses … People flocked to the plant and began to take sugar, tinned goods, jam. This continued throughout the day.’
The Red Army held Kerch, the most important Soviet evacuation harbour in the peninsula, until mid-November 1941. Heavy German bombardment (since mid-October) and fierce and more protracted (two more weeks as compared with the rest of the Crimea) fighting caused deterioration of the food conditions in the area. Nevertheless, the Soviet authorities claimed that before pulling out they also distributed considerable stocks to the local people.
The Red Army recaptured Kerch in late December 1941 but found it difficult to supply the area by sea from the Soviet mainland. As a result, the Soviet authorities resorted to requisitioning food stocks from the local population, on the grounds that ‘When the Red Army abandoned the area [in mid-November 1941], flour and other products were allocated to the population in quantities disproportionate to its current needs’, further placing the area’s inhabitants at risk of malnourishment. Intensifying warfare in the Kerch area, the presence of many thousands of Soviet soldiers, and the failure of the Soviet authorities to evacuate the civilian population on a large scale were bound to lead to a considerable worsening of food conditions in the area by the time the Germans took it over again in mid-May 1942.
The food situation in the Sevastopol area (held continuously by the Red Army until July 1942) was particularly grave, as the German siege slowly strangled sea communications with the Soviet mainland. Therefore, from the beginning of the siege in November 1941, the ‘Sevastopol fortified area’ had to rely largely on its own modest food resources. The report of the local Soviet authorities underscores the point:
Food resources in the Sevastopol area do not even meet current needs. The local food industry cannot cope with the growing needs. Requests are lodged with the Crimean authorities and the Command of the Black Sea to allocate necessary resources. Slaughter of individual cattle is forbidden henceforth without special permission.
Yet, local industry was incapable of meeting the demands on the local food stocks. As a result, Soviet authorities demanded the dispatch of all people unnecessary for the defence of the Sevastopol area from the city, to get rid of ‘surplus mouths’, and they did succeed in evacuating a considerable part of the civilian population. This enabled the provision of a modest bread ration to civilians (200 g per person) until the fall of Sevastopol in July 1942. However, it stands to reason that, on balance, the very intensive warfare and the presence of a considerable number of Soviet soldiers in the Sevastopol area forced the population to maximize its food resources in order to survive the eightmonth siege of the town.
How many people were there in the Crimea and what was the share of Jews among them on the eve of the German takeover? According to the 1939 Soviet census, some 65 500 Jews constituted 5.8% of the total Crimean population (some 1,129,000 people). Between the beginning of the war and the German conquest of the Crimea, there were important population movements in the peninsula: (1) the large-scale evacuation of civilians, among them Jews from the Crimea, (2) the arrival of a small number of refugees, among them many Jews, and (3) the enlistment of 8.25% of the Crimean population (predominantly, men of military age) into the Red Army; some of the soldiers fought and stayed in the territory of the Crimea either as prisoners of war in German captivity or as Soviet partisans, others were evacuated to the Soviet mainland, and during the battle of the Crimea Soviet command brought thousands more soldiers into the peninsula. Many Jews (enlisted in the Crimea and elsewhere) fought alongside the Crimean population. In all, it seems that by the time of the German occupation there remained slightly fewer people in the Crimea (including civilians and Soviet military personnel), while the number of Jews decreased by some 40-50%. At the same time, in the capital city of the Crimea, Simferopol, the absolute number of Jews decreased only slightly while their relative share in the general population probably even grew. The number of Jews also increased (both in relative and absolute terms) in the important harbour town of Kerch.
Overall, it seems that in most places, local inhabitants, Jews among them, had sufficient food by the time of the German takeover of the Crimea. Some of them were even able to increase the food stocks at their disposal when the Soviets distributed food to the civil population before their retreat from the Crimea, and later when civilians looted the abandoned public storehouses before the Germans’ entry. However, in the areas of Kerch (by mid-November 1941) and Sevastopol (by early July 1942) that were the location of the large-scale warfare, the available food stocks became more exhausted and the local population had difficulties in subsisting on their own even in the short term.
The German Occupation
In the military planning phase for Operation Barbarossa, the Germans were already studying the way in which the occupied Soviet hinterland could be made available for the German war effort. Notions of ‘traditional’ occupation policy based on First World War experience, such as showing consideration for the local population, even making concessions to it and promoting general economic reconstruction, were not very advantageous in terms of material support for the eastern army. The Germans had to mobilize maximum resources to provide the fighting forces and the homeland with urgently needed raw materials and foodstuffs. Given the expected exacerbation of shortages in the Reich in the autumn of 1941, the Wehrmacht was supposed to occupy the Soviet wheat-fields and maintain operations by largely living off the land. This policy was reiterated on a number of occasions by the highest civil and military authorities of the Reich.
The German 11th Army, under the command of General von Manstein, reinforced by Romanian troops, occupied most of the Crimea with the exception of the Sevastopol area in the first half of November 1941. By late December 1941 the Red Army liberated the town of Kerch and the adjacent area. In mid-May 1942 the Wehrmacht captured Kerch; in early July 1942 it conquered the Sevastopol area and thus completed the occupation of the Crimean peninsula.
As stated above, the Germans took over the Crimea in a relatively satisfactory food condition. In addition, as they immediately began to execute those whom they regarded as plunderers of the former Soviet public food storehouses, the Germans were able to seize a large portion of the food reserves left by the Soviets. They also captured considerable food stocks stockpiled in forests and mountains for the Soviet partisans. But the Germans did not content themselves with this. The general calculations, which dictated German policy in most of the occupied Soviet territories (living off the land, provision of supplies to the Wehrmacht and the Reich, and only then to those in the German service), were of paramount importance also in the Crimea and were fully backed by Manstein. On 20 November 1941 (when his army was fighting in the Crimea), he signed the order: ‘The food situation in our Fatherland requires that the troops be supplied with food from local resources and furthermore, that as many stocks as possible be put at the Fatherland’s disposal … A considerable percentage of the enemy towns’ populations will have to starve.’
It is no wonder therefore that, as reflected in German testimony, the food situation was deteriorating in the first weeks of the occupation. In postwar testimony given in a West German court, a former German officer in the Crimea claimed that:
The conditions in Simferopol were not at all favourable for the Russian population. They suffered from extreme hunger because it was extraordinarily difficult to supply the town with food. It must also be acknowledged that the winter of 1941-1942 was particularly hard, not only for the troops but also for the civilian population.
In line with their general policies, the Germans arbitrarily plundered food from the Jews and ordered the local people to deliver food surpluses to the municipal storehouses, under the pretext of saving the population who were not in possession of food stocks from starvation.
In Kerch, the German policy was no less stringent. Apart from the demand to deliver all available food to the German command, the local people were also ordered as early as November 1941 to register all domestic animals, and they were prohibited from slaughtering cattle without the explicit permission of the Germans. The order was rigidly enforced. The Germans’ lack of consideration for the local population found expression in the fact that in November-December 1941 mills and plants in Kerch were not in operation, and nor was there a public catering service.
This was the background against which one must view the reasoning of the German military report of 27 November 1941, that ‘the liquidation of the Jews [in Kerch] will be accelerated owing to a dangerous food situation in the town’. The food argument also found expression in the postwar testimony of the quartermaster of the 11th Army, who explicitly mentioned it as the rationale behind the decision to exterminate Simferopol’s Jewish population: ‘On the basis of the order of 11 December 1941, I authorized another raid. In this case, the step was carried out solely in the interests of the local population in order to maintain orderly provision, as was our task.’
Before the extermination actions carried out four to six weeks after the onset of the occupation, the Jews had proved to be the most vulnerable group within the local population of the peninsula with respect to food provision. True, during this period the Germans did not supply food to any Crimean inhabitant (apart from those on their payroll), but as the Germans plundered their food in some places, and did not supply food to Jews imprisoned in camps and in ghettos, the Jews were the first to exhaust the food stocks at their disposal.
German testimony indicates that as the food conditions were strained in Simferopol and in the areas to which they were confined (Dzhankoi, Kerch, and Yalta) the Germans wished to accelerate the extermination of the Jews. These towns hosted more than half the Crimean Jews. The relative share of the Jewish population was especially high in Simferopol (with 12 000-14 000 Jews, the biggest Jewish community in the peninsula) and in Kerch (5000-7000), and constituted probably 30-40% of the total population of these towns. These data are irrelevant for Dzhankoi and Yalta since the Jews were confined to areas outside these localities, and their presence or absence could not affect even theoretically the food conditions in the two towns. For their part, Soviet and Jewish sources maintain that in the first weeks of the German occupation of the Crimea there was a severe food crisis in the Crimea, primarily in the areas of Jewish confinement where the Jews were prevented from procuring food from the local population for two to three weeks.
How can we appraise the food situation in the German-occupied Crimea? It appears that the Germans did have food resources at their disposal (that they inherited what the Soviets did not destroy, distribute, or remove). But they were reluctant to open the stores to feed the local population, let alone the Jews. In November-December 1941 the local people seemed to have had sufficient food stocks preserved from the Soviet period to subsist in the short run. After all, the German occupation had commenced only some weeks previously, and in addition, the Germans were not plundering the non-Jewish population yet. This estimate is substantiated by the Soviet report compiled after the Red Army liberated Kerch in late December 1941.
But the German authorities needed more food stocks in the Crimean peninsula in order to stockpile it for the future provision of the Wehrmacht and the Reich and probably the local population. Some food could be taken from the Jews, but this would not suffice. At the same time, the German authorities demanded that the rest of the local population deliver food surpluses, but there is no evidence that German soldiers actually requisitioned food in November-December 1941; predictably the local inhabitants did not volunteer to deliver their ‘food surpluses’ to the German authorities. Thus, it seems that the Germans felt the food situation in the first period of the occupation of the Crimea to be graver than it actually was.
It is equally important to see who among the Germans made foodrelated pronouncements. The relevant testimony (offered during the war and afterwards) contains not a single statement made by the men of Einsatzgruppe D: it all comes from the Wehrmacht. How are we to interpret this? On the one hand, the army was in charge of the area, including the well-being of the local population, and in this sense it is quite understandable why it concerned itself with food matters. Still, it seems strange that there is no reference to the food problem in the Crimea in Einsatzgruppe D reports: after all, it also dealt with matters of food policy, and its reports compiled in 1942 on the Crimea as well as on other regions tackled these subjects. On the other hand, the Wehrmacht may have felt uneasy that Jews would be killed in the Crimea for political or ideological reasons and wished to account for their extermination pragmatically by ascribing it to lack of food. Needless to say, the Einsatzgruppe did not have such reservations: in its reports the murder of Crimean Jews was presented as a fact that needed no explanation – it was clear to it and to its commanders in Berlin why this decision was implemented.
It appears that the annihilation of some 35 000 Jews (some 6-6.5% of the Crimean population at that time) in November-December 1941 did not improve the strained food situation in the peninsula. The German authorities experimented with various inexpensive methods to overcome the crisis. By late December 1941 they began to ration food out to a tiny section of the population. Later, the locals were driven from the starving towns into the countryside and allowed to search for food independently. But the situation did not improve. According to the Germans’ own estimates, the mortality rate in the peninsula rose by 100% in January 1942 (in apparent contrast to December 1941). Gradually, the Germans began to see the direct relationship between the improvements of the local people’s food conditions and their attitudes towards German rule in the area. The Germans redressed the situation, at least partially, only when they began to allocate food rations to the local people on a relatively large scale in March-April 1942.
Nevertheless, in 1942 in the areas recently conquered by the Wehrmacht (Kerch and Sevastopol) the old harsh policy was applied, apparently because the Germans hoped to seize public and private food stocks preserved from the Soviet period. The diary of a Sevastopol inhabitant from early July 1942 reveals: ‘The possession of an extra kilogram of food products was punishable by execution. No trade whatsoever was conducted in the market, and stores were empty’. Yet, the food argument was not used to justify the murder of Jews in these areas, probably because it was conducted within the first 7 to 10 days after the Wehrmacht took over Kerch and Sevastopol.
The Germans assessed the food situation in the rural areas of the Crimea as more satisfactory, and correctly so. It is possible that villagers had more food at their disposal; besides, far fewer German troops were deployed in rural areas. Therefore, the plunder of food reserves belonging to rural inhabitants was less systematic and thorough than in the towns. It is also arguable that as the Germans particularly needed the support of the local inhabitants in the struggle against Soviet partisans, they restrained themselves in the requisitioning of food. But increasing partisan activity in rural areas, and a large-scale deployment of the Wehrmacht in the ensuing German anti-guerrilla warfare within the Crimean villages, drained the available food resources.
It should be remembered that while the majority of ‘rural’ Jews were annihilated in November and early December 1941, those who survived were forced into hard agricultural labour. Their bread was confiscated, and they were not provided with any food in exchange for their work. The local non-Jewish population was forbidden to give any food to Jews. Thus, the Jewish inhabitants of the Crimean villages were subjected to a starvation policy similar to that in ghettos and camps in urban areas. But the Germans never claimed that the extermination of Jews in Crimean villages would alleviate the lot of the local inhabitants, probably because the remaining Jewish population was too small.
Between the onset of hostilities and the German takeover, the population of the Crimea decreased by some 20%, while the number of Jews diminished by some 40-50%. At the same time, the remaining 35 000 Jews concentrated in the biggest towns of the peninsula, and so increased their share there up to one third of the general population. The incessant fighting led the Wehrmacht to deploy more than 10 German and Romanian divisions in the Crimea; in addition, almost all the troops of Einsatzgruppe D were also stationed there. Thus, the density of the German troops that had to be provided for in the small territory of the Crimea (26,200 km2) turned out to be very high.
In the final account, during the Soviet period the Crimea appeared to be a self-sufficient region insofar as food provision was concerned. By the time of the German entry, there were sufficient food reserves left in public storage and in private hands. Within the first two months of their occupation of the Crimea, the Germans’ increasing demands on the local population to deliver ‘food surpluses’ were largely unanswered; the food that the Germans needed was principally supplied from what was requisitioned from the Jews. As a result, the German military came to appraise the food shortage in the Crimea as so grave that it necessitated the urgent removal of ‘surplus mouths’ and the liquidation of Jews in the peninsula. Soviet and Jewish testimony suggests that the food situation was not so grave at that point of the occupation. Yet, given the information available to the Wehrmacht, it seemed to have reason to apply its amoral food argument in the Crimea, at least in some of the most populated urban areas.
The North Caucasus
The Soviet Period
The North Caucasus region, and specifically the vast territories of Krasnodar and Stavropol, was an important Soviet agricultural asset. In 1941 the Soviet Union lost Ukraine – its most important supplier of grain to the country – and consequently the North Caucasus became increasingly significant. Food conditions there were better than in the other Soviet regions, particularly those close to the front line, in terms of both food availability and price. This had to do with the area’s generally favourable climatic conditions, as well as with the relative sparsity of population, especially in the towns.
The Soviets made full use of the Caucasian food resources by funnelling them to other regions where provision was worse. As the Caucasus had had to cope with an influx of refugees and evacuees since the beginning of the war, the Soviets established food rationing for the civil population from 1 September 1941. The rations mainly consisted of basic commodities, such as bread, sugar, and confectionery. There were logistical problems and temporary failures similar to those that took place in the Krasnodar territory in September 1941: ‘Bread baking for the army increased, which resulted in a bread shortage for the civil population. In mid-September 1941, food coupons for 15 000 tons of bread were not covered, resulting in very long queues.’ However, on the whole, the food conditions for basic commodities remained satisfactory until the German takeover.
With the front line rapidly approaching the borders of the North Caucasus in summer 1942, the Soviet authorities faced a very tight schedule to ‘solve’ the food problem, which implied that no public food stocks should be left in the abandoned territory. The order ‘On preparing to eliminate reserves of bread, fuel, cattle and other articles of value, provided their removal becomes impossible’ of the Military Council of the North Caucasian Front was issued only on 28 July 1942 (just a few days before the Germans entered the area).
The following excerpt from the official Soviet document relating to the Beloglinsk area of the Krasnodar territory is illustrative of what took place in the North Caucasus at that time:
On 29 July 1942, a representative of the Territorial Committee of VKP(b), Comrade Stepanov, arrived and proposed to proceed with the bread harvesting. On 30 July, after dinner, fighting commenced in the area. No directions having been received, it was only then that the evacuation of people and machinery began. A small amount of the already threshed bread was moved to the elevator, whereas the rest was distributed to the kolkhozniki and taken by the population on 30 and 31 July 1942. To burn the elevator and grain, 6 tons of oil, 5 tons of benzene, and 2 tons of kerosene were prepared and spread around. This was transferred, prepared and ready, to the commander of sapper detachment on 30 July 1942 at 23:00.
The report summarizes what was accomplished on a large scale in the North Caucasus in late July-early August 1942. In spite of the logistical difficulties involved, and the belatedness of the Soviet measures, a considerable portion of the cattle (there was no Soviet record of its percentage of the whole) as well as the grain was duly moved from the area to be occupied by the Germans. Some of the food resources (mostly grain) were distributed to the Soviet kolkhozniki. In the towns some of the locals looted the abandoned Soviet storehouses, thus increasing their own food resources. Prior to their retreat from the Caucasus, the Soviets destroyed a considerable quantity of public food stocks.
In the final analysis, at the time of the German occupation, the food conditions in the Caucasian villages were better than in the towns, while the latter still had enough provisions (mostly privately owned) to save them from starvation in the short term. In the long term, both the Germans and the local population were able to reap the autumn harvest of 1942 in this region.
The German Occupation
The Wehrmacht first endeavoured to penetrate the North Caucasus in autumn 1941. But the Red Army repelled the German advance in November 1941 and the front line stabilized until summer 1942. The second German offensive began on 26 July 1942 and involved units of Army Group A (Heeresgruppe A). The Germans reached their deepest penetration on this front in mid-November 1942, when the offensive was halted and the front stabilized. The encirclement of the German 6th Army at Stalingrad in November left the vast flank of Army Group A exposed, so starting in 1943 the Germans began to pull out of the North Caucasus.
According to Einsatzgruppe D: ‘With the conquest of the Caucasian corn-growing steppe, one of Russia’s most important agricultural surplus areas comes into the German power sphere. Most specifically, the area between Manytsch and Kuban was the significant supply source of the Soviet Union.’ Although food conditions were unsatisfactory in a small number of industrial centres, the Germans did not consider the region’s overall food situation to be as acute as that in other Russian areas. They had no illusions about the source of this relative prosperity. It was due to the speedy withdrawal of the Red Army, as well as to the fact that the rural inhabitants plundered the publicly owned food storehouses. The Wehrmacht was also able to seize some of the cattle that the Soviets attempted to remove from the North Caucasus. As a result, the most important short-term task, to secure provisions for the Wehrmacht and the local population, could be fulfilled.
In the North Caucasian towns, German food policy varied from place to place. In some localities, they encouraged free trade in food commodities and to this end lifted the movement restrictions, which led to a significant improvement in the food supply. Arguably, the relief here was only temporary because the Germans fostered trade with food plundered from Soviet stores, and there were natural limits to this ‘bounty’:
There was abundance in the Voroshilovsk markets, both of food and consumer goods. These were, for the most part, goods plundered during the bombardment of the town on 3 August 1942 and the German entry into Voroshilovsk. At the same time, the German authorities did not prevent the delivery of agricultural products from localities adjacent to the town – also mainly a result of plundering the food storehouses and of seizing the abandoned property of kolkhozes.
Conversely, in other towns, the stores were not reopened, which resulted in a considerable increase in food prices. Under such circumstances, people were forced to live mainly off their stocks. To add insult to injury, the Germans followed the line adopted in most of the occupied Soviet territories, ensuring a regular flow of food supplies to the Reich. This, of course, took precedence over provision for the civilian population. Therefore, during the short period of German dominance in the Caucasus, there was a marked deterioration in the region’s food situation.
At the same time, it should be mentioned that all this did not happen in the first phase of the German occupation (August-September 1942). It is noteworthy that, contrary to many other occupied Soviet regions, there is no record that the Germans requisitioned food from the local population, including Jews, during this period. And there is no record of starvation in any urban locality during the German occupation during the whole period of the German occupation of the North Caucasus.
From the beginning of the occupation, the generally moderate German policy in the region found expression in food distribution, which resulted in the development of pro-German attitudes among the local people. But the rations allocated to the locals in some industrial centres were insufficient, and these initial attitudes gave way to apathy, as admitted in the German post-occupation report: ‘The bread allocations in the cities and entire districts, such as Cherkessk, Maikop, Novorossiysk etc., were too small for subsistence. After a short time, the friendly pro-German mood gave way to cold indifference.’ Furthermore, in many towns, there was no food distribution during the first stage of the German occupation.
German policy during the initial phase of the occupation in the towns (four to six weeks from early August 1942) is of particular importance because it was during this period that the extermination of Jews took place in the North Caucasus. It should be remembered that most of the Jews in the region were evacuees or refugees, and therefore ran short of food reserves more quickly than the native residents. There is abundant evidence that as inhabitants of the towns, as forced labourers, as ghetto dwellers, and as camp inmates, the Jews were always denied food rations in the region. Sometimes it was done publicly, for example when signs reading ‘No bread for Jews’ were pasted on the bread stores. There is only one known example of food distribution to Jews in the whole of the vast Caucasian region. When the Romanians controlled the town of Teberda, they distributed food to the orphanage, including the Jewish children living within its walls.
In rural areas Jews were occasionally provided with food rations, even if these were entirely inadequate. But many Jews were not given food, although they were compelled to work. There is one recorded case of starvation among the Jews, when the Germans’ policy was particularly stringent and they forbade the local people to provide the Jews with food. But this was an exception to the rule. As food conditions in the countryside were more satisfactory, the German policy did not have such a devastating effect on the Jews’ prospects for survival.
How many Jews found themselves in the occupied territories of the North Caucasus in the second half of 1942, and what was their proportion of the general population? In 1939 the total population of the region was 7,208,333 people; of these a very high number of combatage (18-45) men were drafted in the Red Army by summer 1942. Yet, almost 300,000 refugees from other areas were registered in the region in the first half of 1942. Almost all the 22 German, Romanian, and Slovak divisions present in the vast area of the occupied North Caucasus (about 200,000 km2 ) – a very low troop density – were deployed at the front line. The available estimates for Ashkenazi and Mountain Jews at the time of the German occupation fluctuate between 45,000 and 55,000 people. Thus, the annihilation of such a tiny section of the local population could hardly change the overall food balance in the region.
The Soviet North Caucasus was a food-surplus region, and when the German armies occupied it in July-August 1942 there was enough food left in public storage, some of which was plundered by the local population, with the rest taken over by the Germans. In addition, the Germans and the local population still had time to collect the 1942 autumn harvest. Jews, most of whom were evacuees, were the most underprivileged group in terms of food provision in the German-dominated Caucasus. And yet, they also benefited from the satisfactory food situation as they could pick up fruit and vegetables. Besides, the local population had food to sell to Jews. Unsurprisingly, the food argument was never mentioned in German wartime correspondence or in postwar testimony as a rationale for the decision to carry out or to precipitate the murder of Jews in the North Caucasus.
Conclusion
Both the Crimea and the North Caucasus enjoyed satisfactory food provision under Soviet rule. However, when the Germans occupied the Crimea and the Caucasus, in November 1941 and August 1942 respectively, the situation changed. My sense is that two factors, one objective and one subjective, were of decisive importance with respect to the food conditions in the areas under review. The first one was intensive warfare, which damaged public and personal food stores, and also led the German and the Soviet commands to introduce reinforcements that had to be provided for mainly from the available food stocks. The second was German food policy, which involved requisition and/or distribution of food to the local population or part of it. These considerations meant that the situation in the North Caucasus was much better than that in the Crimea.
As the Germans intended to eliminate the Jewish population soon after the beginning of the occupation they did not supply food to the Jews in the Crimea and the North Caucasus. In both regions the Jews were thus the first group to run short of food. In the Crimea this occurred against a background of rapidly worsening food supply, and it was difficult for the Jews to get food from the general population who experienced similar problems, albeit on a smaller scale. In contrast, in the Caucasus the local inhabitants had sufficient food stocks to trade for money or goods, at least during the first months of the occupation.
Although the dimensions of the food crisis in the Crimea appeared to be accentuated in the German reports (perhaps because of the Germans’ predetermined views on the subject, but more probably because the Germans did not possess all the information now available to us or because the Wehrmacht commanders in the area felt uneasy that Jews would be exterminated solely for ideological reasons), the Germans had reason to apply the food argument as a justification for the decision to accelerate the killing of Jews in the Crimea, at least in some of the most populated towns. On the contrary, the generally advantageous food situation of the Caucasus and its status as the recognized Soviet agricultural reservoir made the food argument hardly compatible with the region’s profile. As a result, the Germans never raised the food argument as a pretext to get rid of the Jews in the North Caucasus.