
According the Generalplan Ost and Hitler's Lebensraum theories the cities inside the Soviet Union needed to be destroyed. The Nazis wanted the Soviet lands for its resources – oil and grain – and Soviet-Russian culture needed to be erased. Cities are centres of culture and this these needed to be eradicated. As part of the implementation of the Generalplan Ost, the Nazi regime intended to expell 80 million Soviet people and sent them beyond the Urals. German bureaucrats caculated that nearly 30 million Russians would have died during the planned death marches to regions beyond the Urals, such as Siberia. Here you see a future train map in which the Breitspurbahn would connect the main European cities.
The city of Kiev (Kyiv) Hitler wanted to be reduced to rubble with incendiary bombs as occupation was not desirable. Due to the lack of bombs at that moment it didn't happen. Because neither Kiev nor any other major “Eastern” city were “razed to the ground" as Hitler had intended, starvation of the inhabitants quickly became the default option.