Stalin and Europe: Imitation and Domination, 1928-1953 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

7

German Economic Plans for the Occupied Soviet Union and Their Implementation, 1941–1944

Alex J. Kay

Adolf Hitler had longed for a war against the Soviet Union and the destruction of Bolshevism since the mid-1920s, a time when his party was still a fringe movement in German politics. Given the ideological chasm that separated Nazism and Bolshevism, the signing of the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939 came as a real shock to National Socialists and Soviet Communists alike. This pact, however, was nothing more than a product of cynical political expediency. Both Hitler and his Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin, were playing for time; neither wanted a war with the other in 1939.

A comprehensive trade treaty signed on 11 February 1940 established that each side would deliver to the other goods worth 640–660 million Reichsmark over the next two years. In a supplementary agreement signed on 10 January 1941, the Soviets promised the delivery of 2.5 million tons of grain. According to the Soviets, it would be possible to deliver such an amount only “by falling back on national grain reserves.”1 In a telegram to the German Foreign Office, Karl Schnurre, the head of the German delegation to the negotiations that resulted in the supplementary agreement, described what Germany had obtained as “the maximum” that could have been provided by the Soviet economy, after making allowances for the Soviets’ own needs.2 In the sixteen months of the trade agreement, Germany received 1.4 million tons of grain, 1 million tons of timber, large quantities of scarce metals, and 212,000 tons of supplies from Japan sent via the Trans-Siberian railway.3

In spite of the considerable increase in the flow of goods between the two countries, the agricultural deliveries from the Soviet Union did not entirely cover German shortages, while the Soviet Union demanded in return industrial and military goods that were crucial for a country at war, such as Germany. Furthermore—and this was a fundamental factor from Hitler’s point of view—the growing German dependence on deliveries from the Soviet Union, which could theoretically be stopped at any moment, was highly undesirable.4 The longer the war in the west lasted, and with it the British blockade, and the weaker Germany’s strategic position became through increased U.S. support for Britain, the greater Germany’s precarious economic (and political) dependence on the Soviet Union would become.

The difficulties involved in feeding and supplying the people of German-occupied Europe aroused fears among the German political elite of a negative impact on the public mood within the Reich. For these reasons, Berlin was willing to contemplate the loss of vital Soviet deliveries of raw materials and foodstuffs by violating the nonaggression pact and launching an invasion. Memories of the First World War, more specifically what the Nazis saw as the decisive effect of the British naval blockade on the supply of food to the German home front and consequently on the population’s morale, resolve, and faith in victory, were particularly influential in shaping the German leadership’s mentality and formulating its policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.

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