The Food Factor as a Possible Catalyst for Holocaust-Related Decisions: The Crimea and the North Caucasus

Abstract

The Germans occupied most of the Crimean peninsula in November 1941 and the North Caucasus in August 1942, where they faced thousands of Jews who were doomed to be killed according to the logic of the `Final Solution'. According to prevailing scholarship, in other Soviet areas occupied by the Wehrmacht the food factor — namely paucity of food available for the occupying German authorities in order to feed the Wehrmacht, arrange food supplies to the Reich, and provide for the local population — led the local German policy-makers to precipitate the annihilation of Jews as `surplus mouths'. The article analyses whether this connection evolved in the Crimea and the North Caucasus.