This time we robbed the occupied countries, and our people did not have to go hungry until the end of the war.
(Elisabeth D., a German woman who lived through both the First and Second World Wars)1
The National Socialist leadership, and in particular Hitler and Göring, were determined to feed the German population adequately throughout the war. By 1939 Walther Darré, the Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Herbert Backe, working within Göring’s organization for the Four Year Plan, had done their best to prepare the agricultural sector. Even the schoolboy Harry Simon was aware of the need for self-sufficiency and that ‘Germany must make itself independent of other countries, produce its own goods, not only farm produce, but also everything else … Nothing was to be wasted.’2 The Battle for Production in agriculture had been matched by a campaign to suppress consumption and divert consumers towards home-grown foods rather than foreign imports. Nevertheless, the leadership were well aware that a long war would prove too great a drain on the country’s manpower and industrial resources for agriculture to be able to maintain its impressive levels of self-sufficiency. If it were to rely on its own food supply Germany needed to fight a short war.
In the end German farmers managed to maintain production remarkably well even though the war dragged on for five and a half years and the prioritization of the war industries meant less machinery and fertilizer was available to them than to British farmers. As in Britain, the productivity of German farms rested on the hard work of agricultural labourers. But while in Britain farm labour was provided by the Women’s Land Army and prisoners of war, in Germany much of the labour was made up of workers forcibly brought into the Reich from the occupied territories. In this way Germany imported the exploitation of its newly conquered empire. By the end of 1943 the foreign agricultural and industrial workforce amounted to 7 million more mouths to feed. German agriculture struggled to produce enough food to provide an adequate civilian ration, a generous ration for the military, whose share of German food production had quadrupled by May 1943, and a miserly ration for the forced labourers. Just as Britain looked to its allies and the empire for food imports, Germany looked to the occupied territories to make up the food deficit. While Britain’s food policy had its darker side, in particular the War Cabinet’s decision in 1943 to displace hunger on to Britain’s colonial subjects rather than British civilians, Britain’s exploitation of its colonies was neither so ruthless nor so openly dismissive of the value of human life as were the National Socialists in their conquered territories. At a meeting with the leaders of the occupied countries on 6 August 1942 Göring reminded them that, ‘The Führer repeatedly said, and I repeat after him, if anyone has to go hungry, it shall not be the Germans but other peoples.’3
In his quest for ‘nutritional freedom’ Backe had directed ministerial funding into a variety of autarky-oriented research projects such as the development of protein- and oil-rich plants and the best type of potato to provide maximum quantities of vitamin C over the winter months; he had encouraged the setting-up of fish farms, the production of organic fertilizers and home production of animal feed.4 One of the most successful of the Reich Food Corporation’s autarky programmes aimed to make dairy farmers self-sufficient in feed for their cows. Before the war Germany relied on imports for about 50 to 60 per cent of its butter and margarine and 95 to 99 per cent of its vegetable oils.5 The Allied blockade cut off Germany’s access to supplies of whale oil, which was one of the main ingredients in margarine.6 Under instruction from the Reich Food Corporation farmers extended the acreage of oilseed crops but this could not compensate for the deficits in fat imports and the Corporation looked to dairy farmers and butter production as a means of maintaining the fat content of the German ration.7 In order to feed the cows dairy farmers were encouraged to plant root crops such as turnips and sugar beet to replace grain (which was needed for bread), and special silos were built where green stuff could be stored for long periods without losing its nutrients.8 This allowed farmers to produce more butter, and by 1943 German dairy farms were the source of 60 per cent of the butter consumed in the Reich, up from 30 per cent at the beginning of the war. By then Germans were, of course, eating less butter and the quality had declined noticeably. Wartime butter was watery, and older Germans still make a distinction today between wartime butter (and margarine) and a higher quality product, when they redundantly refer to ‘good butter’. But even though consumption levels fell considerably and the quality was marred, these efforts did ensure that fat, an essential source of energy, taste and the feeling of fullness, was still present in the German diet throughout the last two years of the war.9
One of the greatest challenges for German farmers was the maintenance of both potato and pig production. The German pre-war diet was heavily dependent on potatoes, and Germans displayed a marked preference for pork, consuming far more than the British, who in the 1930s ate substantially more mutton and lamb.10 The problem with pigs is that they compete with humans for food as they are usually fattened on grains, potatoes and sugar beet. A reduction in the number of pigs has the undesirable effect of reducing the amount of animal fat in the diet as pigs produce the most fat of all farm animals out of a given amount of feed. A decline in the number of pigs leads to a vicious cycle. As meat and fat become less available humans eat more potatoes, which in turn takes fodder away from pigs.11
Problems had already begun in January 1940 when bad weather affected the supply of potatoes.12 Then in 1941 German pig farmers were hit by a poor barley harvest, which meant that they needed more potatoes for their animals. In June, rationing for potatoes had to be introduced and the meat ration was cut by 25 per cent as the number of pigs began to fall.13 The entire consumption of potatoes rose from 12 million tons a year before the war to 32 million tons during the war. If farmers had been able to grow more, the consumption would have risen even further.14 But a poor potato harvest in 1943 meant that competition for potatoes became so intense that both human and pig potato consumption fell. By 1944 Germany’s pig herds had fallen to 60 per cent of their pre-war levels and the amount of potatoes available for each pig had fallen by half.15 This was reflected in a 10 per cent reduction in pigs’ selling weight and a further fall in the supplies of pork, bacon and fat. By 1944 meat supplies had fallen to nearly one half of what had been available in 1933.16
German farming became caught up in a spiral of falling pork and potato production. Supply problems led to food shortages in Germany’s towns and cities throughout the summer of 1941. The Swiss consul in the city of Cologne reported that this meant the townspeople had been unable to lay down sufficient stores of food for the winter. When, for two weeks in November, it became impossible to buy potatoes this became a problem because the city’s inhabitants had no food in their cellars to tide them over. There were protests in the city in December which had to be controlled by the police until the supply of potatoes finally revived.17 The scarcity of meat was made worse by the potato shortages and this problem plagued Germany’s towns and cities throughout the war.
The greatest difficulty which Germany’s farms faced was a shortage of labour, and this was already severe in 1939. The greatest drain on farm workers was industry. Well before Hitler’s invasion of Poland millions had left behind the poor pay and miserable living conditions of the agricultural labourer in favour of more profitable work in the expanding war industries.18 Once war was declared another 1.5 million rural workers were called up into the armed forces. Given the National Socialists’ portrayal of the Germans as a ‘People Without Space’, the mopping-up of surplus rural labour by industry and the army should have had the same effect as it did in America, painlessly solving the problem of agricultural over-population. But the decline in labour was not accompanied by a parallel process of rationalization and capital investment, as it was in the United States. Germany began the war with a healthy agricultural research culture which was developing new seeds and plants and refining breeding techniques for livestock, but as the war swallowed up more and more of the country’s resources the application of new technologies became impossible. In addition, although Germany began the war with the intention of maintaining a programme of farm mechanization, the fighting on the eastern front devoured both men and arms and the Allied bombing raids gradually began to impact on industrial capacity. Armaments production eventually overrode all other industrial priorities and by 1944 the production of agricultural equipment had fallen by over 40 per cent.19 Fuel shortages and lack of spare parts prevented the proper use of those machines that were available. Even draught animals were in short supply as horses were requisitioned for the eastern front, where each infantry division relied on 1,200 horse-drawn wagons to transport its supplies.20
Military requirements also led to a drastic decline in the availability of artificial fertilizers. As the military use of nitrogen rose by 500 per cent, the amount of nitrogen-based fertilizers available to farmers fell by 60 per cent.21 Even manure from animals became less nitrogen-rich as the amount of protein in animal feed fell.22 Phosphorous fertilizers were import-dependent and by the last two years of the war they were only available in tiny quantities. Nevertheless, between 1939 and 1944 the bread grain harvest fell by only 3 million tons.23 This impressive maintenance of grain farming was achieved through sheer hard work.
Much of the hard work was done by farmers’ wives and daughters. In Württemberg and Bavaria, where farms tended to be small family enterprises, 60 per cent of farm labourers during the war were women. Sicherheitsdienst (SS intelligence service) reports from the region contain plentiful examples of small struggling farms where women had taken over from their husbands. In one of many similar cases, a farm of about 16 hectares was being run by the farmer’s wife, her mother and a frail hired hand, whereas before the war it had been operated by the owner and four male labourers.24 Once the troops invading the Soviet Union had established the occupation of fertile areas such as the Ukraine, the German agricultural labour shortage was made worse by the call-up of skilled farmers to administer and advise on the establishment of German farming in the east. While they were a loss to the farms in the Reich, these men did little good in the occupied Soviet Union where many of them met a brutal fate at the hands of partisans.25
Rather than mobilize the general population, including non-farming women, to fill the agricultural labour shortage (as was done in Britain), the National Socialists chose to import labour from the occupied territories in the east.26 Even as the German army launched its attack on Poland, plans were laid to channel prisoners of war on to the East Prussian farming estates, where the root crops were ready for harvest. By the end of September 1939, 100,000 Polish prisoners of war had been rushed through medical and police checks and sent to dig up potatoes in Prussia.27 German agriculture’s appetite for workers was voracious and a labour recruitment campaign rapidly got under way in occupied Poland. When an advertising campaign yielded insufficient volunteers the campaign quickly degenerated into a violent process of forced deportation.28 By the autumn of 1941 German farms were completely dependent on 1.3 million Polish and Ukrainian forced labourers – many of them women – as well as 1.2 million mainly French and Soviet prisoners of war.29 Reich Food Corporation official Rudolf Peukert acknowledged in 1944 that ‘without the employment of hundreds of thousands of foreign workers it would have been impossible to maintain German agricultural production at its present level’.30 Forced labour produced about 20 per cent of the food grown within Germany during the war.31
The employment of foreign workers on German farms was a practical solution to Germany’s manpower shortage. Their presence allowed German industry to continue recruiting rural workers, which it much preferred to using women or foreigners, and large agricultural enterprises were satisfied by the plentiful and cheap labour. However, the policy deeply offended Nazi agrarian idealists whose vision for the countryside was one of a pure Aryan peasantry tilling the soil and acting as a racial and social foundation for the nation. It was deeply worrying to such ideologues that wholesome German women might work the fields side by side with Slav Untermenschen.32 Early on in the war the Sicherheitsdienst complained that some farmers were treating the Polish workers as members of the family. In eastern Germany there was a long tradition of Poles coming over to do seasonal work on German farms and these farmers continued to treat them as they had done before the war.33 There were even reports of farmers, who shared the Poles’ Catholic faith, attending Sunday church services together with their forced labourers.34 In order to preserve some semblance of racial order Himmler introduced draconian laws of separation. As in the concentration camps, the forced labourers wore letters sewn on to their clothes to indicate their inferior status. They were paid a pittance, banned from social contact with Germans, even from using public transport. A romantic liaison with a German carried the risk of the death penalty.35 Edith Hahn, an Austrian Jew who was sent to work on a German asparagus farm in 1942, observed that ‘it quickly became clear that the Germans were interested in using our strength but not in preserving it … We were always ravenous … surrounded by bounty and aching with hunger.’36 Hahn bitterly recalled how ‘the farmers had grown proud and haughty … like Volkswagen and Siemens, they had slaves’.37
There were, however, plenty of farmers who could see no sense in the racial laws and simply ignored them. Hermine Schmid, who ran a large farm, commented in a letter in April 1943 that she was ‘very satisfied’ with her Polish and French workers. ‘If they are well treated all POWs work well without needing to be watched. They eat with us together, although this is actually forbidden.’38 Many farmers were reluctant to allow ideology to get in the way of practical considerations. Unwilling and undernourished labourers would provide little help on a farm.39 Indeed, if they lived with a kind farmer, forced workers often received more food than German civilians living in towns, and almost all forced agricultural labourers will have eaten better than most of their fellow countrymen living under German rule in their own countries. Agricultural forced workers were therefore unusual, and fortunate, in that they subverted the National Socialist ‘nutritional hierarchy’, which in theory allotted them starvation rations.40
Agricultural forced labourers benefited from the fact that there was plenty of food in the German countryside throughout the entire war, even in 1944–45 when food shortages became increasingly pronounced in the towns and cities. Germany was still a predominantly rural society. In the 1930s more than half the population lived in small village communities or market towns. Millions of Germans grew their own food on allotments and smallholdings, many keeping pigs and chickens.41 In 1939 about one-third of the population were classified as self-supporting and were not included in the rationing system.42 Even many of those who were entitled to rations grew their own vegetables and fruit and kept small animals such as rabbits. Those who lived through the war in rural areas, or had friends or relations living in these circumstances, were always able to eat enough, and quite often enjoyed good food. Irmgard B recalled that her mother, who was a midwife, ‘always brought milk back when she had delivered a baby for a farmer’.43 Marie Vassiltchikov, who was well connected in the German aristocratic world, frequently benefited from the bounty of her friends’ country estates, enjoying peaches and cream in March 1944 and food parcels of butter, bacon and sausage. ‘After a copious lunch’ on 8 April 1944, she commented, ‘what it is, these days, to own a country place!’44
While the rural nature of German society was to prove an advantage for a large section of Germany’s civilian population, the preponderance of small-scale farmers was to prove a weak point in Germany’s wartime food economy. As the National Socialist state learned to its cost, throughout Germany and the rest of occupied western and eastern Europe, it is much more difficult to exert control over farmers with smallholdings than it is over large agribusinesses and it is particularly difficult when the small farmers are disgruntled. Many German farmers were disillusioned by the failure of the regime to live up to its promises. The hoped-for rise in the rural standard of living had not materialized. Subsidies that supported prices meant that farmers were financially better off, but there were few opportunities to invest their capital in farm improvements. Indeed, National Socialist policies tended to widen the gap between rich and poor farmers.45 Disappointed, the small farmers retreated into self-sufficiency, which meant that they produced less surplus food and the surplus which they did produce they preferred to channel on to the black market for higher prices.46 This placed a serious limit on the state’s ability to fully exploit its agricultural resources. It was both unable to stimulate production to its maximum and unable to control all of that which was produced. The National Socialists’ frustration with this state of affairs is indicated by their introduction of draconian laws. In 1942 farmers who failed to relinquish their entire bread grain harvest to the state were threatened with penal servitude and hefty fines, but these coercive laws appear to have done little to increase the amount of grain the state was able to collect.47 The British government was better protected from the development of such a situation by the greater specialization of British farms. If he was unhappy with government policy a farmer who produced solely milk or wheat could not decide to withdraw into self-sufficiency. The German mixed smallholding with a few pigs or cattle, chickens, a little wheat, and a vegetable garden, could simply scale down production and withdraw from the market.
This withdrawal into self-sufficiency was even more of a problem among farmers in the German-occupied territories. They resented receiving instructions from agricultural organizations which had been imposed upon them by the conquerors, and unfair pricing policies provided little incentive to produce for the market. This meant that in rural areas of Europe a great many farmers withdrew on to their farms and tried simply to ride out the war. Emilia Olivier lived on a farm with her parents in the hamlet of Brion in Maine et Loire in western France. Apart from the fact that some of her uncles were in Germany as prisoners of war and that an aunt’s horse was requisitioned by the Germans, the war barely impinged on Emilia. The blackout, watching the fire in the sky after a bombing raid on the nearby town of Voisin, and the loud thuds, which made the doors in their house shake, as the retreating Germans blew up the Loire bridges in 1944, were as close as her small family ever came to the fighting. On the farm they did not miss any foodstuffs or ever go hungry. They kept the cream back from their milk and made butter and soft cheese. They always had ‘good white bread’. Her father grew the wheat and was allowed to mill a certain quantity for his own use. He would take it to the miller using the horse and cart, and always had to carry papers in case he was stopped by a German road block. But if he was fortunate enough not to meet any checks on the first journey, he would go back and make a second trip, thus illegally doubling his allowance of wheat. The wheat was poorly milled and much of the husk was left on the grain. At the house they had a windmill and they used this to separate out the chaff and make white flour. They also processed their neighbour’s wheat and the neighbour had an oven in which he baked the bread for both families. Emilia and her family never needed to turn to the black market, and it seems they did not bother to trade their own goods on the market although they did regularly sell milk, potatoes, eggs and chickens to a woman who would bicycle out to their farm from the town of Angers.48 Emilia’s memories sum up just how little the war affected the food habits of many European farmers and their families.
Even though German farmers managed to maintain a good grain harvest until 1943, the demands on grain supplies became ever greater as the war wore on. Civilians, the military and a growing number of prisoners of war and forced labourers within the Reich placed impossible demands on the productivity of the farmers. Already in August 1940 the bread ration had to be cut, only to be followed by a cut in the cereal ration in May 1941. The decline in meat and fat production meant that Germans came more and more to rely on their bread ration, and when the hard winter of 1941 damaged the grain crops Backe was forced to begin using up the country’s grain reserves in order to maintain the bread ration for the German population. In the spring of 1942 bread, meat and fat rations all had to be cut again.49 By 1943–44 an ordinary German civilian was eating 40 per cent less fat, 60 per cent less meat and 20 per cent less bread than in 1939.50 German agriculture simply could not supply sufficient food for the civilian population, the voracious army and a growing number of prisoners of war and forced labourers. Germany looked to its occupied territories to make up the food deficit.
The dominant National Socialist attitude towards the countries the Wehrmacht invaded was to treat them as a source of plunder rather than as long-term supply bases. The military policy was that all troops should live off the land, and in every defeated nation the Wehrmacht ruthlessly requisitioned industrial and agricultural goods. In the winter of 1940–41 it became clear that the war was going to last longer than the leadership had hoped, and when the decision was taken to invade the Soviet Union the plan was hatched to use the east as the main source of food for the army, as well as a supplier for civilians in the Reich and possibly even to fill food deficits in western European countries such as Belgium and Norway.51 In the summer of 1942, unable to achieve victory in the east, the National Socialist leadership realized that Germany was engaged in a long war of attrition with the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States – and, to make matters worse, the regime was faced by an internal food crisis. It was then that Göring began to insist that every morsel of food should be squeezed out of all occupied territories and to insist that hunger should be exported outside the Reich.
Despite the National Socialists’ focus on the east as Germany’s source of sustaining food supplies and their short-term attitude towards the resources of western Europe, the latter actually contributed more food to wartime Germany than the occupied Soviet Union. Denmark and France both exported slightly higher quantities of meat to the Reich (768,000 and 758,000 tons respectively) than was received from the Soviet areas (731,000 tons). Moreover, if the official figures for the amounts of food requisitioned by the occupying forces are counted together with the amounts exported to Germany, then Denmark, Holland and France collectively contributed 21.4 million tons of grain-equivalent, in comparison to the 14.7 million tons provided by the occupied Soviet Union.52 Even though collectivization had modernized Ukrainian agriculture it was not as productive or as efficient as western European agriculture, which was better placed to restructure in order to withstand the disruptions of war. With hindsight, Backe would have done better to turn his attention to exploiting the food resources of western Europe rather than those of the Soviet Union.
The National Socialist policy of plunder wreaked havoc in countries such as Greece, where agriculture was basic and peasant-based. When the German army arrived in April 1941 the officers of the high command requisitioned all the food they could lay their hands on: oranges, lemons, currants, figs, rice and olive oil. Whereas the British navy had brought in shipments of food for the Greek civilian population throughout the military campaign and even the Italians had distributed pasta and olive oil, the Wehrmacht made no attempt to feed the Greeks. To make matters worse, the German troops were expected to live off the land and many units were not even provided with a mess, eating instead in local restaurants.53 The food situation rapidly deteriorated and in the summer of 1941 Marcel Junod, a Swiss Red Cross delegate in Athens, reported that the streets were filled with ‘walking spectres. Here and there old men, and sometimes young ones, sat on the pavement. Their lips moving as if in prayer but no sound came. They stretched out their hands for alms and let them fall back weakly. Pedestrians passed backwards and forwards before them without paying the least attention. Each one was asking himself when his own turn would come.’54
Although Greece was a predominantly rural country, the peasantry, especially on the islands, produced mainly cash crops such as olive oil, tobacco and currants. The population was dependent on the annual import of 450,000 tons of American grain for one-third of its food but the British blockade of occupied Europe cut Greece off from all imports.55 The compartmentalization of the country into three zones of occupation under the Germans, the Italians and the Bulgarians prevented food from circulating, and in particular it meant that what little food there was available in the north did not get through to Athens and the south.56 Meanwhile, the escape of the Greek merchant marine before the Germans arrived left the islands more or less cut off from the mainland.57 In a pattern which could be observed in every economy affected by the wartime loss of imports, inflation set in and producers and retailers withdrew their food supplies from the market. They either hoarded them, speculating on further price rises, or sold them on the black market, often to German agents collecting food for the military. The Greek government therefore lost access to what little food supply was left in the country and was unable to protect the poor and the needy from spiralling food prices by giving out food aid.58 The numbers of the poor swelled daily as the Germans requisitioned and dismantled industrial plant for transport to the Reich, leaving thousands unemployed. In Athens the government was only able to provide rations of 458 calories per person, not even half of what most people need to maintain the body’s normal functions. In November this fell to a paltry 183 calories, the equivalent of one or two slices of bread a day. In August people began to drop dead in the streets of Athens.59 By January 1942 the death rate was 2,000 per day and infant mortality had risen to over 50 per cent. Families would leave the bodies of their children in the streets, hoping to continue using their ration cards. One island in the Aegean sarcastically conveyed the message to Athens, ‘send bread or coffins’.60 Meanwhile, the health of German troops in North Africa greatly improved that summer as small ships laden with fresh fruit and vegetables began to sail from Greece to the Libyan port of Bardia.61
In the summer of 1941 the Red Cross, the United States government and campaigning groups within Britain* all argued that it was imperative that the British government revise their blockade policy and allow food aid to get through to the Greeks. When he had announced the blockade in August 1940 Churchill had been adamant that there was to be no question of food aid. To send in food, even for innocent civilians, would, he argued, simply relieve the Germans of the need to feed the people, and help their war effort. Besides, the Nazis were not to be trusted – the food would most likely be diverted into German stomachs. The former American President Herbert Hoover, who had risen to prominence in public life as a self-appointed organizer of food relief during the First World War, was infuriated by Churchill’s stance. He described him as ‘a militarist of the extreme school who held that incidental starvation of women and children was justified’.62
Churchill eventually caved in to the pressure to allow relief for Greece through the blockade. The famine was on such a vast scale that it aroused American public opinion against the policy. Further rational argument came from Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of State in Cairo, the headquarters for the North African military campaign. Lyttelton was facing protests from the Greek community in Egypt where the British position was never particularly secure. He telegrammed the British government with the warning: ‘History will I believe pronounce a stern judgement on our policy. I appeal not only to mercy but to expediency … we shall undermine the resistance of an ally and lose a possible centre of successful insurrection against the Axis if we continue to starve the Greeks … I have no doubt where the balance of advantage of winning the war lies.’63 In January 1942 shipments of wheat were allowed through the blockade and from April regular cargoes of wheat and other foodstuffs were shipped into the Greek ports.64 But by then at least 20,000 people had already died of starvation. Even after April the food brought in by the Allies was never enough. Although it halted the large-scale urban famine, the Greeks continued to die of starvation. Reinforcing Churchill’s argument that the Germans were not to be trusted, relief eventually became a tool which the occupying armies used mercilessly against the guerrilla resistance fighters in the mountainous areas. Villagers in those areas where the partisans were active were denied any food aid; instead, their homes and fields were burned to the ground in an attempt to clear the area and deprive the resistance fighters of their support network. In 1943 and 1944 much of the Greek countryside starved. By the time Greece was liberated in 1944, half a million Greeks, 14 per cent of the population, had died from hunger and associated diseases.65 This was a civilian casualty rate eight times higher than that suffered by Britain.
Food aid for Greece was the only significant exception Churchill was willing to make and the blockade against the rest of occupied Europe was enforced throughout the rest of the war. Campaigners from the relief organizations continued to plead for aid to be allowed through, arguing that if Britain stood by while Germany used starvation as a weapon of war it would call into question the humanitarian rhetoric that Churchill himself used so liberally.66 But it was Churchill’s fixed idea that no quarter could be given in the fight against Germany. Perhaps, if the defence of the strategy had been tempered by greater acknowledgement of the suffering it caused, it would not have created such a large question mark over the reputation which the Allies claimed for themselves as representatives of the forces of ‘Good’ over ‘Evil’.67
In theory Belgium was in a similar position to Greece. It depended on annual imports of 1.2 million tons of grain from overseas, which came to a sudden halt with German occupation. As the Wehrmacht moved in the quartermasters, field units and individual soldiers scrambled to buy or requisition as much food as possible.68 However, after an extremely difficult winter in 1940–41, farmers rallied and succeeded in producing enough food to provide adequate amounts for almost all the population. The Belgians did not succumb to famine like the Greeks. The usual explanation for this is that Germany was willing to support the country with food imports for the sake of its industrial goods, at least two-thirds of which were exported to the Reich. On the contrary, Belgium did not in fact survive on food sent in from Germany but was left to feed itself. Throughout the four long years of occupation Belgium received only 849,000 tons of grain imports, enough to cover three-quarters of a year’s pre-war consumption.69 A little food was smuggled in across the French and Dutch borders but the reason the Belgian population did not starve was because its agricultural sector proved itself able to adapt to wartime circumstances.70
The wartime productivity of Belgian agriculture was not the result of the efforts of the Belgian version of the German Reich Food Corporation, which was set up by the occupying forces. Indeed, the Corporation Nationale de l’Alimentation et de l’Agriculture proved incapable of influencing disaffected farmers, and its collection system was only able to muster sufficient food to distribute a daily ration of between 1,000 and 1,500 calories per person. What kept the Belgians alive was the food which the farmers channelled on to the black market. Farmers in large enterprises were able to illegally siphon off only a part of their produce, but farmers with smallholdings probably sold virtually everything they produced on the black market, which eventually developed into an alternative food economy.71 The extent of the black market is indicated by the absurd statistic that the smaller an animal and the easier it was to conceal, the fewer the number of such animals – rabbits, chickens, goats – were recorded in the official figures.72
Belgian agriculture was much more modern than Greek peasant farming, and the farmers were sufficiently flexible to be able to switch to crops rather than livestock, and increase grain and potato production. The high prices their goods fetched on the black market provided sufficient incentive to produce. In 1943 a kilogram of black market bread cost 49 francs compared to 2.60 on the legal market, a kilogram of meat sold for 190 francs while the official price was 34 francs. This would suggest that if the occupying administration had applied a fair pricing policy it might well have been able to gain much more from Belgium than the paltry 27,200 tons of fruits and vegetables which Belgium exported to the Reich in 1942, falling to only 7,300 tons in 1943.73
A similar story played itself out in France. The country’s reputation for fine food and wines meant that the German occupying forces were all the more rapacious in their plunder. With the exchange rate absurdly weighted in their favour, German soldiers could afford to supplement their rations with sumptuous meals in restaurants and cafés. On a trip to Paris from Berlin in October 1942 Marie Vassiltchikov, who worked for the German Foreign Ministry, wrote to her mother: ‘life is still most agreeable so long as one can afford it. This does not mean that things are particularly expensive; but to have a decent meal (say, with oysters, wine, cheese and fruit, plus a tip) you must fork out about 100 francs per person; which is, after all, only 5 marks.’74 German officers were served beefsteaks ‘imperfectly concealed under token fried eggs’ and washed down with champagne. The First World War hero turned famous author, Ernst Jünger, a German officer in Paris during the war, recorded in his diary that ‘to eat well and to eat a lot’ while surrounded by the hungry, ragged French, ‘gives a feeling of power’.75 For occupying troops in France the Wehrmacht’s policy of living off the land translated into living off the fat of the land. Even the lowliest of the German occupiers were able to afford luxuries in France. When he was doing his labour service Alois Kleinemas was billeted at the chateau in Cognac. He was able to collect a crate of brandy to take home to celebrate his parents’ wedding anniversary. He also used to post them packets of butter.76 Helmut Radssat recalled that the canteen of the Verneau barracks in Angers was particularly cherished by those soldiers who had come from the eastern front. ‘The precious aroma of wine and brandy was quite new to me. In Germany such luxuries were becoming more and more scarce. It was in those barracks that I learned to know and appreciate good wines.’77
French agriculture was particularly badly hit by a shortage of labour. Around 50,000 of the 2 million French prisoners of war were agricultural workers who were sent to work on German rather than French farms. Altogether, about 400,000 agricultural workers were missing, leaving women and the aged to run the farms. Shortages of horses, tractors, fuel, fertilizer and pesticides led to a precipitous decline in yields. Worst hit were meat and milk, but even potatoes, sugar beet and wheat showed steep reductions, particularly in the first year of the war, after which yields stabilized.78
Official food prices rose only modestly but prices on the black market soared. This triggered an inflationary spiral whereby the less the food authorities were able to requisition the more the rations were reduced. In August 1942 Göring responded to internal food shortages within the Reich by calling together the various leaders of the occupied territories and insisting that they deliver more food to Germany. ‘As far as France is concerned’, he pronounced, ‘I am positive that its soil is not cultivated to the maximum … also the French stuff themselves to a shameful extent … Collaboration from the French I see in one way only: let them deliver as much as they can.’79 Given Göring’s own notoriously extravagant eating habits and the behaviour of the German occupiers who were known to wolf down omelettes made with twelve precious eggs, this was the application of the worst possible kind of double standard. Göring demanded from France quantities of wheat, meat and butter which amounted to between 15 to 20 per cent of all available food.80 His secretary, Paul Koerner, noted that Germany’s military commander in France was so horrified by the demands that he initially refused to convey them to the authorities in Paris.81 He feared that it would lead to further ration cuts and food riots. In the long run he concluded that it would simply be counter-productive and would further demotivate the farmers, leading to a long-term fall in production.82 By 1944 the energy value of the French ration had fallen to 1,050 calories and, as in Belgium, the black market or connections to a rural family with food became essential for the survival of anyone living in a town or city. This in turn pushed up prices on the black market, leading to the diversion of more and more food on to the illegal market.
Germany exported wartime hunger to the countries it occupied. In Belgium and France those who suffered were the people without any or only limited access to the black market. Thus, prisoners in Belgian gaols began to die of starvation in 1942, unable to survive on the 1,550 calories a day that the ration provided and unable to supplement their rations from alternative sources. Urban office workers, clerks, civil servants and the old suffered disproportionately as they lacked the cash or the luxury goods to barter for supplementary food.83 By 1943–44 Belgian and French families were spending 70 per cent of their income on food. Even middle-class Parisians had to make do with a dreary round of soup, a little sausage and the occasional egg with beans.84 Tuberculosis, which is strongly associated with malnutrition, spread among the young and in France deaths from the disease doubled. Malnutrition could be read in the stunted growth of children. In 1944 French girls were 11 centimetres, and boys 7 centimetres, shorter than the height of their counterparts in 1935. By 1943, 80 per cent of urban Belgian children were suffering from rickets, caused by severe vitamin D deficiency in the diet. Parisians betrayed their lack of vitamins in their dull eyes and sallow complexions.85
In theory Italy and Germany were allies but when in October 1940 Mussolini tried to assert Italy’s autonomy by invading Greece without consulting Hitler all he succeeded in doing was relegating Italy to the position of a satellite state of the Reich. Italy’s humiliating inability to defeat the Greeks and the need for Germany to send in its own troops to finish the job discredited Mussolini in the eyes of both the National Socialists and his own people.86 When Mussolini was overthrown in the autumn of 1943 Italy went over to the Allies, triggering German occupation of the country.
Italy’s agricultural sector should have been well prepared for war. When Mussolini seized power in 1922 one-quarter of Italy’s budget for imported goods and services was spent on wheat. Mussolini could see that if his plans for a Mediterranean empire were to be realized, food self-sufficiency would be an essential element in addressing the balance of payments deficit and freeing up foreign exchange. Once these problems were solved Italy would have a far more solid economic foundation for industrial development.87 Italy’s agricultural sector was certainly in desperate need of regeneration, marked as it was by low productivity, high unemployment and poverty. The ‘Battle for Wheat’ was launched in July 1925 and by dint of land reclamation the area under wheat was increased. Outreach and education programmes introducing machinery, fertilizers, higher-yielding wheat varieties and irrigation were extremely effective. By 1935 Italy had increased its wheat production by 40 per cent and significantly reduced its expenditure on food imports. The only problem was that internal wheat production did not cover the gap created by cutting imports, and the annual amount of wheat available across the population declined by 14 kilograms per person.88
When Hitler invaded Poland, Italian officials began to panic-buy wheat from Hungary and Yugoslavia, afraid that they would be unable to feed the population with Italy’s own wheat harvest, and bread and flour shortages did indeed plague wartime Italy. Meanwhile, Darré went on a tour of the country to assess future prospects for food exports to the Reich.89 Once Italy had entered the war a general state of administrative chaos meant that Mussolini’s Battle for Wheat campaign was neglected and overall agricultural yields fell. In 1943 they had fallen by 25 per cent. Once the Germans had occupied the country they sank dramatically to 63 per cent of pre-war levels.90 Filled with contempt for their erstwhile allies and careless of its impact on the Italians’ food supply, the National Socialists continued to demand wheat, rice, tobacco, cheese, fruit and vegetables in exchange for coal. Those German soldiers stationed in the country were allocated a meat ration of 750 grams a week. This represented about double the amount of calories provided by the daily Italian ration. The Italians complained that the Germans were ‘eating away at Italy’.91 In 1944 the Agriculture Minister, Edoardo Moroni, begged for Germany to send a delivery of grain or at least trucks so that food could be transported to the cities. His pleas fell on deaf ears.
The gradual worsening of the Italian food situation was reflected in the experience of the family of Giovanni Tassoni and his wife Guila. The family was very poor. They lived in a one-room shack near the gravel pit where Giovanni worked manufacturing lime in a kiln. The nearest town was Valmonte, two hours’ train journey from Rome. No one in their neighbourhood possessed a radio or read newspapers, so they were only vaguely aware of the course of the war and most of their information came from rumours. In the early years the war had little effect on the family. Women, children and the elderly became increasingly dominant in the town as the young men were conscripted, and food became more difficult to acquire. By 1942 the shortage of food began to make itself felt. The ration of bread sank to 150 grams a day, and meat, oil and butter rations were all gradually reduced. Then suddenly in August 1943 Germans appeared and, as the Tassonis realized, they were now in charge. ‘Food became even scarcer’, and this was not helped by the demands of the occupying troops who would come to their shack and demand eggs or bread.92
By late 1943 at least thirteen people were living in the Tassonis’ hut besides the Tassonis and their own five children. It was a struggle to feed everyone. The Germans had requisitioned the local flour mill so ‘Giovanni reconstructed an old coffee mill for the milling of the flour. When properly fastened to the table, it was possible to produce four to five kilos of flour if one worked all night. At first the only wheat that was available was black, and when that ran out fava and ceci beans were ground to make the flour for bread.’ The family turned their entire garden over to the production of potatoes, and ‘Guila coaxed her hens to make more eggs so that she could trade some for bread, which the Germans baked in their giant ovens nearby.’93 The Tassonis were eventually driven out of their home by Allied bombing and went to live in a cave. German soldiers fleeing from the invading Americans would occasionally turn up there and beg for civilian clothes. Then one day the Americans arrived and scattered caramels from the turrets of their tanks. ‘Word spread quickly that the fields near Cisterna and Anzio where the Americans had been dug in, were full of such treasures, and so people from all over bicycled, ran, and walked in that direction to bring home whatever they might find. The scavenging was always dangerous because of the possibility of setting off a land mine. The food was as welcome as it was unfamiliar. Everything was in cans – even the spaghetti – and tasted of sugar.’94 When the Allies liberated Italy they were shocked by the utter deprivation of the urban population. As the troops arrived in the port of Naples they were horrified to observe malnourished people, dressed in rags, picking scraps of garbage out of crevices in the pier. In the town itself a prostitute could be bought for 25 cents, the price of an American C ration can of meat and vegetable hash.95
Even if the Italians began the war as Germany’s allies their supposed racial inferiority and military ineptitude meant that the National Socialists accorded them little respect. In contrast, the Danes were regarded as fellow Aryans. Consequently, the occupying German authorities interfered less in the agricultural administration of the country and allowed the existing pre-war institutions to remain in place.96 This caused far less disruption to agriculture than was the case in Belgium or France and enabled the government to maintain greater control over its farmers.
The Germans had highest hopes for receiving food imports from France and Holland. It was hoped that the Dutch surpluses, which had previously gone to Britain, would simply be redirected to the Reich. But this calculation failed to allow for the impact of the loss of agricultural inputs such as fodder and fertilizer because of the blockade. The Dutch responded to this problem by quickly converting from livestock to arable farming and although they were able to send large quantities of meat and fat to the Reich in the first two years of the war, by the end they were only able to supply potatoes, feed grain, sugar and large quantities of fruit and vegetables.97
It was Denmark which surprised the Germans. Danish administrators adopted a pricing policy which encouraged farmers to maximize production of the commodities most desirable for Germany – beef, milk, pork and bacon – and, despite difficulties associated with the lack of imported feed and fertilizers, the farmers delivered.98 Control over Danish consumption was left in the hands of the Danish government and was limited to no more than butter rationing and restrictions on the purchase of meat. The reasonable rations meant that the black market barely existed in Denmark and the Germans were able to cream off a surprisingly large surplus. Denmark provided the Reich with about one month’s worth of butter, pork and beef a year. As food supplies in Germany decreased, this contribution became ever more important, providing perhaps as much as 20 per cent of the urban population’s meat in 1944.99
Holland and Denmark both possessed relatively efficient agricultural sectors. In particular, scientific knowledge was integral to their agricultural processes. This meant that they were able to restructure their agricultural production, and the eating habits of their populations were sufficiently flexible to allow the substitution of one foodstuff for another. As a result their populations were the best fed in occupied western Europe. Nevertheless, there was a subtle difference between the diets of the two countries which was reflected in a rise in infectious diseases such as diphtheria and tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, dysentery, bronchopneumonia, typhoid and flu among small children and young adults in Holland.100 Most of the factors which could explain the spread of infectious diseases – overcrowding, the increasing mobility of populations, lack of soap and poor hygiene, illegal and possibly unsafe slaughtering of meat – were present in both countries.101 The explanation seems to lie in the micronutrient deficiencies in the Dutch diet which have a particularly pernicious impact on the development of the immune system in the young.
Like the British, the Dutch switched to eating wholemeal bread and more vegetables and cut back on meat and fat. The poor in particular converted to a plant-based diet and swapped their meat coupons for bread on the black market. Lack of animal foods in the diet led in turn to a lack of trace elements such as iron, zinc, selenium, vitamins A, B6 and B12, which makes children more vulnerable to disease and increases the rate of child mortality.102 This phenomenon impacted on child health throughout all of German-occupied western and eastern Europe. It was only the Danes, who managed to maintain an adequate amount of meat in their diet, who escaped this side-effect of German occupation.
Having spent the war relatively cushioned from wartime hunger, the Dutch suffered terribly at the end of the war during the battle to liberate Europe. In September 1944 the Allied operation to re-take Holland failed, and the provinces of North and South Holland and Utrecht were left in German hands. Thinking liberation was at hand, the Dutch railway workers had gone on strike, and in retaliation the Germans cut the gas, electricity, water and food supplies into these parts of Holland.103 Throughout the cold winter of 1944–45 the situation of the Dutch trapped in this pocket became desperate. Cornelia Fuykschot recalled that without water to wash, heating or light, life became dirty, cold and joyless. Every evening her family retreated into the kitchen ‘in the gathering darkness, the street empty, the curtains open since we had no light of any kind and our hands in our pockets because it was cold inside too’.104 Here they would huddle around the stove where a pot of black market dried peas would be cooking. Fortunately her mother had laid down a store of peas early in the war in case of an emergency. ‘We ate a pan full of them every day. They were our only meal and all there was. Parsley, celery, carrots and onions were finished. Even salt could no longer be bought … You had to chew carefully because some of the black was not pea, nor blight, but gravel, and that could cost you your tooth. Most of the peas went down unchewed; they had not even swelled up enough to become bigger, and we let our stomachs do the sorting and digesting.’105 By March 1945 the peas were beginning to run short and Cornelia’s family eked them out by limiting themselves to one cup each per day.
The Red Cross lobbied to be allowed to transport food into the area. But Churchill remained as unwilling as ever to feed European civilians trapped behind German lines. He argued that the food would just be eaten by the Germans. The American government was also concerned that the Soviets might be antagonized if any food transported into the area by the Allies fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht. The Soviets were in no mood to countenance feeding German soldiers while the Red Army was still spilling blood trying to defeat the Wehrmacht in the east. Reports began to reach Britain that the Dutch were dying in the streets of Amsterdam.106 In the end the death toll reached 22,000.107 The Dutch prime minister in exile informed Churchill that his people would hold him responsible for the deaths, and General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, pointed out that he did not want to send Allied troops into an area where people were already starving.108 Conditions generally deteriorated for the first few weeks after liberation and the already dire food situation meant that chaos and a significantly increased death-rate were likely to ensue. These arguments persuaded Churchill to relax his stand. The American food administrators in Britain released some of the United States’ stocks earmarked for Germany, and the Allies began air-dropping food into the region in March 1945. Air-drops were chosen as the quickest and most effective way of getting food to the area from Britain. Once it had been decided to bring in aid, the measures were generous. From the end of April 1945, 800 Allied planes dropped 7,458 tons of food, including flour, chocolate, tea and margarine. Unfortunately many of the packages smashed, leaving a thin layer of fat all over the dropping zones. The Dutch authorities’ punctiliousness in first collecting and sorting the food before attempting to distribute it as fairly as possible, meant that it took another ten days before the civilians started to receive handouts. For some this was ten days too long and the delay cost lives.109 The Dutch were finally liberated by the Canadians in May 1945. Cornelia remembered the delight her family took in the military supplies that became available in the stores and her praise for reviled wartime foods indicates the level of deprivation the Dutch had experienced. ‘The grocery stores sold powdered egg, bought from army surplus, something we had never heard of before, and it fascinated us with its possibilities. You just had to add water and you could fry an omelette! … Another new item was Spam … canned meat. That too had myriad possibilities, all of them good.’110
The fact that Denmark was able to export 200,000 tons of butter to the Reich between 1940 and 1943, in comparison to a paltry 49,000 tons of butter from France, demonstrates the superiority of the lenient occupational agricultural strategy adopted in Denmark.111 The situation in Denmark showed that with the right governmental pricing policies farmers could be motivated to overcome their difficulties and maintain yields. Even in Belgium, which was hard hit by the loss of imports, farmers demonstrated this point – although in Belgium’s case the motivational pricing was provided by the black market. Sensible pricing policies would also have addressed the problem of small farmers’ tendency to withdraw from the market and reduce their production.
When imports are measured in quantity (rather than in monetary value) then the continental European countries delivered 40 per cent less food in 1943 than they had in peacetime.112 The German occupiers would have had a better chance of squeezing more food out of western Europe if they had invested in restructuring agriculture rather than concentrating on plunder. If the self-sufficiency lessons learned in Germany had been transferred to the relatively modernized western European farmers this would have gone some way towards addressing the problems created by blockade. In addition, if civilian rations had been maintained at a reasonable level, as they were in Denmark, the black market would have been made superfluous to survival and thus been dampened down. In this way the authorities would have gained control over a far greater proportion of the food the farmers actually produced. Backe’s insistence on looking eastwards to the less modern and adaptable Ukraine as a bread basket for the Reich revealed just how little he understood the economics and the logic of agriculture and food supply. Meanwhile, Göring’s insistence on regarding the occupied countries as short-term sources of food, and the ruthless requisitioning policies which he insisted upon, meant that hunger, malnutrition and, in the case of the Greeks, famine, were exported to millions of Europeans.
*One of which was the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, now known by its abbreviation Oxfam, which was set up in response to the plight of starving Europeans.