German Blood, Slavic Soil by Nicole Eaton;

Author:Nicole Eaton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Struggle over Space and Time

The Red Army had arrived as an army of conquest, but in establishing an occupation, it found itself called on to assume the role of the state. After the first weeks of interrogations, the Red Army’s pressing task was to rebuild the devastated city and countryside. They sought to do so in large part to contain the epidemic contagion, which threatened the lives of the German population and increasingly the lives of the Red Army soldiers and officers themselves. Because Germans constituted virtually the entirety of the population and the primary workforce, the tasks of rebuilding the city and rescuing the Germans from death proved to be inseparable. Success depended on the Soviet occupiers’ ability to assert control as quickly as possible over the collection, production, and distribution of the city’s remaining resources. This process of Sovietization became a battle for the mastery over time and a struggle to assert control over space. Yet the military’s efforts to rebuild and improve living conditions were constrained by the region’s ongoing privation and its geographic and administrative isolation. Practices of Sovietization utterly transformed Königsberg in the first year after the war. But Königsberg started to become Soviet less so in response to the military occupation’s plans, and more so in organic and pragmatic response to constant crisis.

The military government’s greatest struggle was to nationalize the city’s remaining resources. The most valuable and urgently needed of these, by far, was food. Hunger had already plagued the Soviet home front for years: the Soviet Union was the only major combatant to face mass starvation mortality during the war, in large part due both to the loss of agricultural lands to the German occupation and the extreme, long-term mobilization of the home front to produce supplies for the defense.68 When Fortress Königsberg fell on April 9, 1945, the Red Army issued orders immediately to collect the city’s remaining stockpiles and Wehrmacht supplies. By mid-April, it established the first rations for the German and Soviet population of the conquered territory. The Soviet state had developed a complex wartime ration system designed to feed Soviet soldiers and civilians, structured around basic hierarchies of allocation: soldiers at the front were fed better than civilians in the rear, and provisions were based roughly on a labor principle of caloric expenditure.69 The Special Military District adopted a similar practice at the end of the war. The number of calories and types of food varied by group—German POWs, injured soldiers in hospitals, German civilians, and Soviet citizens all had different rations—but the main determinant for the number of calories was based not on being German or Soviet, but according to the difficulty of labor. Construction workers, no matter their nationality, were slated to receive more food than those working less strenuous labor, and certain groups of Soviet citizens and former forced labor repatriates, along with German POWs and civilians working under direct Red Army command, were slated to be fed according to the Third Norm, the military’s standard rations for noncombat troops.

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