Life for civilians in German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union during World War II was characterized by extreme hardship, brutality, and systematic exploitation. The German occupation was fundamentally different from occupations in Western Europe, as Nazi ideology viewed Slavic peoples as racially inferior and targeted them for exploitation, enslavement, and in many cases, extermination.

The Hunger Plan and Deliberate Starvation

One of the most devastating aspects of German occupation was the deliberate policy of mass starvation. The Nazis developed what became known as the “Hunger Plan” (der Hungerplan or der Backe-Plan), which was designed to seize food from Soviet territories to feed German soldiers and civilians while deliberately starving the local population.

The German Army invading the Soviet Union was instructed to live off the land and was “forbidden on pain of death to give a Russian even a piece of bread.” This policy particularly targeted urban populations in non-agricultural areas, who were deliberately cut off from food supplies.

The consequences were catastrophic. The Hunger Plan caused the deaths of millions of Soviet citizens. Historian Timothy Snyder estimates that “4.2 million Soviet citizens (largely Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians) were starved by the German occupiers in 1941–1944.”

Racial Hierarchies and Food Rationing

Nazi occupation policies established strict racial hierarchies in food distribution. The genocide effected by the Nazi regime took the form of allocated daily food rations: 100% for Germans, 70% for Poles, 30% for Greeks, and just 20% for Jews. This system of unequal rations was explicitly designed to cause the death of “undesirable” populations.

In major cities like Kharkov (now Kharkiv), food was provided only to the small number of civilians who worked for the Germans, with the rest of the population designated to slowly starve.

Forced Labor and Deportation

Soviet civilians were subjected to widespread forced labor under German occupation. Of approximately 4 million Soviet citizens repatriated after the war, 2,660,013 were civilians who had been deported for forced labor, while 1,539,475 were former POWs.

Many were sent to Germany as laborers to support the German war economy. The German army and economic authorities worked together to forcibly evacuate hundreds of thousands of civilians who were then used as workers in the German war economy.

Scorched Earth Policies and Destruction

When German forces were eventually forced to retreat from Soviet territories, they implemented devastating scorched earth policies. These retreats were accompanied by immense destruction, demonstrating an attempt to cripple the Soviet Union’s economy for years to come. They were accompanied by the forced evacuations of hundreds of thousands of Soviet civilians from their homes.

The scale of destruction was enormous. Soviet sources claim that the Axis powers destroyed 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages, as well as 65,000 km of railroad tracks. German-occupied Soviet territory encompassed 2,201,489 km².

Atrocities and Mass Killings

Beyond starvation and forced labor, Soviet civilians endured systematic violence and mass killings. Mass shootings and gassing operations, carried out by German paramilitary death squads and collaborators, murdered over a million Soviet Jews as part of the Holocaust.

According to Paul Robert Magocsi, between 1941 and 1945, approximately 3,000,000 Ukrainian and other non-Jewish victims were killed as part of Nazi extermination policies in the territory of modern Ukraine.

Common military practices included burning houses suspected of being partisan meeting places and poisoning water wells, which became standard practice for soldiers of the German 9th Army.

Regional Variations and Local Experiences

The experience of occupation varied somewhat across different regions of the occupied Soviet territories. In Ukraine, which was seen as a crucial agricultural resource, the Germans initially attempted to exploit Ukrainian nationalism against Soviet rule, but this policy was abandoned in favor of harsh exploitation.

In Belarus, which saw some of the most brutal anti-partisan operations, entire villages were destroyed and their inhabitants massacred in retaliation for partisan activities.

The Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), which had been annexed by the Soviet Union just before the German invasion, experienced a complex situation where some initially welcomed the Germans as liberators from Soviet rule, but this sentiment quickly changed under the harsh reality of Nazi occupation.

Long-Term Impact

The German occupation left deep scars on Soviet society. The Soviet Union lost around 27 million people during the war, including 8.7 million military and 19 million civilian deaths. A quarter of the people in the Soviet Union were wounded or killed.

After the war, the psychological and physical effects of malnutrition, forced displacement, and trauma continued to affect survivors for decades. Many regions saw dramatic demographic changes, with entire communities wiped out and populations redistributed through evacuation, deportation, and post-war population movements.

The experience of German occupation in the Soviet Union represented one of the most brutal chapters of World War II, characterized by deliberate policies of mass starvation, exploitation, and extermination that reflected the Nazi regime’s ideological view of Eastern Europeans as inferior and their territories as resources to be exploited regardless of human cost.

Resources List

1. “Eastern Front (World War II)” – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
2. “World War II casualties” – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
3. “Military production during World War II” – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_production_during_World_War_II
4. “North African campaign” – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_African_campaign
5. “Casualties of World War II” – History of Western Civilization II – https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldhistory2/chapter/casualties-of-world-war-ii/
6. “The struggle for North Africa, 1940-43” – National Army Museum – https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/struggle-north-africa-1940-43
7. “Eastern Front (World War II)” – Britannica – https://www.britannica.com/event/Eastern-Front-World-War-II
8. “Operation Torch: Invasion of North Africa” – U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command – https://www.history.navy.mil/browse-by-topic/wars-conflicts-and-operations/world-war-ii/1942/operation-torch.html
9. “German-Soviet economic relations (1934-1941)” – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German–Soviet_economic_relations_(1934–1941)
10. “Friends of Necessity: The Effects of the 1939 German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact” – Tucaksegee Valley Historical Review – https://affiliate.wcu.edu/tuckasegeevalleyhistoricalreview/spring-2020/friends-of-necessity-the-effects-of-the-1939-german-soviet-nonaggression-pact/