The CODOH Revisionist Forum

“Before we starve,” Goebbels had noted in May after a meeting with Backe and Himmler, “a series of other peoples will be first, and indeed those whose governments forced us into this war.” This principle was rigorously applied. “If there must be hunger, then first the foreigners will starve,” an army official noted Göring saying on August 6.[279]

Göring’s pronouncement was made at two major meetings involving representatives from all of the occupied territories as well as the Gauleiter in the Reich.[280] The immediate outcome was the raising of agricultural requisitioning quotas everywhere in Eastern Europe, including the Generalgouvernement. The Nazis were quite clear that they could not raise rations for the labouring population in the occupied Soviet territories.[281] Extreme difficulties also accompanied the feeding of the armaments workforce in the Generalgouvernement.[282] Thus when Göring’s quotas arrived in August 1942, they led the civil administration of the Generalgouvernement to decide to exclude all but labouring Jews from the meagre ration scales. As Hans Frank declared on August 24:[283]

"The feeding of a Jewish population component, estimated heretofore at 1.6 million, drops off to an estimated total of 300,000 Jews, who still work for German interests as craftsmen or otherwise. For these the Jewish rations, including certain special allotments which have proved necessary for the maintenance of working capacity, will be retained. The other Jews, a total of 1.2 million, will no longer be provided with foodstuffs."

Confirmation of this decision can be found in the revealing reports of a representative of the Party Chancellery attached to a manpower comb-out commission that was touring the Generalgouvernement at this time. “It is planned from 1 January to give the Jews no more food at all and to reduce the rations for Poles considerably, and no longer to allot any increases for armaments workers.”