In World War II, some four to seven million Soviet citizens died as a consequence of the Nazi regime's hunger politics, which clearly underlines how much is at stake when a state uses food as a weapon of war. In Nazi Hunger Politics, Gesine Gerhard tells a story that reaches from Germans’ own hunger experiences in World War I to the years after World War II, when Germans, as well as their former victims, continued to go hungry. Within these parameters, she analyzes the significance of food in Nazi ideology, the introduction and modification of food rationing in Germany, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and the significant overlap between scientific research and Nazi ideology with regard to food. At the center of the study stands the top civil servant, Herbert Backe, and Operation Barbarossa, a battle plan that deliberately reckoned with the starvation of several million Soviets. The food calculations on which Barbarossa was based became known as the Hungerplan (hunger plan), prepared by Herbert Backe, among others.

Backe was already a major figure in National Socialist food policy. Soon after the Nazis seized power, he became a Staatssekretär (state secretary) in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture, and in 1936, he was appointed Food Commissioner under Herman Göring's Four Year Plan, which prepared Germany for war. In 1942, Backe replaced Richard Walther Darré as acting Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. As the military leadership prepared for the invasion of the Soviet Union, he was charged with ensuring adequate food provisioning for the German army. Backe and others designed a plan to accomplish this goal by seizing most of the required resources from the lands that the Wehrmacht conquered. Under Backe's leadership, Russian civilians, as well as more than two million Soviet prisoners of war, succumbed to hunger.

Gerhard has written a short but essential book. Besides synthesizing the results of a growing historiography, she bases her findings on archival materials. Gerhard had access to the papers of Backe and his wife, some of which have never been used before, and uses this material to analyze Backe's role in the Hungerplan. At the same time, she interweaves the history of Nazi policies with personal accounts from Backe and his wife, which gives the reader an idea about their personal thinking and family life.

The title of the book is misleading because the study is mainly centered around Backe and Nazi politics in the Soviet Union. Even though Gerhard looks at other important aspects of food in the German Reich, she does not focus on the food situation of people living in occupied areas other than the Soviet Union. Her succinct study would have benefitted from more in-depth historiographical reflection on its relationship to other food histories of the Third Reich. Gerhard's chapter on eating and food in the Reich, for instance, draws heavily on two important studies: Lizzie Collingham's Taste of War (2011) and Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies's Brot – Butter – Kanonen (1997). They account for more than half of all references in this chapter, but Gerhard does not reflect on or contextualize their work—she merely summarizes it. Such limitations notwithstanding, the clearly structured and well written study provides a comprehensive overview of the topic, especially for English readers who do not have access to existing German studies on the history of food and hunger politics in the Third Reich.