In the weeks leading to Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Reich Minister of Food Richard Darre and his state secretary, Herbert Backe, developed the Hunger Plan, a strategy of deliberate starvation to exterminate Soviet civilians and Jews while feeding German troops.

It killed at least seven million people, not as collateral, but by design.

The Nazi regime’s food ration system reflected a racial hierarchy: 100 percent for Germans, 70 percent for Poles, 30 percent for Greeks and 20 percent for Jews.

In the Jewish ghettos, food was weaponised. Access to meat or bread was controlled. Shops were empty. Hunger was not a failure – it was policy.

“That we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally,” Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wrote in a diary entry.