Paolo Fonzi. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Volume 38, Annual 2021.
This article centers on the German perception of the Great Soviet Famines of 1931-1933, with a focus on Soviet Ukraine in particular. The first part explores the channels through which information from the Soviet Union detailing the Famine reached the Germans and the attempts by different Reich institutions to control the spread of knowledge in German society about this human tragedy. Against this framework the article details the policy enacted by different organizations to provide relief to the starving Germans, both ethnic Germans and German citizens, who were living in the USSR. In the second part, the article deals with the patterns of perception that shaped the German view of the Famine. The author thus provides invaluable insight into the Reich’s policy towards Soviet Ukraine, and more broadly into the perception of the Famine among well-informed Germans of the 1930s.
In October 1933 a German engineer by the name of Saueressig who was employed in Moscow sent a letter to the Reich authorities complaining about German news coverage of the Soviet Union. Since the Kremlin controlled all interactions of German diplomats, he argued, they could not readily grasp what was going on in the USSR. Because its policy was based on misinformation, Berlin had been unable to prevent the “Jewish-Francophile faction led by Litvinov” from taking control of Moscow’s foreign policy and to avoid a worsening of German-Soviet relations.
Though not entirely groundless, Saueressig’s claims should, rather, be seen as staunch National Socialist activism, typically directed against a state bureaucracy viewed by many party adherents as a relic of the past. The embittered response from a representative of the Reich Chancellery to these accusations offers a detailed picture of German intelligence gathering in the USSR. “It has to be said,” the letter explained,
that the Reich Government is probably much better informed about the situation in Russia than any other great power. We maintain one embassy and seven consulates in Russia, a number that places us well above all other foreign missions. A further source of information is made available to us by the numerous German engineers employed in Russia. Also, the numerous letters that have arrived in Germany because of the hunger catastrophe in South Russia contained important communications. One can therefore assume that nothing of what goes on in Russia remains hidden to us.
This statement was only slightly exaggerated. From 1929 the Soviet authorities had tightened their control over the outflow of information from the country, restricting the presence of foreigners and their contacts with locals. Hence, reliable knowledge about the social and economic upheavals occurring in those years in the USSR became extremely scarce. Yet, in comparison to other great powers, Germany was in a privileged position. While most governments had to rely on informal channels to obtain information from the USSR, German sources, which included a wide network of diplomatic proxies, were particularly rich. It is noteworthy that German news reports on the Soviet Union were frequently reproduced by the press in other countries.
The possibility of accessing information from the Soviet Union gave German institutions and public opinion a vivid sense of what was taking place in that country, from collectivization and dekulakization to the famine crises that hit several regions of the Soviet Union in 1931-1933. No wonder, then, that in the late 1980s, when non-Soviet documents about the Great Famine in Ukraine began sparking the interest of scholars, German diplomatic dispatches were among the first to be published. Since then, however, only a few titles have been added to the inadequate bibliography on this topic. Thus, German sources still await an in-depth investigation in order to shed light on how German institutions, political organization, intellectuals, and public opinion perceived the Soviet famines. The perception of the famines of 1931-1933 and, more generally, of Stalin’s modernization outside the USSR has not received much scholarly attention, which is most likely due to the traditional understanding of the interwar period as marked overwhelmingly by a decline in the transnational circulation of ideas. Yet, this topic is crucial for enhancing our understanding not only of Soviet industrialization, but also of the way in which this unprecedented experiment affected the intellectual and political development of other countries. Among these, Germany has some interesting peculiarities, as the famine occurred in a crucial period of its history—namely, the final years of the Weimar Republic and the first year of National Socialist rule. The importance of a study of the German perception of the famine can be fully appreciated if one thinks of the Historikerstreit of the 1980s, the heated debate sparked by Ernst Nolte’s thesis that Hitler’s eliminationist anti-Semitism was a reaction to a perceived Bolshevik threat triggered by the knowledge of Stalin’s brutal dekulakization. Strangely enough, neither during that debate nor in the following years was a source-based investigation ever undertaken of how German society, heading toward the fateful year of 1933, perceived the death by starvation of millions of people in the USSR, including ethnic Germans.
Based on wide research in German archives, this article analyzes two aspects of the German perception of the Great Famine. First, it examines how information about the famine spread within German society and the reasons why state and nonstate agencies allowed or hindered its dissemination among the broader public. This is followed by an overview of how German diplomats reported the famine and which cultural patterns shaped their view of these events. The link between information politics and the perception of the famine is addressed in the conclusion.
German Sources of Information About the Famine
The reason why the German state had such a considerable number of diplomatic proxies in the USSR—seven in total, three of them located in Ukraine (Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv)—may be found in the close political, economic, and military relations that were established between the Weimar Republic and the Bolshevik state in the 1920s. In 1922, spurred by their marginal status in international politics, these two countries signed the Treaty of Rapallo, which normalized their relations and ushered in a decade of intense collaboration. As the Reich Chancellery noted, in 1933 diplomatic relations and the German diplomatic network were still in place, conveying a notable amount of intelligence to Berlin.
Another source of information was the sizable groups of German speakers living in the Soviet Union, both German citizens (Reichsdeutsche) and so-called ethnic Germans (Auslandsdeutsche, later known as Volksdeutsche), who had settled in the Russian Empire over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Statistics on the number of German speakers in the Soviet Union are rare and mostly incomplete. While the 1926 Soviet census gave a figure of 1.24 million, in 1934 the German agricultural attache in Moscow calculated that their number, though strongly decreased, was still above one million. A large number died as a consequence of dekulakization and famine, while many left the USSR after the onset of collectivization. The most notorious case in this respect is the refugee crisis of 1929, when 13,000 ethnic Germans, 10,000 of whom were Mennonites, gathered in Moscow hoping to obtain a visa to immigrate to Germany. After difficult negotiations, during which the affair came into the spotlight of the international press, 5,671 people, 3,885 of them Mennonites, were allowed to leave for Germany, from where they were subsequently relocated to South America. In addition to ethnic Germans, a sizable number of German citizens (Reichsdeutsche) lived in the Soviet Union. They were mostly skilled workers and engineers, whom the economic slump and the concomitant industrialization in the USSR had induced to emigrate. In 1930 they numbered 11,327-5,554 of whom, mostly peasants, were settled in Ukraine. While dekulakization and collectivization motivated many to return to Germany, by 1935 their numbers still stood at 6,000 inhabitants in the entire USSR, 2,500 of whom lived in Ukraine.
During the famine, contacts between German consuls and ethnic German peasants were particularly frequent. The German consul in Kyiv, for instance, gathered intelligence during trips to the countryside and, at the peak of starvation, was visited every day by approximately fifty German peasants in search of assistance. From 1934 onward, increasing hostility toward foreigners restricted access to this source of information, not only because many Germans had already emigrated, but also because restrictions were applied to the consuls’ own freedom of movement. However, those who returned to Germany were systematically interrogated by the Gestapo to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union; their testimonies were then passed along to other agencies.
As in most humanitarian crises, relief and information moved in parallel yet opposite ways. A huge number of aid requests in the form of letters containing detailed descriptions of the food crisis, then generally referred to as Hungerbriefe, spread information about the famine in German society. Typically, letters were sent by ethnic Germans—and, in some cases, by people of other nationalities—to relatives in Germany or to German communities in the United States and Canada. Many were entrusted to Germans who emigrated from the USSR and then handed over to the Reich authorities upon their arrival. A considerable number of Hungerbriefe were directed to the German Foreign Office (Auswartiges Amt) or forwarded to it by recipients in Germany to draw the authorities’ attention to the plight of their relatives in the USSR. Several emigre organizations used Hungerbriefe for anti-Soviet propaganda, and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) organized an exhibit of them in 1932.
In the fall of 1932 several religious and ethnic organizations, on the initiative of the Mennonite community and with the participation of state representatives, set up an umbrella relief committee (Reichsausschuss) called Bruder in Not (Brethren in Need). The committee oversaw the collection of funds from state agencies and private donors and organized the delivery of food packages or money via Torgsin shops to the starving Germans. Bruder in Not, which continued to operate until the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, was not the first such operation. A similar committee with the same name had been founded by the German Red Cross in 1922, and another one was created during the 1929 refugee crisis. In order to identify people eligible for relief, Hungerbriefe were systematically collected in a central card file set up in Germany’s Foreign Ministry.
Scholars played a major role in providing information coming from the Soviet Union. Cultural relations with the Russian Empire had already given rise to a considerable number of organizations gathering specialists in the history of Eastern Europe, when, after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles, the so-called Ostforschung was established as a multidisciplinary academic field. Stressing the leading role of the Germans, inprimis ethnic Germans, in the history of the region, Ostforschung advocated a revision of the Versailles treaty and furthered German imperialistic endeavors in the East. Osteuropa, a leading journal to which most German experts of Russian affairs gravitated, published several articles describing the effects of industrialization in the Soviet Union.
The Information Policy of the German Foreign Office
Since the Soviet government never publicly admitted the existence of the famine, reporting on it was considered politically sensitive in most countries, and the circulation of related news was generally restricted by the authorities. So, too, in Germany, where several institutional actors strove to oversee the flow of information about the famine. Among these, the German Foreign Office had a particularly strong influence, not only because it was the only institution with access to direct sources from the USSR, but also because public denunciations of the famine could have affected German-Soviet relations; thus, it fell into the purview of diplomacy. Since maintaining good relations with the USSR was regarded as a priority by German diplomats at the time, disseminating knowledge about the famine among the wider public was largely conditional on this goal.
In order to appreciate this aspect fully, one needs to bear in mind that in 1933 there were different expectations of the foreign policy course that the Nazi government was going to adopt. As we know now, Hitler would steer Germany’s foreign policy toward an inexorable worsening of its relations with the USSR, which culminated in the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact in 1936. Yet, immediately after the seizure of power the Nazi leadership strove to foster an impression of continuity with the foreign policy of the last Weimar cabinets. This attitude seemed to confirm the conviction of many that National Socialism would not endure or, at least, that its radicalism would abate under the influence of the conservative politicians that had brought it to power. Thus, in 1933 officials of the Foreign Office still believed they had enough maneuvering power to keep alive the special relationship with the Soviet Union that had been established in the 1920s. In a memo drafted a few months after Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor, Foreign Office State Secretary Bernhard Wilhelm von Bulow argued that it was imperative “to devote particular attention to our relations with Moscow.” To this end, he argued, German diplomats must signal to the Soviets that the “internal political fight against communism” and “our state’s political attitude toward the Soviet Union” were clearly separate matters.
Rapallo was considered even more important after the Nazi seizure of power. Since its inception, the alliance with the Soviet Union had been conceived of as a means of safeguarding Germany militarily from an attack from Poland. When the NSDAP, with its radically revisionist agenda, rose to power, a great strain was placed on the relations with the Polish Republic, the foremost target of German revisionism. Against this backdrop, Foreign Office staff deemed it more vital than ever to secure Soviet backing (Ruckendeckung) in order to have a few years of peace to allow for rearmament. Viewed from the perspective of 1933, this policy was not utterly unrealistic. Although Hitler eventually took the lead in the field of foreign policy, in 1933-1934 the Foreign Office still had considerable autonomy. Moreover, in March 1933 Hitler’s cabinet accepted the extension of the Soviet-German treaties of 1926 and 1929 and had them ratified by parliament. Even the NSDAP newspaper Volkischer Beobachter commented enthusiastically on the event, declaring that “our Fuhrer has made a good relationship with the Soviet Union an important programmatic point of German foreign policy.”
Preserving Rapallo implied an effort on the part of the Foreign Office to influence the German public’s perception of the tragedy unfolding in the USSR. Circulating news about it risked exacerbating Soviet-German relations, already strained by the Nazis’ rise to power and by the rapprochement between the USSR and France. In May 1933, for example, Otto Schiller, German agricultural attache to Moscow, drafted an internal report entitled “The Situation in the North Caucasus in the Spring of 1933,” which described in detail the food crisis in that region. The report was leaked, then published by the Daily Telegraph and the Paris-based emigre newspaper Vozrozhdenie, triggering a brief storm in German-Soviet relations. The author was heavily attacked by the Soviet press and threatened with expulsion. In a private meeting, D. G. Shtern, director of the Section West of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs of the USSR (Narkomindel), pressured the German attache not to mention a crisis or a famine in his reports but, instead, paint an optimistic picture of the state of Soviet agriculture.
Among those who were particularly preoccupied with the effects of a German campaign on the famine were the personnel of the German Embassy in Moscow. In July 1933 Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen advised the Foreign Office to disavow the efforts made by several organizations to turn Bruder in Not into a full-fledged relief operation. Since reports showed that German peasants were faring relatively better than Ukrainians or Russians, the ambassador argued, support through money and packages was largely sufficient to allow them to survive. Sticking to the discreet methods adopted thus far, wrote von Dirksen, would help the German authorities maintain good relations with the Soviets, who tolerated Bruder in Not because it suited their interests. The operation allowed them partially to stem starvation at no cost and, in addition, to procure hard currency for the Soviet state—all this without its leadership’s having to admit the existence of a famine. At von Dirksen’s prompting, Bruder in Not committed itself to “avoiding slipping into political attacks against the Soviet Union in conducting propaganda that is in and of itself necessary, and to adhere to the humanitarian and religious approach.”
A further source of concern for German diplomats was that circulating news of the catastrophe unfolding in the Soviet Union might reinforce the idea that collectivization had dealt a deadly blow to the Bolsheviks and that, therefore, the souring of diplomatic relations was no matter of concern because the Soviet Union was going to collapse at some point. The question about how stable the Soviet Union was had concerned German diplomats since the mid-1920s, when some of the most prominent figures in the Foreign Office had engaged in a discussion about the possible outcomes of the Bolsheviks’ policies. This interest was sparked not only by political preoccupations but also by strictly economic interests. Since the inception of the Rapallo policy, German industrial and political circles had viewed the Soviet Union as a key area of commercial and capital penetration. Great hopes, for example, were entertained as to the possibility of German capital’s sharing in the construction of the Soviet transportation network. After the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP), the idea was widespread among diplomats and representatives of the private sector that the USSR would evolve into a kind of semi-capitalist system, moderating its socialist features and even undergoing a process of de-Bolshevization. With the inception of industrialization in 1925 and the first signs of a food crisis, a debate was launched among the “Russia experts” of the German Foreign Office about the future of the Bolshevik system. While one group anticipated its imminent collapse, which would lead the country to reestablish strong relations with the Western powers, others, including von Dirksen, who at the time was Deputy Director of Section East (Ostabteilung), believed in its capacity to stabilize itself. The latter group thought that Germany must play a key role in restraining the “revolutionary and subversive tendencies of the Soviet government,” promoting its rapprochement with the Western world.
Although expectations of the Soviet Union’s evolution into a semi-capitalist system were dashed by collectivization, the belief in the capacity of the Soviet regime to endure the challenge of industrialization continued to inform the outlook of many German experts on Russia. Significantly, in September 1933 the German consul in Kyiv Andor Hencke was admonished by his superiors in Moscow not to be too pessimistic in his reports about the local economic conditions and to limit his observations to Ukraine, thus avoiding the impression that the crisis was raging in the whole country. In a letter to Hencke, Fritz von Twardowski, a counselor at the German Embassy in Moscow, explained that German diplomats in the Soviet capital were trying in this way to defy those political forces in Berlin that were convinced that the famine had so weakened the Soviet Union as to make it irrelevant in international relations. Twardowski noted that giving credit to this idea would bolster the standing of Hitler, Rosenberg, and Hugenberg, whose agenda risked souring relations with the Soviet Union. In August 1934, when Theodor Oberlander, an agrarian expert and a leading figure in the Ostforschung, visited the embassy in Moscow, German diplomats sought to convince him to exert his influence on the “highest party circles” to support their policy. To give strength to their argument, they explained to Oberlander that “no opinions were noted that internal problems deriving from the country’s food supply situation were such as to endanger the regime in the near future.”
Existing sources do not permit us to establish whether the National Socialist leadership in 1933 believed that the Soviet Union was about to collapse under the weight of its internal economic crisis. Despite being an early critic of Rapallo, Hitler was initially not fully consistent in promoting an anti-Soviet line, sometimes even calling for an alliance with the USSR. Yet, since the mid-1920s the idea that all traces of “Germanness” in the Russian elite had been erased by Judeo-Bolshevism and that the Soviet Union was “ripe for collapse” had definitively prevailed in his thinking. In his early writings Alfred Rosenberg, who was born into a Baltic German family in the Russian Empire and in 1933 appointed director of the NSDAP’s Office of Foreign Affairs (Aufienpolitisches Amt, APA), had vehemently called for German support of the Soviet nationalities that were being oppressed by Great Russian chauvinism. During Nazi rule this view was furthered by the Eastern Section of the APA and the so-called “Amt-Rosenberg,” which was responsible for the “spiritual and ideological education” of party members. This notwithstanding, neither Hitler nor Rosenberg considered joining the anti-Soviet campaign conducted by many Ukrainian organizations in 1933, despite rumors in Germany and abroad that Rosenberg had plans to promote Ukraine’s independence. Shortly after the Nazis came to power, in January 1933, Russian and Ukrainian emigre circles approached the new rulers, with whom contact had been established as early as the 1920s, to persuade them to launch an anti-Soviet campaign. But in 1933 the National Socialists were too weak to commit themselves to such a policy. Moreover, Rosenberg was never able to convince Hitler to liaise with the non-Russian nationalities of the USSR, and the Fuhrer remained reluctant to establish contacts with Russian emigre groups.
Despite their willingness to subordinate their information policy on the famine to the preservation of the spirit of Rapallo, the Russia experts of the Foreign Office had to comply with a series of constraints and conflicting interests. Foreign Office officials shared the anticommunist ideas of the NSDAP and, like all other Reich institutions, supported the repression of communism in Germany and abroad. Informing the Germans about the famine was certainly an ideal propaganda tool to achieve this goal. Moreover, the Foreign Office could not completely pass over in silence facts of which the Germans had knowledge via other channels. Finally, the Foreign Office, through its cultural section Kulturabteilung, was a key actor in the policies enacted by the Reich to support German communities abroad. It is hardly surprising, then, that Bruder in Not had the full backing of the Foreign Office, even though its activities risked contradicting a central tenet of the policy of this same institution. In 1933, for instance, Bruder in Not launched a “public collection” (Reichssammlung) to raise money on behalf of ethnic Germans. This fundraising campaign, which very much resembled the one that was conducted during the refugee crisis of 1929, used “oral propaganda” conducted by the participating organizations as well as appeals in the press. A million copies of a brochure were printed and distributed, among others, by the National Socialist Factory Cell Organization (Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation) among the working class. A sum was donated by Hitler himself. (The uneasiness felt by Foreign Office staffers about these contrasting concerns was neatly expressed by Ernst Kundt, director of the Kulturabteilung of the Foreign Office and a key figure in the relief operation, who complained that “the Reichsammlung and all that is connected to it causes us much headache every day.” “On the one hand,” he explained, “propaganda has to be conducted for the money to come in, and, besides, the German authorities also want to make propaganda against communism through this issue. On the other hand, the honored enemy cannot be upset too much, otherwise his attempt to sabotage us would hinder the whole operation.”
The way the Foreign Office came to terms with these difficulties was to disseminate information and, in some cases, even copies of consular reports to a select number of institutions. At the same time, it strove to prevent any uncontrolled leaks. This was not an attempt to silence the famine but to manage the flow of information arriving in Germany through the Foreign Office’s restricted channels and to oversee as much as possible its further spread in German society. Thus, for example, the Foreign Office passed consular reports to Bruder in Not, to be used in the fundraising campaign, but in order to conceal their source, they were attributed to a generic “reliable informant.” The same strategy helps explain why the Foreign Office provided organizational and financial support to the committee. Coordinating the operation in support of Germans abroad through the committee was a means of exerting tight control over the campaign and curbing independent initiatives.
It is difficult to pinpoint when exactly the “Russia experts” at Wilhelmstrasse lost faith in the possibility of preserving the special relations with the USSR or even joined the anti-Soviet course. The German-Polish Declaration of Non-Aggression of 26 January 1934 was a watershed moment, as it sealed the end of the Rapallo era. However, even after this turning point diplomats did not give up on their attempts to uphold good relations with the USSR. Before leaving his post in Moscow, von Dirksen conceded that Rapallo was now “a closed chapter.” Nonetheless, he believed that the Soviet government would strive to reach a “reasonable settlement” of some kind with Germany and that the Reich should accept its offer. In his first memorandum to Berlin, von Dirksen’s successor Rudolf Nadolny, who would remain in his position only from September 1933 to June 1934, called for the Foreign Office to eliminate all sources of friction with the Soviet Union, thus taking “the wind out of Litvinov’s sails” To this end, he advised desisting from public attacks against the Bolshevik system and putting aside the relief operation. “After the last good harvest” he wrote, “Bruder in Not, as a general endeavor and especially as a campaign directed against the Bolshevik mismanagement of the economy, has become absolutely out of place, and it should stop its advertising as soon as possible.” Nadolny dismissed as unrealistic the belief, expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and one that was widespread among Germans, that the Bolshevik system was doomed. In fact, the regime had proved able to tackle all economic crises with great flexibility and had even renounced some of its ideological principles. “For this reason,” he concluded, “the possibility of a collapse of the Soviet government or of a system change in the Soviet Union cannot be counted upon as a factor determining our relationship, and this relationship should not suffer from it.”
The Information Policy of Other Institutions and Individual Initiatives
One institution that might have been expected to undermine the policy of the Foreign Office by exploiting the famine for anti-Bolshevik propaganda was the Reich Ministry for Popular Education and Propaganda (Reichsministerium fur Volksaufklarung und Propaganda), founded in March 1933 and headed by Joseph Goebbels. In his early activity in the ranks of the NSDAP left wing, Goebbels had advocated an alliance with the USSR but then joined in support of Hitler’s line of eastward expansionism. Yet, in the electoral campaigns of the early 1930s until 1935, anti-Bolshevism did not feature prominently in Nazi propaganda, as the NSDAP foregrounded its revisionist agenda and the fight against communism within Germany. Anti-Bolshevism was directed against a generic Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy, rather than against the Soviet Union. Only in 1936, with the establishment of the Rome-Berlin Axis and the anti-Comintern, did Goebbels’s ministry become the mouthpiece of anti-Soviet propaganda, especially through the publishing house Nibelungen Verlag, which published several booklets on the USSR, including descriptions of the famine. This explains why during the famine, the ministry, in recognizing the expediency of a compromise with the Foreign Office’s line, accepted that its involvement in the relief operation Bruder in Not remain “not visible” to the public. In financing Bruder in Not and conducting a press and poster campaign on the famine in June and July 1933, Goebbels’s ministry did so “more from the perspective of the struggle against communism in Germany.” At the same time, noninstitutional campaigns denouncing the famine were prohibited, as happened, for example, with the “Protest Meeting against the Starving of Germans in Russia” that was summoned by several organizations in the summer of 1933 at the Berliner Lustgarten.
German churches, in particular the Evangelical Church of Germany, gathered a considerable amount of information on the famine, first and foremost because ethnic Germans had close ties with German evangelical churches. In 1932 Benjamin Unruh, a prominent figure in Mennonite refugee organizations, received more than a thousand letters from Mennonites living in the USSR, reading which, he said, “makes one’s hair stand on end.” Both the Evangelical and the Roman Catholic churches took part in different relief operations. However, the hierarchies of these churches had strong reservations about becoming involved in an operation that might easily slip into a political battle. Significantly, the Holy See refused to give overt support to a relief campaign because it feared that this might unleash persecutions against Catholics in the Soviet Union. In addition, the Vatican did not want relief to reach Catholics and non-Catholics indiscriminately. Thus, Pius XI issued instructions for the Catholic Church to limit itself to denouncing the famine in articles published in L’Osservatore Romano and to supporting local initiatives, such as the international and interconfessional aid operation launched by Cardinal Theodor Innitzer in 1933. Similar concerns made representatives of the Evangelical Church look with suspicion at involvement with organizations with an openly political character.
Particularly active in denouncing the famine of 1931-1933 was Ewald Ammende, a Baltic German from Livland, who became General Secretary of the European Congress of Nationalities in 1925. Although Ammende never openly supported National Socialism, historians have determined that his activity as a promoter of the European Congress of Nationalities and the famine campaign was linked to the policies and interests of the National Socialist government. The Reich Ministry for National Education and Propaganda and the German Foreign Ministry financed many of Ammende’s activities, among them the publication of the book Muss Russland hungern? (Must Russia Starve?). Religious institutions were preoccupied with Ammende’s campaign, which, they clearly realized, was part of a political strategy. As internal reports by representatives of the Evangelical Church rightly argued, while Cardinal Innitzer was “absolutely serious about achieving actual help for the starving people,” Ammende regarded the anti-famine campaign as an instrument for relaunching his own minorities policy, at a time when the European Congress of Nationalities seemed to be falling apart. Ammende’s activity tallied with the interests of the German Foreign Ministry, since it was helping to distract foreign public opinion from the mounting criticism against National Socialist policy by placing the unbearable conditions in the Soviet Union “at center stage of international interest.” At the same time, however, the Foreign Office was concerned about the campaign being conducted by Ammende. For example, in 1934, when he traveled to Great Britain with Fritz Dittloff, former director of Drusag, the German agricultural concession in the North Caucasus, to promote his campaign in that country, the Foreign Office contacted Dittloff beforehand to make sure he avoided media attention.
German Diplomats and the Famine
The wide network of consulates in the Soviet Union enabled German institutions early on to develop a clear awareness of the occurrence of food scarcity. An internal report of June 1932 from Ukraine entitled “Catastrophic Situation in Ukraine” noted that the constant influx of peasants into towns to look for bread was a clear sign of spreading food insecurity. Demonstrating insightful knowledge of Soviet agricultural conditions, the authors of the report suggested that the indiscriminate collection of grain during the last procurement campaign had left the peasants with insufficient quantities of sowing seed. Hence, even if the prescribed sowing area had been tilled, the fields were poorly sown. The prospects for the next crop, the report concluded, “can be regarded as not favorable, and the population looks to the future with great worry.” In September 1932 a report from Kharkiv estimated that, in contrast to the picture offered by official statistics, the harvest was much lower than the already poor ones of the preceding years. The consul attributed the reduced agricultural output to collectivization, which had thrown agriculture into great disarray by, among other things, producing insecurity in the peasants as to land ownership and alienating them from their work.
Descriptions of this kind abound in German diplomatic reports written after the start of collectivization. Most of them reveal a profound grasp of the causal link between the famine and the peasants’ resistance to collectivization, perceived by them as a new form of serfdom (neue Leibeigenschaft). While this is a common feature of the reports, diplomats provided different explanations of the peasants’ attitude. Whereas some pointed to intentional resistance to collectivization, others attributed this attitude to the peasants’ conservative mindset. Stereotypes, such as “the Slavic natural indolence” or the deeply entrenched “individualistic mindset,” were commonly applied to the peasants’ refusal to adapt to Stalin’s modernization campaign. For example, in December 1933 the German consul in Kharkiv attributed the catastrophe caused by collectivization to the fact that the Bolshevik leadership had not taken into consideration the “deeply rooted individualistic ideology” of the Russian peasants. Such stereotypes reveal that to some extent German diplomats shared the perception of many Bolsheviks of the countryside as a place of backwardness and even admired their capacity to modernize the country with such overwhelming speed. The above-mentioned report from Kharkiv emphasized that “the socialization of agriculture may be justifiable not only theoretically but also practically as a necessary replacement of small and unproductive economic units.” However, the consul continued, “the low yield results and the big losses attest that the peasantry in its majority is not yet proceeding along the marked path, but, on the contrary, remains on the side and that the internal transformation needed to achieve better results has not yet been completed.”
Even though a “modernist bias” is common to German reports, they do not display complete aversion to the countryside but, rather, a selective approach that contrasts the ideal of the “good peasant,” as embodied by the German colonist, who is perceptive to modernization, with the huge mass of backward “Slavic” peasants. A typical example of this attitude is a booklet entitled The Agricultural Policy of the Soviet Union, published in 1942 by the German diplomat Otto Brautigam. The author, who at the time of the famine was in charge of the Russian Economy Section of the Foreign Office, argued that forced collectivization was the Bolsheviks’ response to a problem faced by most European societies—namely, the need to reduce overpopulation in the countryside. The Bolsheviks’ solution to this problem, in his opinion, had proved wrong. In fact, collectivization had eliminated the “most capable for life” (Lebentuchtigsten) and generated what Brautigam called, in Social-Darwinist terms, “counter-selection” (Gegenauslese); that is, the elimination of the best and the survival of the unworthiest. Though typically not expressed with such clarity, Brautigam’s Social-Darwinist approach is usual in German reports on the famine. A common pattern, indeed, was to regard Bolshevism and German peasants almost as two opposing principles, the latter embodying the ideal of successful modernization. Ernst Kundt of the Foreign Office’s Kulturabteilung wrote in 1939: “Bolshevism has fought against and tried to destroy in the harshest possible way the German peasant, who, from an economic and ideological point of view, was—and had to be—the natural foe of this regime.”
In line with this focus on peasant resistance to collectivization, German diplomats did not see any trade-off between an “intentionalist” and a “structuralist” approach to the explanation of the famine but applied, rather, a combination of these two views. Most reports stressed that, while the Soviet government had not unleashed the famine on purpose, it had used it as a means to break down the peasants’ resistance. In a report of 1935 the German ambassador in Moscow, looking back at the transformation of agriculture in previous years, concluded that taxation imposed on independent peasants along with violence to force them to submit to collectivization, and the famine of 1932-1933, which was exploited in order to induce the peasants to comply with Soviet policy, had turned them into a “docile instrument” of the regime. In some instances, analysis of the relationship between intention and structure in the reports reveals a striking resemblance to contemporary approaches to famines, such as the “new famine theory,” which focuses firmly on political agency as key to explaining famine causations and on failures to prevent or react to food insecurity. Reports from Ukraine placed particular emphasis on this aspect. Most of them, for example, suggested that, far from having been unleashed deliberately, the famine was instrumentalized by the Soviet government as a way to force the peasants to bring in the harvest of 1933, which risked being damaged by the lack of manpower caused by high mortality. As this could set off a vicious cycle between workforce reduction, the collapse of agriculture, and famine, the Soviet authorities had resorted to a policy of selective food distribution to persuade the peasants to work. A report from Odesa dated December 1933 argued that “collaboration between the state authorities and the party has managed, through brutal pressure and complete control, to force the people weakened and decimated by hunger to conduct their field work in an orderly fashion until the harvest. Those who did not come to work in the fields remained without even the scanty food ration provided in exchange, and the people trudged to the fields to die of exhaustion there. But the work in the field was done and, thanks to good summer weather, a record harvest was achieved [auf dem Halm].”
Most reports commented widely on the relationship between the famine and the shift in Soviet policy, noting that the regime had “nationalized” the explanation of the famine, to use Terry Martin’s expression, by casting blame for the crisis on separatist tendencies in Ukraine. Yet, most diplomats emphasized that nationalist feelings in Ukraine were, rather, a by-product of the famine and resulting discontent with the Soviet regime. Opposing Bolshevism, in their view, was more important than purely nationalist feelings aimed at independence or unification with Western Ukraine, then part of Poland. The German consul in Odesa wrote in December 1933 that
[the fact] that the Ukrainian national movement has indeed made progress is, in my opinion, not to be denied. The primary reason for this is the pauperization of the Ukrainian peasant population, which has proceeded hand in hand with the Five-Year Plan and has reached its apex—if only temporarily—with the hunger winter of 1932-1933. This development, together with the persecution of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, had a freezing impact on those circles in Western Ukraine (Eastern Galicia), the center of Ukrainian national endeavors, which previously saw in Soviet Ukraine the sprout of a Ukrainian national state in contrast to the anti-Ukrainian internal policy of the Polish state. And finally, it cannot be denied that the developments in Germany had raised certain hopes here.
This view is consistent with the idea, common to many memoranda, that Ukrainian national consciousness was still in an embryonic state. The above-mentioned report from Odesa noted that “Ukrainian national consciousness in Russian Ukraine is still poorly developed, and the number of its bearers is still small. Ukraine, not considering Eastern Galicia, finds itself approximately where the Slovenes or the Slovaks were one generation ago.”
Several reasons account for such a disparaging view. First, it was widely believed that Moscow’s grip on the republics through party structures precluded the development of any separatist movement. Ambassador von Dirksen expressed this view in a letter to Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann as early as 1929, arguing that even in the case of a major economic crisis one should not expect from the Ukrainians any attempt to achieve independence. Another reason is the prevalence of a “master nation” bias, which saw in the Ukrainian national peasant identity a second-class nationalism, as opposed to what they perceived as a higher degree of national consciousness among Germans, particularly ethnic Germans.
The reports stressed that the repression of nationalism was the Soviet authorities’ response to the crisis. Pointing to “Ukrainian national opportunism” as a dreaded enemy, wrote the German consul in Kyiv, was instrumental in increasing Moscow’s grip on this country, an “intimidating and warning maneuver … directed against those numerous unreliable elements in the party and the administration, who no longer put their will and energy into defending party principles decisively against the growing anti-Soviet mood.” “The nationalities issue,” a report from Kharkiv emphasized, “is only of secondary importance for the party. The party sees only the goal of strengthening its power and, thus, of establishing its position as the link connecting different republics and peoples.”
Otto Schiller and the Famine
Particularly insightful about the agricultural crisis of 1932-1933 are the memoranda written by Otto Schiller, the agricultural attache of the German Embassy in Moscow. Schiller had long-standing experience with Soviet affairs and maintained close contact with the network of cultural associations known as Ostforschung. He sent a constant stream of data to Berlin on the development of Soviet agriculture, which he collected during long trips made in his own car. This mode of transport allowed him to circumvent Soviet controls and interview peasants directly, gaining firsthand information that was not available in the press. As mentioned earlier, his trips led to several clashes with the Soviet authorities, until he left the country in 1936.
Schiller’s memos stand out for their impassioned and analytical attitude toward the famine, his major interest being to explain the Soviet experiment of industrialization and its capacity to endure the tremendous disruption it had created. A memorandum on “Crop Prospects in Ukraine,” drafted in July 1933 after his 4,200-kilometer-long trip from Moscow across Ukraine, examined whether and to what extent the famine had undermined the industrialization process by damaging the agricultural sector. Schiller estimated that the population loss resulting from the famine in the whole of Ukraine was between 10 and 20 percent, peaking to 30 percent in some areas. He considered this rate relatively low, if compared with the 30 to 40 percent death toll he had calculated for the North Caucasus in a previous study. In his opinion, Ukraine’s death toll was not such as to endanger agricultural production because of a shortage of manpower. In fact, in contrast to the North Caucasus, Ukraine displayed high levels of overpopulation in the countryside. If, nevertheless, the lack of manpower had made itself felt in some regions of Ukraine, this was due to the uneven distribution of starvation rates in the country and the fact that those who had survived the famine were too weakened by hunger to work. In a letter to his colleague, Klaus Mehnert, Schiller was even more explicit on this point. In his opinion, though “gruesome,” the famine was not only not disruptive to Soviet agriculture but even beneficial for the economy as a whole because it helped eliminate overpopulation in the countryside, which stood in the way of industrialization.
Besides comparing the intensity of starvation in different areas, Schiller suggested possible explanations for such variations. In his view, a major reason was differing cultural and economic development seen in these areas prior to the famine, which in many cases could be explained by the history of the settlements in these regions. In a report on the Volga Republic, he attributed the fact that the Germans of this region were starving in much greater numbers than German peasants in Ukraine not only to the relatively poor quality of the soil in the former area, where, in contrast to Ukraine, the steppe (kastanienbrauner Steppenboden) prevailed. Another decisive reason was that the Volga colonies were much older and therefore had remained on the “relatively low cultural level” that they possessed at the time of their settlement, which had resulted in their inadequate economic development. Moreover, prior to collectivization the region had many independent peasants, which meant that dekulakization had hit a larger number of peasants than in other areas. Similar variations could be observed within the same region. Schiller pointed out that in Ukraine ethnic Germans had been less affected by the famine than Russian and Ukrainian peasants. In his opinion, this was because the former were relatively wealthy in comparison to the latter, as they had accumulated a large amount of capital stock. When the famine began, selling off this capital had allowed the Germans to endure hardship better.
A major factor of local variations in famine mortality was the policy pursued by the Soviet authorities. In a report dated September 1933 Schiller argued:
The arbitrary way the grain procurement campaign has been handled, especially in recent years, had a much stronger impact on the food supply of the countryside than the loss of the harvest itself. This was especially clear this year, as regions that in the previous year had had a satisfactory harvest were most severely hit by the famine. The procurement praxis of the last years amounted to squeezing out of the village with the harshest means all grain surpluses that it was possible to lay one’s hands on.
Schiller suggested that one of the factors influencing the onset of starvation was what he termed a “political use of the famine”—that is, the intentional denial of food in order to break down resistance. It was significant, in his opinion, that the regions that had suffered more were those whose population had a stronger anti-Soviet attitude, such as the Cossack areas of the North Caucasus. In a report on food conditions in the Soviet Union in 1934 he clearly distinguished between food scarcity and starvation, the former deriving from a decrease in agricultural output, while the latter was a political response of the Soviet authorities to the crisis. In Schiller’s view, the Soviet government had not unleashed the famine deliberately but, rather, had exploited it once it began in 102 103 104 102 103 104 order to put down peasant resistance, which, in its view, was responsible for the poor harvest.
Like most German observers, Schiller was more concerned about ethnic Germans and German citizens living in the Soviet Union than about all the other victims of the famine, and more apprehensive about the Germans as a cultural group than the survival of people per se. In a 1934 report analyzing the decrease in the number of ethnic Germans as a consequence of collectivization and famine, he explicitly equated migration of German peasants to towns, driven food scarcity, and dekulakization with direct starvation as a result of the famine. In his view, once they moved to urban areas, Germans soon underwent a process of “Russification” and were therefore lost to the German nation.
The losses caused to German culture [Deutschtum] in the Soviet Union by the developments of the last years can be better estimated by looking at the population decrease in the German settlements than at the total number of the German population in the Soviet Union. The reason for this is that the Germans who emigrate from their villages of origin must be regarded as more or less lost to the German culture. With no connection with a German-speaking environment, German schools, etc., the dispersed Germans succumb very soon to Russification. As the example of the Germans who emigrated from the Volga German villages to Saratov before the war proves, Russian German settlers transplanted to cities are a much more unstable element from the point of view of nationality than the long-established German inhabitants of cities like, for example, Moscow and Petersburg. They are usually Russified after two generations.
Conclusion
With the possible exception of Poland, Germany was the country that was best informed on the details of the famines occurring in the USSR in 1932-1933, its diplomatic corps having access to an enormous amount of information. Analysis of the information policy reveals that the Foreign Office tried to maintain a monopoly on the dissemination of information but, at the same time, it could not truly establish a firm grip on it because the Germans were able to resort to several noninstitutional channels of information. It also shows that the German perception of the famine was accurate in recognizing its deep economic and social causes. Enjoying a privileged point of observation, the Germans developed a sophisticated understanding of the famine as caused by both structural factors and intentional decisions. At the same time, cultural patterns and stereotyping about the Slavic character of the Soviet peasants consistently shaped the way they made sense of that tragedy.
The cultural patterns that shaped diplomats’ perception of the famine reinforced their political considerations, leading them to stem the anti-famine campaign in 1932-1933. Starvation was considered a byproduct of the inevitable path to industrialization and, to some extent, a necessary consequence of Slavic backwardness. Deeply concerned about the fate of ethnic Germans, regarded as bridgeheads of modernity and Europeanness in an “Asian” world, most diplomats subscribed to the idea that different standards applied to the Slavic majority. Stereotyping of the “Russian world” was critical to their perception of the famine, as revealed, for example, in a report from Odesa in which the consul Paul Roth states that “the Russian still remains a man without particular needs [bedurfnislos] and patient but, if left to himself, he is unrestrained, clever but not reliable, and inert—all in all, very suitable material for a dictatorship.” Such ideas formed the basis for the diplomats’ view that no popular opposition would ever be able to undermine Bolshevik rule. Mirroring the opinion of many of his colleagues, Roth wrote in 1933 that “among the fully amorphous population a point of crystallization of resistance cannot form, as the system is strongly and excellently organized. A push for whichever change might rather come from a center of force, be it from the outside or from a power group within the system itself, such as, for example, the Red Army.”
Finally, it is clear from most reports that German diplomats were mainly concerned not about the survival of ethnic Germans as human beings but, rather, the safeguarding of German culture in what was widely regarded as German Lebensraum. The diplomats’ concern for their conationals was motivated by what can be termed a “moral economy” deeply enmeshed in concepts of race and imperial fantasies. It is no surprise, then, that Bruder in Not, though it remained nonpolitical at the behest of the Foreign Office, was joined by National Socialist organizations and supported by the government. Besides being an anticommunist endeavor, this operation pivoted on ethno-racial categories, for it aimed to keep alive an outpost of German civilization in the East, an attitude clearly expressed in its name: Relief Organization for Destitute National Comrades Abroad (Hilfswerk fur notleidende Volksgenossen im Auslande). During a meeting of the Bruder in Not committee, Benjamin Unruh summarized the spirit of its activity in a short but meaningful sentence: “Kein Deutscher darf verhungern” (We cannot allow any German to starve). Thus, far from being a source of conflict with the new National Socialist leaders, the operation and the handling of the information policy on the famine ensured a high degree of convergence and continuity with the policies of the Weimar Republic toward Germans abroad.