October 07, 2017 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Herbert Backe and the Hunger Plan
When Moses Schönfinkel died in 1942 in
Moscow, Soviet Union was already under siege from Hitler’s Germany and
Operation Barbarossa was well underway.
Moscow itself came under attack in October
1941, a direct betrayal of the political economic agreement signed between
Germany and Soviet Union a couple of years before.
One of the lesser known facts that was a
part of the Operation Barbarossa and Soviet invasion was the Hunger Plan
devised by the Nazi politician Herbert Backe as early as 1940.
The plan was devised almost soon after as
Hitler announced to his ministers his plan to invade Soviet Union in December
1940.
Hebert Backe along with a group of
dedicated ministers and secretaries of the state were in charge of the
logistics of the Operation Barbarossa.
His greatest and closest aid in planning
and carrying out the Hunger Plan was Hans-Joachim Riecke who was a permanent
secretary to Backe in the German Ministry for Food and Agriculture.
The question that was needed to solve was how
to feed the invading German troops during the entire period of operation that
would occur primarily in the deadly Russian winter and no certainty of its
duration.
The only solution to this problem was to
live off the land that would be occupied by the invading German Army, more
specifically the grain rich area of Western Soviet Union that included Ukraine.
If all the food grains and meat would be
diverted to the invading German troops, then what would follow logically and
sequentially would be mass starvation of the native Slavic population.
It would be an act that would exactly emulate
the proverbial killing two birds with one stone
In fact, in Backe’s estimate, the local
“surplus population” of Russia and Soviet Union had to be got rid of if
continuous and stable food supply had to be maintained for both the German
troops and its population during the war.
He had termed a special word for this so
called “surplus population” of Slavs and Jews of Soviet Union; He called them
“useless eaters”.
The plan would eventually lead to the
starvation of over 4 million citizens of Soviet Union between 1941 and 1944.
In the Siege of Leningrad (that lasted 872
days from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944) alone 1 million died as the
city was completely surrounded and blockaded by the encircled German troops.
It is interesting to know how the end of
Herbert Backe came.
In 1945 after the Germans surrendered in
the early hours of 7th May of that year, Herbert Backe was arrested by
the allied forces, which essentially means that he was a prisoner of war of
American troops and not the Soviet Army.
Remember mon ami, after the level of
brutality that the Nazis had unleashed upon the land of Lenin, they knew that
if apprehended by Stalin and his men, no mercy would be shown to them.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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