Over the course of the winter crisis concessions had to be made to the local population. As 1942 passed Germany’s food situation continued to worsen. On April civilian rations were reduced, a dramatic measure taken only because there was no alternative; the political cost was high and there were fears of industrial performance reduction in the event of further cuts. To make matters worse, there was now a massive influx of foreign workers and it was eventually settled that they would be properly fed.
The German and foreign worker population was then fed at the expense of the occupied territories. with the harshest results in Poland (where rations were down to a pitiful level until the 1943 harvest) and the occupied Soviet Union. Goebbels described this as “digesting” occupied lands; if there was to be starvation in Europe, then Germans would be the last to starve. French and Soviet deliveries of grain, meat and fat in grain equivalents rose from 3.5 million tons in 1940-41 to 8.78 in 1942-43. Even the General Government, a food deficit region, was squeezed to provide over half of German rye, oats and potato imports. The harvest was also better than expected in 1942, and in October 19th rations were substantially increased for Germans and foreign workers. The food crisis was under control for now.

Parallel to this was the long-term reorganization of conquered territory. It began in Poland. Hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans from South Tyrol and the Baltic were to be resettled in the annexed provinces on land taken from the local peasants. The Jewish and Polish populations in general would move to the General Government, with some of the Poles assimilated. In reality both resettlement and non-German emigration were much slower than expected, with many eastern Germans remaining in their transit camps. Jews were moved to ghettos and Poles conscripted for labor in Germany.
Once Barbarossa was in the horizon, this could take a much grander scale. Planning was largely made through Himmler’s subordinates in the SS economic administration, Reinhard Heydrich’s Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) and the Reichskommissar fuer die Festigung deutschen Volkstums (RKF), where Konrad Meyer was settlement expert. Their discussion continued into a year after the invasion and by July 1942 had produced three drafts, the first and last by the RKF and second by the RSHA, of the “Generalplan Ost”. It covered the future of the German East widely, even going into mundane details such as forestry.

The planned reorganization of the East would be a massive project on the scale of the past decade’s rearmament. It would begin with a rationalization of land distribution, with plots being consolidated into 18-30 ha estates at the hands of the most hardworking small farmers, so that in the future no farm would yield less than 3,000 Reichsmarks per anuum. This would affect as much as 30% of farms in some areas, and that was a concession to local sensibilities as otherwise that rate could get close to 50%. 220,000 families would be freed up by this and join 220,000 young rural couples and 2 million urban colonists to settle the East. They would mostly occupy Hufen (self-sufficient farmsteads) of at least 20 ha. Poorer lands would be formed into larger Wehrbauernhoefe run by SS veterans with Slavic labor. By 20-30 years 10 million Germans were expected to have become settlers. But not all colonists would become farmers: the population structure would be similar to Bavaria and Hanover, which was considered balanced and had only a third of the workforce in agriculture. Only 36% of investment would go to agriculture and land remediation.