The Role of Agriculture and Nutritional Policy in the Post-Arrival Conflicts
Part I
Introductory Summary
Starting in the summer of 1946, the two primary polities that controlled the vast majority of both Arrived land and population exchanged roles regarding what would rapidly become the most important resource in the conflict over the Baltics and Russia: grain. Before the Arrival, the Soviet Union had been pushed out of much of their western territory by the combined offensives of those who would later become the Arrived Germans, and their allies. In the years before the arrival, the country suffered greatly as a result, being unable to import sufficient stocks of food to make up for the loss of their primary domestic agricultural regions. At the same time, the later Arrived Germans and their allies controlled these regions as well as having supply lines extending into both Southern/Eastern and Central Europe: any local shortfalls could be compensated for by drawing increased supply from the homelands of the armies of the anti-Soviet forces (also called the "Pact forces", after the Anti-Comintern Pact). This mismatch was clearly visible in the gulf between the nutrition policies of the occupation regime in the Operational Zone of Military Affairs (OZMA; before the Arrival there had been a local Russian government established by the advancing Pact forces, but due both to its disappearance before the Arrival and its lack of autonomy, 'OZMA' will be used to refer to the period of time in which this government existed as well).
The Arrival immediately caused a shift in the OZMA-USSR paradigm. With the immediate end of shipments from the Pact homelands, the Arrived armies faced a situation not unlike that of their Soviet opponents: no longer able to rely on shipments from the outside world, local production became paramount in the fight against starvation. It would remain so for the entirety of the brief existence of the OZMA and, later, the areas controlled by the “Deutsche Reichstreue Armee” (German Reich-loyal Army; both the military organization itself as well as the occupation regime, the Deutsche Reichstreue Armeegebiet, 'German Reich-loyal Army Territory', used and will be referred to with the acronym DRA), as even at the height of imports and foreign support, the requirements of the DRA and local civilian population could only be supported with full exploitation of domestic agricultural production. Simultaneously, the USSR's situation was made more precarious by the loss of Vladivostok and parts of eastern Siberia - however, these losses did not represent a destabilizing factor of the same impact as the loss of the Pact homelands had for those in the OZMA.
As a final note to the immediate shift caused by the Arrival, the import of foodstuffs by the Soviet Union from Persia and Afghanistan which began in the summer of 1946 may have represented an increase to those possible before the Arrival. Due to a lack of available information (this work is unfortunately limited to the usage of archival information that has been released and translated into German, Polish or English), it is not presently possible to make further claims regarding the impact of the Arrival in this context.
After the Arrival, the USSR began a series of westward offensives. While this work will not go into further detail (those interested in the rapid alteration of Soviet plans post-Arrival, and the precise events of the following battles are encouraged to read the excellent work of Solzhenitsyn and Solzhenitsyn, which is the first to incorporate accounts of Arrived soldiers on both sides of the conflict, as well as that of Arrived civilians in the region), of immediate relevance is the recapture of the Caucasus region by the Red Army and local rebels between April and June of 1946. With this, one of the Soviet Union's two largest food-production regions had been brought back under Soviet control. While the fighting had significantly impacted the agricultural output of the area, it nonetheless represented a significant relief for the USSR. For the Pact forces, the loss of the region was a significant blow that erased much of the progress of previously-begun initiatives (which are the subject of later chapters) to increase production as well as decreasing consumption. Only the decimation of the Pact armies and massive contraction of the OZMA, both in terms of land area and population, coupled with the increase in production and shipment of food from Ukraine, delayed the food crisis that would otherwise have resulted shortly thereafter.
As the summer continued, the OZMA continued to shrink, local uprisings erupting in the wake of retreating Pact occupation troops or as a result of new, aggressive requisitions. The official withdrawal of Arrived Polish troops from the OZMA and into the "Liberated Territories" (as they were called by local Arrived Polish occupation forces) represented the formalization of the existing status quo - desertion rates among non-German Pact armies resulted in these rapidly melting into hardened cores, fully integrated into what would become the DRA to replace the tens of thousands of Arrived Germans which deserted or entered Finnish service. The more impactful agreements between the Polish and Soviet governments were the agreement to an armistice (despite the presence of Soviet forces in Rostov), which itself carried stipulations regarding delivery of “important war supplies” into the OZMA. By the end of June, shipments of food into the rump OZMA had slowed; not for political reasons, as is commonly believed, but rather for logistical ones, as the distance between Ukraine and the OZMA continually increased, and new rail routes needed to be used, in the face of the Red Army's unbroken advance. By the end of July, food shipments came to an end - this time, for political reasons, as part of the first phase of the lengthy negotiations between Poland and the USSR regarding Rostov.
Despite the loss of Ukrainian grain, the OZMA's food supply did not face immediate collapse - just as the OZMA ceased to exist and was replaced by the DRA, an agreement was drawn up between St. Petersburg (the new official capital of the DRA; the OZMA did not have a
de jure capital, but its administration was previously centered in Moscow) and Helsinki. The agreement, often called an alliance, revived the institution of the Prussian Legion of the 1920s, gathering volunteers from the DRA and forming them into an autonomous arm of the Finnish Defense Forces, as well as establishing a quota of grain deliveries into the DRA in exchange for various goods (which only briefly reached the value of the imported grain). This “lifeline” allowed for the DRA to consolidate its defense without the immediate threat of starvation; during this time, the DRA also established official trade relations with Estonia and Latvia, opening a smaller but still significant line of supply.
For various reasons, primarily the high number of deserted DRA soldiers crossing the border, Estonia and Latvia implemented strict border controls as well as limitations on imports and exports with the DRA. This would be the political basis of the following conflict, though the requirements of the DRA could not be met through trade (despite the “surplus” paid by Finland), lending some credence to the claims that Operation Ordenstaat, the DRA invasion of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would have been executed regardless of the actions of the Baltic governments. Regardless of the answer to that question, which is worthy of investigation in its own work, the DRA invaded and occupied all three countries over the course of late August to early September, setting the stage for the “Butter Offensive” that would come later.
The immediate aftermath of the DRA's invasion was an improvement in the nutritional situation of the eastern regions; many parallels have been drawn to the occupation of Romania in 1916 regarding the occupation policy, which was founded on light-handed extraction of local resources and the avoidance of requisitions where possible. These policies were supported and enabled by the Baltic Germans (here used in the modern sense, which includes those of German heritage in Lithuania, rather than the term's historical use, which included only those of old German ancestry living in the former Baltic governorates of the Russian Empire), who at the time remained the largest landowners in Estonia and Latvia. By the end of October, these “gentle” methods were exhausted, as local trust in the DRA currency declined and the ability to pay in other currencies dwindled. Further, the naval blockade by the German and British navies that began in mid-October ended any hopes of using Riga or Tallinn to import additional food from new foreign sources. The border with Poland, formerly closed, was now fully militarized in the aftermath of Ordenstaat, and the German-DRA border was similarly blocked, allowing only small packages of food (accompanied by the promise of “a full table and honest work” in the Republic to any DRA deserters) to pass through as part of an ongoing propaganda war.
Starting in November 1946, with the German-DRA ultimatum and the Baltic Uprising, the “Butter Offensive” swept over the entirety of the DRA.
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The Butter Offensive
The
Butteroffensive was an operation that the Republikwehr carried out in the rapidly-expanding area under its control, as well as in the regions that were liberated by local resistance groups before their arrival. In a broad sense, the operation was a very simple one: basic foodstuffs would be supplied
en masse to prisoners of war and locals alike, utilizing previously-stockpiled supplies gathered from domestic and foreign sources. Despite the claims and implications of the propaganda spread, both by the Republikwehr in the Baltic and the Solidarity regime in Germany, the operation had more than humanitarian aims. The first and second phase of the Butter Offensive had somewhat different, but fundamentally similar goals, and are therefore listed together here. These aims are taken from official documentation as well as private notes on the content of meetings in which it was planned.
- To act as a preventative measure against the threat of large, uncontrolled movement of refugees in search of food or other supplies
- To act as a preventative measure against the threat of criminality and partisan-esque activity in the rear of the army
- To further degrade the morale of the DRA by showing the logistical superiority of the Republikwehr
- To discourage and demoralize pockets of DRA troops that could otherwise continue fighting
- In Russia, to immediately present a practical difference to the DRA occupation regime
- In Russia, to secure the goodwill of the locals and aid in the rapid build-up of local administration
- In Russia, to offer a “counteroffer to the Bolshevik dictatorship”
Highlights of the Butter Offensive, and its crowning successes in the eyes of many, were the negotiated “Hunger Surrenders” of Pskov, Novgorod and, finally, St. Petersburg itself, where DRA forces agreed to lay down their arms in exchange for immediate shipments of food.
“It is not without some irony that I gave the message along. Here we were, on the outskirts of the city, a hundred thousand men or more, and even though the men inside had given up, we were to remain at our posts. No parades, even though we had nowhere to rush to next. Instead of the officers riding in on horses, or the men marching in, or even the tanks, rolling down the street to give the locals a taste of
real German technology, we were sending in a
Brot-Blitz [a nickname for a truck filled with food, combining ‘Brot’ (Bread) with the ‘Blitz’ (Lightning) name of the truck line that supplied most of the Republikwehr’s wheeled transports] formation. This war is the first of its kind: a war where it is not the strength of armies or the spirit of soldiers, but the labor of the farmers of Pomerania and Pannonia that bring about the enemy's defeat.”
- Diary of Alfred Guthausen, on the day of the ‘Hunger Surrender’ of Pskov; all emphasis present in the original.
