“There is a tendency to think of the Second World War, especially on the Eastern Front, largely in terms of black and white. Although colour film was available, it was expensive and often restricted. Colour ‘combat’ film footage was shot on the Western Front and the Pacific, most of it by American cameramen. In Germany, Agfa pioneered the use of colour in the 1930s, which was adapted into negative print and slide film, with the first German colour feature movie made in 1940.

This was in response to the development of Kodachrome and Technicolor in America, where Hollywood was just beginning to embrace colour. During the 1930s photography caught on in Germany in a big way. The country became an international centre of excellence for the manufacture of not only cameras and film, but also lenses. Agfa’s marketing was very seductive, especially when it came to urging Germans to take holiday snaps. Lens-makers such as Carl Zeiss based in Jena took a similar approach with their advertising. In 1941 the company proclaimed in the pages of Signal:

Snapshots of everyday experiences are lasting memories. But the rapidly changing scenes of everyday life bring with them opportunities for the photographer in which a good camera and the best lenses are necessary. - A reliable aid in obtaining better photographs is the ZEISS LENS, the eagle eye of your camera.

Joseph Goebbels, head of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, immediately saw the value of Agfacolor to both the German film industry and Nazi propaganda. Initially, the Nazis did not make much use of colour photography, as much of their propaganda was illustrated by artwork designed to deliver very simplistic messages. Goebbels, though, understood the power of the moving image and stills photography to sway public opinion. Indeed, it was this that had helped the Nazis come to power.”

…

From the introduction to Life and Death on the Eastern Front. Most of the images contained in this volume are not from the Wehrmacht archives used in magazines like Signal but from private collections. Thousands of German soldiers took colour images of the campaign in Russia and sent them home to be developed. Many of those collections survive to this day, even if the majority of German soldiers on the Eastern Front did not survive the war.

The following images and the original captions represent the range of material presented here:

©Anthony Tucker-Jones & Pixpast 2022, ‘Life and Death on the Eastern Front. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.

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In August 1941, Agnes Humbert was in a French prison after she and her colleagues had been caught circulating anti-German literature. The Germans cracked down on even the smallest acts of resistance. The brutality of the occupation in France had not yet reached the barbarity that was immediately

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Lodz, the second largest city in Poland, had a Jewish population of around 200,000 at the outbreak of war. This was one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. After the Germans occupied Poland the Nazis moved quickly to force all the Jews in the main cities into ghettos.

These were in effect open prisons, fenced off from the rest of the world. The areas designated for the Jews were massively overcrowded - typically whole families would share one room. The food allowed into the ghettos was deliberately set at starvation levels. Images taken by a German photographer show the consequences in the larger ghetto in Warsaw.

Survival became a desperate matter. The smuggling of food and medicine was organised at many levels. Organised crime worked through corrupt German and Polish officials to bring in supplies, whilst at an individual level many children were engaged in the risky business of creeping outside the ghetto.

There are many accounts of life and death in the ghetto contained in The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941-19441. They often make grim reading. This was a collective diary by a number of scholars to record the conditions in the ghetto as fully as possible. It was clearly written as a matter of record for the future.

There is one account from the 1st August 1941 which suggests that the Nazis did not always have the upper hand:

The Smuggler Zawadzki who recently escaped from Hospital No 1, where he had been under guard by the Order Service, was apprehended in the city and placed under arrest.

When interrogated, he stated that he had executed his escape with the aid of a Jew and had paid a policeman 500 marks for his help. The Order Service man who had been on duty in the hospital was summoned to Kripo (German criminal police), and in spite of his passionate assurances that he was innocent, was only released two days later. He is now receiving medical attention.

Zawadzki, a fourteen-year-old boy, was the major smuggler both into and out of the ghetto. He supplied saccharine, vaccines, medicines, etc, and earned colossal sums of money.

His escape was executed in a highly ingenious manner: Zawadzki stated that he wanted to go to the bathroom, where the stalls were set up so that the user's feet were visible. When, after a rather long time, the patient had not come out and did not respond to knocks, the door was forced open. To their astonishment it was discovered that Zawadzki had left his shoes to deceive the guard while he escaped through a window.

In North Africa the stalemate persisted. Both the British and the Germans were looking to build up their forces in order to bring on a decisive engagement. In the middle stood the besieged port of Tobruk, stubbornly holding out against constant attacks from the Luftwaffe…

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The very highest levels of the High Command were struggling to come to terms with the Fuhrer’s sudden revision of strategy. For the troops in the field it was even more bewildering.

Army Group Centre, the strongest of Hitler’s three Army Groups, had been making good progress during Operation Barbarossa. The past two weeks had seen it successfully overcome the strongest Russian defences they had yet encountered - and huge numbers of prisoners had been taken in the Battle of Smolensk. It was now set to resume its march directly towards Moscow.

Dr Heinrich Haape1 was a doctor with the 6th Infantry Division, part of Army Group Centre.

Two days before, Haape and his colleagues had calculated that they had covered 600 miles in the past 5 weeks. They were now 180 miles from Moscow. They were three-quarters of the way and probably had two weeks further marching to reach the Soviet capital.

Then inexplicably they were ordered to halt.

For five weeks the daily order had been “March! March! March! Stick to it! We must follow the fleeing enemy and destroy him wherever he stops. He must not have time to regain his breath. The faster we advance, the faster he will have to run. Moscow is just beyond the horizon. Full speed ahead to Moscow!”

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Kurt Meyer was quite literally a poster boy for the Nazis. This image (above) of him in Greece in the spring of 1941 appeared on the cover of Illustrierter Beobachter, published by the Nazi Party, and became a popular image of the Waffen SS.

On the 28th- 29th of July in the south of Russia, Meyer1 was eng…

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The original plan for Barbarossa had called for a massive central thrust into Russia that…

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This sequence of images may be too large for some email providers but can also be viewed on the website.

As the German Army moved further east in Soviet Russia they were followed by the SS Einsatzgruppen. These ‘special groups’ were responsible for leading the ‘holocaust by bullets’. In the more rural areas they were going from village to village shooting all the known Jews they could find. Surviving reports and diaries are very clear about what was happening.

In larger towns and cities the Jews were evicted from their homes and forced into crowded ghettos, where they were slowly starved. Some were used as forced labour - but it was only a temporary reprieve.

On the 26th July 1941 the Germans captured the city of Mogilev, a district capital in what is now Belarus. About 50% of the inhabitants were Jewish, part of an ancient community that dated back to the 14th century. In these areas it was possible for some Jews to escape east before the advancing Wehrmacht reached them - perhaps 40% moved out of Mogilev in time.

There were still around 12,000 Jews left in Mogilev.

A Wehrmacht propaganda company photographer, Rudolf Kessler, was on hand to take a series of photographs of the treatment of the Jews immediately after the occupation of the city. There are only the most basic descriptive captions to accompany these.

At this stage the Nazi regime was proud of its treatment of the Jews - except that they were not taking propaganda pictures of the mass murders. The pictures taken here would have been intended to present a slightly more benign interpretation of how the Jews were being treated.

Later in the day people are evicted from their homes. These barefoot peasants were the 'enemies of the Reich'.

The whole process is depicted as being conducted in an orderly manner with no violence. As such, these images cannot be taken as typical of how events like this were usually carried out.

These pictures show that the Jews being evicted from their homes, but other accounts suggest that they were not forced into a Labour Camp until ‘the end of summer’. The ‘Labour Camp’ was itself just a temporary stay of execution.

Ultimately, the fate of the Jews of Mogilev was no different from hundreds of thousands of others in the region.

The Zwangsarbeitslager [Forced Labour Camp] in Mogilev was created shortly after the German occupation at the end of summer. The Jewish artisans from Mogilev and nearby areas were detained in this camp along with some Russian partisans. They slept inside the former Dimitrov factory. The camp was surrounded with double barbed wire and four guard posts.

The auxiliary Ukrainian police conducted the shooting of women and children in a very cruel manner. Under the influence of alcohol, they fired at the victims without aiming.

The Jewish inmates were separated from thr Russians. The Jews had distinguishing armbands. Several workshops, including a sewing workshop with thirty sewing machines, tannery, carpentry, and goldsmithery, were set in a big room. The primitive sleeping area was located on the ground floor, over the workshops.

The chief of each workshop guarded his companions in misery. They were called Kapos and were subordinate to the Lagerführer. They had to beat and denounce the other inmates. During the shooting, they were shot the last.

The auxiliary Ukrainian police conducted the shooting of women and children in a very cruel manner. Under the influence of alcohol, they fired at the victims without aiming. At least 2,000 Jews were shot during this extermination Aktion.1

On 20th November 1944, Hitler left his ‘Wolf’s Lair’ for the last time. He had spent over 800 days directing the war from the remote Field HQ in East Prussia. This was the scene of the early exhilaration over the dramatic advances into Russia during Operation Barbarossa - through to all the subsequent reverses. When he left, the sound of Red Army guns in the distance was unmistakable.

Hitler moved here in June 1941 and brought a small army of security and support staff. Hitler’s Wolfsschanze: The Wolf’s Lair Headquarters on the Eastern Front - An Illustrated Guide lavishly illustrates the location and provides a history of the events that took place there over those 800 days. The book provides detailed background on the functions of the various buildings on the site and illustrates it with many images of the site as it is today. It will be an invaluable guide to anyone planning a visit.

Alongside this is a more general history of what life was like for those living and working in the compound. The remote, damp, mosquito-infested compound was by all accounts not a very pleasant place to be. John Grehan draws on a wide range of sources to complete the picture - from the many important visitors who left a record of their time here, through to accounts from his secretaries and even from the food tasters who checked Hitler’s food before it was passed to him. There are many contemporary images of Hitler on the site, mostly of him greeting visitors. There is also a chapter on the July 1944 assassination attempt.

A very useful insight into how Hitler lived for much of the war with some fascinating details. The following excerpt concerns the camp cinema:

Also facing this compound was the cinema, or kino (Building H). This played a vital role in the social life of the Wolfsschanze. For many, used to the vibrant nightlife of Berlin, the 'horrid ... dirty green, gloomy, airless forest encampment ... permanently swathed in fog', as one resident described it, was excruciatingly dull, and apart from drinking and conversation there was little else to keep the residents entertained other than the cinema.

Films were shown at 20.15 and 22.15 hours every night, although the senior man in Dining Room I determined the exact timings. Every Friday at 17.00 newsreels were shown, among which were Pathe news scenes from the bombing of London. As the cinema was a wooden building, smoking was not permitted.

As time progressed, the residents, having watched every available current film, were reduced to watching old silent movies. Hitler encouraged visitors to use the cinema, but he did not attend himself, preferring to watch films in his own quarters, and he saw all the German newsreels - the Deutsche Wochenschau - before they were allowed to be shown in the cinema, which he carefully censored.

These were silent films and, according to one of Hitler's valets, Karl Wilhelm Krause, one of the adjutants would read out loud the accompanying text with Hitler checking that the words fitted the film footage. Often, he dictated what he thought needed to be corrected.

From the winter of 1942 onwards, Hitler stopped watching the newsreels.

There was, though, one special evening in the cinema that Hitler attended. This was when Generalmajor Walter Domberger, head of the Army Weapons Department, was invited on 7 July 1943 to give a presentation on the A4 rocket, which later became the feared V2 that so terrorised London the following year.

Domberger wrote of that memorable day as his aircraft flew beyond the River Vistula and as the skies cleared, 'below us, as far as the eye could see, stretched the dark forests of East Prussia, plentifully adorned with glittering lakes and occasionally flower-decked meadows'.

The viewing took place a little after 17.00 hours. Hitler entered the room escorted by Keitel and Alfred Jodl (who described the Wolfsschanze as 'a cross between a monastery and a concentration camp'). Domberger was shocked at the deterioration in the Fuhrer's appearance since he had last seen him, four years earlier:

A voluminous black cape covered his bowed, hunched shoulders and bent back. He looked a tired man. Only the eyes retained their life. They stared from a face grown unhealthily pallid from living in huts and shelters and seemed to be all pupils.

With a commentary by a soon-to-be-professor Wernher von Braun, Hitler was shown astonishing film footage of the V2 rocket for the first time soaring majestically not just into the sky, but into space. The film ended, and von Braun finished his commentary. 'No one dare utter a word,' continued Domberger. 'Hitler was visibly moved and agitated. Lost in thought, he lay back in his chair, staring gloomily in front of him ... At last... Hitler walked rapidly over to me and shook my hand ... If we had had these rockets in 1939,' said the Fuhrer, 'we should never have had this war.'

Another film that Hitler allegedly watched (though probably in the confines of his own quarters) was the execution of eight of the senior figures involved in the 20 July 1944 assassination attempt. The film was shot in Plotzensee prison, Berlin, where the condemned men were stripped to the  waist and hanged by nooses of piano wire attached to meat hooks suspended from the ceiling of the small prison room. The barbaric scene was played on 18 August at the Wolfsschanze. According to Albert Speer, 'Hitler loved the film and had it shown over and over again.'

Dr Dietmar Pertsch recalled being in the cinema two days after Hitler's fifty-third birthday on 20 April 1942, when the weekly propaganda film, the main part of which was dedicated to the war in the East, was shown.

This included three shots of Hitler's birthday celebrations.The first of these was a celebration of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) on the eve of the birthday, which showed the 'national unity' with high party officials alongside wounded soldiers and war widows listening to the closing chorus from Beethoven's 9th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler.

The middle section was a 'typical' Nazi weekly show with a lot of blaring trumpets and ordinary Germans meeting senior Reich figures, plus a group of children from Rastenburg singing gentle songs superimposed with an image of Hitler. The martial music returned, followed by lots of smiling faces and a happy-looking Fuhrer.

The entire production had been carefully crafted by Goebbels as 'patron of the German film' and bore no relationship to the dreadful struggles of the German army battling deep inside Russia. Yet, as Dr Pertsch asked himself: 'Did we see through the dramatic concept? No! We were proud of ourselves to have been there in the Wolfsschanze and seen the Fuhrer.

© John Grehan 2021, Hitler’s Wolfsschanze: The Wolf’s Lair Headquarters on the Eastern Front – An Illustrated Guide. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.

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Staggering Red Army losses

24th July 1941: The Germans are shocked by crude Soviet tactics that send line after line of infantry into frontal assaults that are soon mown down

… the whole mass of Russian troops came trampling stolidly and relentlessly forward.

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On 19th July, Hitler had issued his Fuhrer Directive No. 33. This was an entirely new conception of Operation Barbarossa's objectives. Moscow would no longer be the primary objective, and substantial forces, especially panzers, would be diverted from Army Group Centre to its n…

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If Hitler thought that the Barbarossa campaign was as good as won, and the whole war nearly over, his soldiers in the East were beginning to see things differently. The Red Army remained very much ‘in being’ and was capable of fielding hundreds of thousands of men.

The first response of the Soviet High Command had been to deny reality, to prevent their front-line troops from responding to the opening German attacks. The next response was to issue fantasy orders to retake ground that had long been overrun by the Germans, even to order them to advance into territory held by the Germans prior to 22nd June.

Gradually, the reality on the ground began to filter back to Moscow. There were plenty of reserves who could be brought into battle. As it became clear that the central thrust of the German assault was headed toward Moscow, major battles began to unfold. The area around Smolensk was a key location to block the advance.

The Red Army tactics were very crude, so poor that the Germans were shocked. But there was one underlying reality. The Soviets had hundreds of thousands of men, millions. And they kept coming forward1:

I can never forget the first mass atack by Russian infantry ... I could not believe that in the Second World War the tactics of the First Great War could still be used by any one of the major combatants.

The whole assault was so ineptly handled that I found it difficult to believe that it was being carried out by a professional army. That incompetence reinforced the belief held at the time by many German officers, that the Red Army was being handled no differently to the Tsarist army. It was the same old steam-roller.

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HMS Eridge was part of a convoy taking urgently needed supplies from the British base at Gibraltar to the island of Malta. Commanding the destroyer was Frank Gregory-Smith, who was later to write a vivid memoir of life during the Mediterranean war:

Now that the moment of decision was at hand many men, who ha…

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The US Special Envoy, Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s personal …

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Hitler had ordered that both Moscow and Leningrad be razed to the ground by bombers - so that the Germans would not be feeding their populations over the winter. He was obviously confident that they would be occupying both cities fairly soon - ‘tanks should not be used for this purpose’.

Just under a month after the launch of Barbarossa, Luftwaffe planes came within range of Moscow and were poised to launch heavy raids. Yet once again, the Russians proved capable of confounding Nazi expectations.

The British military report1 gave the Russians somewhat grudging credit:

There was an air raid on Moscow on the 21st July which lasted about six hours and was on a fairly heavy scale. The main objectives were apparently the railway station, industrial areas and aerodromes. Several large fires were caused by enemy aircraft which flew over at a medium height.

The Soviet A.A. defences, of which a large proportion were light anti - aircraft guns, put up what was described as " an impressive show." The searchlights frequently held the attacking aircraft quite well. Incendiary bombs fell on the roof of the British Embassy but the fire was tackled immediately by the Embassy staff, both Russian and English, and by the Moscow fire brigade.

… shrapnel from the anti-aircraft shells clattering down on to the streets like a hailstorm; and dozens of searchlights lighting the sky; I had never seen or heard anything like it in London.

British journalist Alexander Werth2 painted a rather more rounded picture:

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The newly built submarine HMS Umpire was on her way north out of Sheerness for her sea trials. She was proceeding on the surface with an outbound convoy when she was in collision with a trawler coming inbound - an accident partly attributable to the fact that all the ships were in d…

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The Blitz may have been temporarily over for Londoners, but intermittent raids continued around Britain. Hull was …

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In 1941, the British were still evaluating how best they could utilise their putative ‘Special Forces’. A programme of ‘Commando training’ had begun in Britain, but the very first airborne raid behind enemy lines had achieved little. A more substantial force of Commandos, intended as maritime raiders in the Mediterranean, Layforce, had been diverted to the attack on the Vichy French in Syria. But they had suffered heavy casualties and were due to be disbanded.

The vision, determination and enthusiasm for ‘raiding party’ warfare, championed by just a few individuals, now allowed the concept one more chance. Without them, some senior officers would have ended the establishment of ‘Special Forces’ as a costly mistake. It took some high-risk endeavours, successfully completed, to change the outlook of many in the British forces.

One of the very few key individuals making the case was an Australian officer who found himself, as one of the small surviving remnants of Layforce, besieged in the fortress of Tobruk, awaiting transfer to another unit. Jock Lewes, Co-Founder of the SAS, first published in 2000, is based on many letters to his family as well as other contemporary accounts. This excerpt covers a raid conducted on the night of the 17th/18th July 1941:

General Morshead, despite the opposition of the Commanding Officer of the Indian regiment, insisted that the Layforce men had come to Tobruk ‘to do a show’ and ‘he would give us one worth doing’ .

The ‘Twin Pimples’ were two little mounds of rubble which often mark the position of Arab cisterns, in the making of which the stuff was excavated; they stood out clearly on the level plain and covered the whole area with observation. The CO of the Indian Regiment considered that the position that Jock was to raid was not an isolated forward post but part of a continuous line, heavily defended with mutual covering fire and the invariable defensive fire plan from the flanks and rear; it was strongly held and heavily fortified. The objection to the decision was that ‘the raid was a bigger undertaking than we could handle alone and would be more costly than a hit-and-run raid should be’. The Viceroy Commissioned Officer also wanted to have more control of his sector and ‘not have his affairs of honour dispatched for by hired assassins’ .

The General had his way, and Indian guides led. The plan was to attack the left rear where the Italian line fell back a little into a shallow salient, and to withdraw to the left straight across the Italians’ front. Diversionary raids were set to the right a few minutes before zero hour, counterbattery work to ease the process of withdrawal, a mortar platoon and a section of machine guns were pointed on the line to the right of the objective. Jock led with two officers and each man commanded a troop of fifteen. Six Australian Sappers brought ten pounds of gelignite each.

Jock also had plenty of support in the form of Sgts Pat Riley and Jim Almonds, both giants of men and brave as lions. The men wondered what exactly they might find up the ‘Twin Pimples’: ‘Indian patrols had heard a concrete-mixer going there for weeks - the Italians worship concrete, they set their idol and build his temples wherever they go.’ The irony of these symbolic totems of Mussolini’s African Empire didn’t escape Jock, who added, ‘Having made one set of concrete posts to keep us out of Tobruk they are now building another to keep us in. I wonder if they see the joke or even the implication.’

Everything went like clockwork. Jock arrived 200 yards south of the post and heard uproar from the Italian lines; before zero hour he heard ‘laughing and singing, political arguments, a truck being unloaded like a Covent Garden lorry, the concrete mixer and a stiff breeze were all in our favour.’ Dressed in tin hat, shirt, shorts, stocking tops, puttees and rubber-soled boots, he was given the job of silently ‘bumping first’ the outer defensive line on his right as he approached from the rear. Extracts from his Tobruk diary that was sent to MEHQ seem unedited, highlighting both the grotesque and banal in the heat of battle:

A hundred yards to go and up went the diversion, plum to time; the moonless night covered us, but the stars here are always bright enough to show you all you want to see without being seen. We came on faster and crouched lower, still there was talking and laughing in the lines; suddenly the pimple loomed up ahead, a single shot was fired, we were too far to the left but had to go on, I signalled the final rush, and as I reached the foot of the mound, firing into the embrasures with which it was honeycombed, there rose behind me the pitiful wail of the great Italian soldier in extremis.

The head of my troop ‘arrow’ had actually passed through the outer line without seeing it and unnoticed; as the arms swept on they bumped it, and were now busy winkling out the wretched screaming Wop from his sangars and entrenchments with the bayonet, or rolling in grenades when he lay low. The place was like a disturbed ant heap; Italians, for the most part dressed only in trousers, ran grimly for their lives, silent and scuttling, fell screaming when brought down with fire, knelt with raised hands before bayonets, crying pitifully, or just whimpered as they grovelled underfoot.

The top of the pimple we had bumped was chaos. Some of the Italians as they ran threw their absurd grenades at us, they flashed and filled the air with smoke and dust; the shots from our own men were crackling past from behind, and more and more men were climbing up the mound. Men from all troops were there, mad with excitement, shouting obscene profanities at the fallen and departing enemy. Prisoners taken by one man, and left in his eagerness for more, were bayonetted by those folding in from the left and centre. Soon the whole force was dancing a mad war dance on and around the pimple.

To get the troops off the pimple was the only way to restore control. I ordered my troop back. This was taken as the signal for a general withdrawal, the sappers lit their fuses and shouted their prearranged warning to get clear. The withdrawal had begun, the enemy were quick to sense it, and at once before we were clear of the outer lines an LMG opened up and got two men with its first burst. It was very gallantly attacked and silenced, and no more short-range fire troubled us.

By now the troops were properly sorted out, the defensive fire was screaming over. Our plan worked perfectly; the long march southward with two wounded men, one unable to walk, was slow, hazardous and nerve-racking; the noise was terrific, and the coloured fire in the sky most awe-inspiring. The Very lights seemed to go up every five minutes, not at the quarter hours, and we seemed hardly to have moved between its appearances, but at last we reached the safety of our wadi, climbed the other side, which was being mortared relentlessly, swallowed our tea and rum at the cookhouse, and so to our cave and sangar to sleep, while the Italian continued to roar defiance from a distance in the pleasant impersonal manner that he prefers.

Jock reported the two casualties and tended the pair, removing his pullover to warm the cooling body of a man shot in the neck; the soldier was fatally wounded, but the other escaped with a broken arm. The official estimate of the enemy casualties was one hundred, but Jock regarded that as ‘an exaggeration; fifty would be closer’. Most of the guns on the ‘Twin Pimple’ went up with a ‘lovely roar’ . Jock was disappointed that he had been unable to ‘exploit our extraordinary good fortune’ while the objective lay for a while completely at the men’s mercy ‘instead of dancing our war dance on top of the pimple’ - ‘but there it is, that’s how it happened, and I suppose, being inexperienced soldiers, almost without exception, it could hardly be expected to have happened any otherwise.’

The attack took place in the early morning of 18 July, and the following day Jock wrote to his father that he was ‘able to lift up my head in the presence of those who have been in battle and stood the test of action’:

Last night I led an attack which has been universally proclaimed a success, but what pleases me more than praise of those higher up is the fact that the men of my troop are satisfied with me, and in knowing that with the help and strength which I needed on that night I can do much better. But the Italian is no soldier and fighting him is a hateful business, so let’s talk no more of it.

© John Lewes 2000, 2001, 2007 ‘Jock Lewes, Co-Founder of the SAS’. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd.

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In principle we have now to face the task of cutting up the giant cake according to our needs, in order to be able: first, to dominate it; second, to administer it; and third, to exploit it …

On the 20th June 1941, just before the invasion of the USSR, the leading Nazi theorist, Alfred Rosenberg, had made a speech stating that the lands that the Nazis would occupy in the East would be used for ‘feeding the German people’:1

We see absolutely no reason for any obligation on our part to feed also the Russian people with the products of that surplus territory. We know that this is a harsh necessity, bare of any feelings.

That aspiration now became official Nazi policy. Hitler was growing ever more confident that the swift victory over Russia that he had planned was being achieved. The progress of his armies on the map and the great numbers of Soviet casualties and prisoners suggested that he could soon wind down the war in Russia and turn his attention back to the west.

He had already ordered that Moscow and Leningrad be bombed into rubble - so that the Germans would not have to feed their residents over the winter.

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