As the army marches on its stomach … so does the industrial worker produce his best work when his stomach is well looked after.
(Noel Curtis-Bennett, author of a book on feeding British industrial workers during the war)1
The fighting won’t stop until Göring fits into Goebbels’ trousers.
(Popular Berlin saying in early 1945)2
When the war began in September 1939 the National Socialists had already accomplished the difficult task of switching the German population’s diet to a wartime footing. Throughout the 1930s, as part of Herbert Backe’s campaign for ‘nutritional freedom’, strenuous efforts had been made to guide consumption away from scarce, high-quality foods towards lower-quality substitutes. Germans had been encouraged to eat fish instead of meat, margarine rather than butter, and to base their meals on potatoes and brown bread. In 1940 British nutritionists envied the Germans their frugal diet of autarky. Ernest Graham-Little, a member of the Food Education Society and an MP, attributed the Germans’ military successes of that year to the fact that their diet was ‘more scientific and effective than ours’.3 In the British Medical Journal, Jack Drummond, Scientific Adviser to the Ministry of Food, explained: ‘The present German rations are based on the simple but sound principle that a “peasant diet” of “high extraction” or wholemeal bread, plenty of vegetables and potatoes, and some dairy produce in the form of cheese or separated milk, provides all the essentials of sound nutrition.’4
British politicians throughout the 1930s had, in contrast, determinedly resisted all efforts by nutritionists to persuade them to interfere in the nation’s eating habits. This meant that the British had to make the painful adjustment to a diet of austerity in the first two years of the war. However, after the difficult winter of 1940–41, the food system stabilized and in the end the public’s belief that the Ministry of Food was doing a good job in sharing out shortages fairly across the population transformed food into one of the factors that positively contributed to maintaining morale among the British.5
The fact that the German Aryan population was adequately fed between 1939 and 1945 is often identified as one of the successes of the National Socialist regime. Indeed, both governments were successful in creating food supply and distribution systems which avoided the mistakes of the First World War and used food effectively to support, rather than undermine, the war effort. Throughout the war, average consumption of calories in Britain and Germany ranged between an adequate 2,500 to 3,000 calories. The British wartime diet was of a slightly better quality in that it contained more meat while the Germans relied more heavily on bread and potatoes, but the British and the Germans survived the war on a comparable diet. Despite many similarities, the two rationing systems were marked by telling ideological and material differences. The British Ministry of Food placed a great deal of emphasis on the argument that the British rationing system ensured equality of sacrifice across the population. In Germany, where the food supply was tighter, greater emphasis was placed on the efficient and effective distribution of food. Although the entitlement of certain sections of society to food was entirely disregarded, arguably this resulted in a rationing system which (within its limitations) was more just in that it allocated the most food to those expending the greatest physical effort.
Although food consumption averages create a picture of a very similar food situation in both countries, the story of the German food supply followed a different trajectory from that of Britain. An initial period of stability was followed by a crisis in the winter and spring of 1941–42, which was relieved by the exploitation of the occupied territories. Then in 1943 the strain of war began to impact hard upon agriculture. Falling harvests combined with the intensification of the aerial bombing campaign to result in worsening food shortages in Germany’s cities until, in the last months before the Allied victory, the supply system broke down.
Throughout the 1930s the Conservative-dominated national coalition governments which held power determinedly upheld the view that the social welfare measures introduced since 1918 had provided the working population with adequate protection against the economic vicissitudes that marked the period. Indeed, government expenditure on social welfare increased significantly in the inter-war years. After the First World War the insurance scheme to cover unemployment was extended to cover nearly all of the working population, and their dependent wives and children. In 1919 the Ministry of Health was created and the national health insurance scheme was supplemented by child welfare clinics and a school health service. In 1925 the pension scheme was extended and provision was made for widows and orphans.6 However, a number of scientific investigations found that the government’s picture of Britain as a healthier and less impoverished nation required substantial qualification. In fact, the country was marked by deep regional and class inequalities. Death-rates in the industrial centres were sometimes half as high again as the average death-rate, while in affluent Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Surrey death-rates were 20 per cent lower than the average.7 The main cause of deprivation was Depression-related unemployment. In the north of England, Scotland and South Wales, decline in the coal, textile and shipbuilding industries had created pockets of abject poverty.8 Medical officers estimated that as many as 80 per cent of the working-class families in Jarrow and Stockton were living in appalling conditions caused by unemployment.9 The health of women and children was particularly hard hit by poverty, as was indicated by the rising maternal mortality rate, which increased by 22 per cent between 1922 and 1933.10
Studies showed again and again that ill-health among women and children could be traced back to inadequate diets. Surveys in Durham and London found that the majority of children were showing early signs of rickets, caused by vitamin D deficiency. R. A. McCance, who was later to influence wartime nutrition policies, linked the high incidence of anaemia among working-class women to a lack of iron and protein in the diet.11 Lady Rhys Williams, working with expectant mothers in the Rhondda valley, found that all it took to reduce maternal death-rates from 11.29 per thousand to 4.77 was to feed pregnant women nourishing foods.12 It was clear that ill-health among the poor was directly related to deficient family income. The poor quite simply could not afford to buy enough good-quality food.
British government ministers and their advisers were reluctant to admit that the much trumpeted health insurance scheme was failing to provide for those who needed health care the most: the wives and children of working men and the unemployed.13 The Ministry of Health dismissed Lady Rhys Williams’s findings as ‘speculations’ and asserted that ignorance, not income, was the root of the problem. Poor diet and ill-health were the result of ‘bad cooking, bad marketing, [and] bad household economy’.14 This shifted responsibility firmly on to the shoulders of the poor. The question of responsibility was at the heart of the matter. It was not in the government’s financial interest to accept responsibility for ensuring that everyone could afford an adequate diet, and the government was wary of acknowledging a problem which it felt that it could not resolve. The Chief Medical Officer, Sir George Newman, regarded an inquiry into the question of poor health among working-class women as inadvisable for the very reason that he was certain that it would reveal ‘a great mass of sickness and impairment attributable to childbirth, which would create a demand for organized treatment by the state’. He believed that a positive relief programme which addressed health problems on such a scale was beyond the capacity even of ‘modern civilized nations’.15
If the government thought that improving the nutrition of the deprived would require a programme of assistance which was beyond its capabilities, the findings of two studies by the Rowett Institute and the British Medical Association, announced in 1936, were even more unwelcome. Using a set of minimum dietary standards developed by a League of Nations committee of twelve physiologists and biochemists, the studies found that the problem of malnutrition was much more widespread throughout the British population than had been thought.
In the inter-war years the League of Nations acted as a driving force for nutritional research, and doctors, teachers, health officials and campaigners applied the League of Nations minimum dietary standards in a series of surveys conducted in different countries throughout the world. The surveys revealed the depressing fact that even in the ‘civilized’ nations the great majority of the urban working classes existed in a state of hidden malnourishment because they could not afford to buy nourishing foodstuffs. In Australia, the Advisory Council on Nutrition found that while Australians ate enough calories, urban children in particular showed signs of rickets and vitamin-deficiency diseases.16 Even on the tiny island of Iceland nutritionists despaired of the health of the urban working classes, who were cut off from the farms and the traditional diet of mutton, butter and skyr (skimmed milk mixed with rennet), and instead derived sufficient energy but not enough vitamins from their diet of low-cost calories from rye bread, margarine, a little fish, coffee and sugar.17
In Britain, the Rowett Institute survey uncovered a yawning dietary gap between the rich and the poor. The wealthy were shown to be consuming 70 per cent more iron, 90 per cent more phosphorus, and 260 per cent more calcium than the bottom third of society.18 The survey by the British Medical Association confirmed these findings. The wealthy were consuming the lion’s share of the nation’s meat, fish, butter, cheese, fruit and vegetables, while the bottom third of the nation were scraping along on a thoroughly innutritious diet of cheap white bread, margarine, jam, a little bacon and copious quantities of tea. The causes were lack of proper kitchens in which to prepare hot meals, lack of time and, predominantly, lack of money. While they appeared to be adequately fed, in that they consumed a sufficient number of calories, about one-third of the nation did not earn enough to buy adequate quantities of the so-called protective foods such as milk, fruit and vegetables. Thus, they were denied access to vital sources of the vitamins and minerals which strengthened the body’s immune system and were a prerequisite for good health.19
Despite the fact that the Rowett Institute’s survey had been conducted in co-operation with civil servants at the Ministry of Agriculture, the British government did everything in its power to prevent the publication of its findings. The director of the institute, John Boyd Orr, was called in to see the Health Minister, Sir Kingsley Wood, who ‘wanted to know why I was making such a fuss about poverty when, with old age pensions and unemployment insurance, there was no poverty in this country. This extraordinary illusion was genuinely believed by Mr Wood who held the out-of-date opinion that if people were not actually dying of starvation there could be no food deficit. He knew nothing about the results of the research on vitamin and protein requirements and had never visited the slums to see things for himself.’20 When Orr and another doctor decided to talk about the survey’s findings on a radio broadcast they were warned that if they went ahead they might well be struck off the Medical Register.21 Orr was infuriated by the government’s attitude and the monstrous injustice that at the same time as ‘mothers and children [were] suffering malnutrition because they were too poor to afford the more expensive health foods … these foods were so abundant that the government was taking measures to reduce production so as to raise retail prices’.22 Although his fellow participant was sufficiently intimidated to withdraw from the radio programme, Orr, as a research scientist who had no intention of practising as a doctor again, went ahead, undeterred by government threats. He also decided to publish the Rowett Report under his own name, and Food, Health and Income was published in 1937 by Harold Macmillan, publisher and at that time MP for Newcastle.23
In response to the revelations of widespread malnutrition, the League of Nations argued that rather than cutting back production in order to avoid the creation of surpluses, farmers needed to produce more of the protective foods. Governments, in turn, needed to take responsibility for their citizens’ well-being and ensure through a variety of measures that the poorer sections of society were able to gain access to these foodstuffs.24 These were radical and provocative suggestions which the British government preferred to ignore until the Second World War forced the issue. Then, in the circumstances of total war, where every aspect of the food production and distribution system was controlled by the Ministry of Food, it was no longer possible, nor was it in the government’s interest, to abdicate responsibility for the nation’s health. Many of those researchers whose work had been spurned by the government in the 1930s were drawn in to give advice to the Ministry of Food and found themselves able to exert a level of influence over the government decision-making process that was unprecedented, even if it was limited.
The National Socialists came to power in 1933 determined to reduce unemployment and pull Germany out of economic decline. They held out the promise of a gleaming future, with new houses filled with modern consumer goods such as refrigerators, radios and washing machines. There would be affordable family cars and relaxing holidays for all members of the regenerated and united community of racially pure Germans (the Volksgemeinschaft).25 However, the regime’s more immediate aims were at odds with this vision of plenty. A growing economy and rising wages generally lead to increasing demand for food and consumer goods. The National Socialists were determined to suppress these inflationary pressures, cap the demand for imports (especially food imports) and overcome the pressing problem of the balance of payments. Hitler wanted to spend precious foreign exchange not on cattle and butter from Denmark but on iron from Sweden.26 The rise in the German GDP was not going to be channelled into improving the diet of the nation’s citizens, but into re-industrialization and rearmament. Göring was in earnest when he announced to the German population in Hamburg in December 1935 that the National Socialist leadership had chosen guns over butter.27
In order to achieve their aims the National Socialists would have to change the German nation’s eating habits and suppress demand for imported foods such as coffee and oranges, and all those foods dependent on imports of fodder for their production such as meat and butter. Despite the dictatorial nature of the regime the National Socialists proceeded with caution, unwilling to provoke food protests.28 The campaign for nutritional freedom was conducted through persistent persuasion and was given credibility by an array of scientists, nutritionists, doctors and social reformers, all of whom promoted the health benefits of the foods of autarky. In 1938 Franz Wirz, a member of the NSDAP’s Committee on Public Health, published a book on Healthy and Secure Nutrition in which he argued that since the end of the nineteenth century the German people had been consuming excessive quantities of meat, sugar and fat and this had led to ‘nervous ailments, infertility, stomach and digestive disorders … heart and vascular disease’.29 A reduction in these foods would not only free Germany from its dependence on food imports but also create a strong and healthy people ready to face the physical rigours of war.
Wholemeal bread was presented as the backbone of the frugal diet of autarky. Since the beginning of the twentieth century German bread reformers had been campaigning against the spread of white bread. It was demonized as a manifestation of the corruption of the modern world. The reformers argued that by removing the protein, fat and minerals along with the bran and husk of the wheat, the newly invented milling process robbed people of their rightful nutrition.30 One reformer came up with the slogan: ‘Anaemic bread causes anaemic blood.’31 For the National Socialists white bread was a wasteful way of using expensive imports and precious home-grown wheat, as more of the grain was discarded in the process of making white flour. In the south and west of the country, where the people showed a marked preference for the degenerate luxury of white rolls, a campaign was launched in 1937 to promote wholemeal bread. Millers were instructed how to produce wholemeal flour and bakers taught how to use it to make edible bread.32 Advertising proclaimed, ‘Wholemeal bread is healthier and more nutritious and filling!’ and a quality label was attached to the loaves. Wholemeal bread was presented as the food of the Volksgemeinschaft: it was the most appropriate staple food for a healthy Aryan race which used its resources efficiently.33 By 1939 consumption of the patriotic loaf had risen by 50 per cent.34
The German Women’s Enterprise (Deutsches Frauenwerk) was another enthusiastic promoter of autarkic foods and they ran cookery classes which taught women how to make filling meals using fewer calories.35 The promotion of quark was possibly their greatest success. Invented in the 1920s, quark was a cross between yoghurt and cream cheese. It was made from the sour milk which was a by-product of butter production and which had previously been fed to animals. Quark was the perfect food in the quest for autarky. It diverted food from animals to humans, it was nutritious – containing fats, calcium and protein – and it was a substitute for scarce foodstuffs as it could be used to replace butter or cream. The German Women’s Enterprise held demonstrations on how to use quark and lobbied grocers to stock it in their stores. Quark consumption rose dramatically in the 1930s, possibly by as much as 60 per cent, and it is still popular in Germany today.36
But the ultimate Nazi food was the Eintopf or casserole. The Eintopf rendered poor-quality cuts of meat tasty through slow cooking, while eking out small quantities of (preferably left-over) meat with vegetables. Cooked, as its name implies, in one pot, it used less cooking fuel. It was thus the epitome of a thrifty and virtuous meal. Sarah Collins, an Englishwoman living in Berlin in 1938, recalled how ‘the first Sunday of the month was designated as “Eintopf” Sunday’.37 Every family was supposed to make a hot-pot and ‘the amounts saved by this frugality contributed to the Winter Help Fund’.38 Goebbels, as propaganda minister, was aware that the ordinary people’s trust in the regime rested upon a belief in the probity of the leadership. As early as 1935 he began to create an image of the National Socialist leaders as men with simple tastes, and officials in his ministry were instructed not to publish pictures of the NS leadership seated at groaning dining tables littered with bottles of wine.39 On Eintopf Sundays ‘field kitchens appeared … at midday on Unter den Linden, and photographs were taken of the Party hierarchy eating their Eintopf alfresco’.40 The dish ‘was served in all restaurants, whilst uniformed jack-booted collectors rattled collecting tins in the faces of the guests’.41 This transformed the drive for autarky into a social ritual which was supposed to unite and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft through sacrifice.42
Changes in eating habits were less the result of the internalization of National Socialist propaganda about the racial health benefits of German-grown food, than the product of necessity and lack of choice. One of the first foods to disappear as a result of the National Socialists’ attempt to reduce food imports was cheap margarine, a staple of the poorer sections of society. Alfred Hugenberg, Hitler’s first Minister of Agriculture, decided to stimulate German butter production by making it compulsory to mix a certain amount of butter into margarine. The result was to make margarine more expensive, and an increasing number of consumers were forced to switch to cheaper, lower-grade margarine.43 However, margarine production was dependent on falling imports of whale and vegetable oils, and there was simply not enough to go around. Shopkeepers reported that they could only cover about two-thirds of the demand for cheap margarine.44 In Brandenburg the state police reported ugly scenes among frustrated customers, and women fainted, exhausted from standing for hours in queues waiting to buy tiny quantities of fat. ‘The question of food is at the moment the most pressing,’ the police warned. ‘A general tendency toward price rises is noticeable. Some goods have risen by 40 per cent in price. Especially threatened is fat, meat, potatoes and textiles. In conjunction with this, hoarding has begun which creates a war-psychosis. Margarine as the people’s fat cost 24 Pf in 1932, today [1934] about 98 Pf is normal.’45
Reductions in fodder imports led to pork, bacon and beef shortages.46 The number of domestic pigs and cattle fell by over a million, while the number of live cattle being imported into the coastal regions in the north-west also dropped significantly.47 Coastal areas and the northern industrial towns began to run out of meat. In 1935 and 1936 butchers in the Ruhr area were forced to close from time to time for lack of meat to sell.48 Eggs, an alternative source of animal protein, also became scarce and Sarah Collins noted that one had to ‘go from one shop to another buying all sorts of things which were unnecessary, in order to be given two eggs.’49
The living standards of workers declined. Official government statistics show workers’ wages rising back to their pre-Depression levels by 1937 and the regime argued that this was because it had managed to prevent excessive price rises in food. In fact, food prices rose by much more than government figures suggest and the cost of food was also adversely affected by the emergence of a black market. National Socialist statistics did not take into account the impact of food shortages, the decline in the quality of food, the new and hefty deductions from workers wages for social insurance, the Labour Front and Winter Relief, and the impact of the housing shortage, all of which bit deep into the living standards of the workers.50 By 1936 German working-class families were spending somewhere between 43 and 50 per cent of their income on food, in comparison to only 30 per cent in British working-class families.51 The United States Ministry of Agriculture calculated that in the decade ending in 1937 the meat consumption of German workers fell by 17 per cent, milk by 21 per cent and eggs by 46 per cent.52 These figures are probably slightly inflated, but the general effect of the National Socialists’ militarism was to suppress consumption and deny many Germans the foods they would have preferred.53
Throughout the 1930s the National Socialists redefined their policy of denying Germans meat, butter, white bread and coffee as a drive to achieve racial fitness. The frugal diet of autarky was supposed to create a revitalized nation of fertile, vigorous workers and soldiers. While the government prepared for war by building tanks, aeroplanes and weapons, the German people must prepare by readying their bodies to withstand the demands of war as soldiers, workers or mothers of the future generation. The state intruded deep into the private space of German citizens. Propaganda reminded the members of the Hitler Youth, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’ The German citizen was the property of the state, embodied in the person of the Führer. It did not seem strange in this context to assert, ‘Your body belongs to the Führer!’54 It was the duty of every good German to comply with the diet of autarky. An embittered German émigré in 1939 observed that ‘Germans today … consider hunger almost as a moral duty.’55 Anyone who grumbled about the regime was accused of missing superfluous luxuries such as butter or coffee. As a result, more honourable complaints tended to be suppressed ‘for rather than be thought to be complaining out of mere greed, most Germans prefer to suffer in silence’.56
Research into the biological standard of living in 1930s Germany indicates that the populations of the large cities were the worst affected by food shortages. The mortality rate in large cities was 18 per cent higher than in small towns. In particular, the cities saw a rise in the incidence of diphtheria, which is associated with a lack of protein in the diet. The worst hit were children between five and fifteen, whose mortality rate rose by 13 per cent.57 This would seem to suggest that the children of the German working classes were suffering from the micronutrient deficiencies associated with a lack of animal protein in the diet which the German occupation was later to inflict upon the children of occupied Holland. Although the autarkic diet based on wholemeal bread and reduced quantities of meat and fat could credibly be presented as a healthy diet, in fact it denied the poorer sections of German society protective foods – meat, butter, milk – in sufficient quantities to ensure health. A by no means unbiased émigré doctor writing in 1939 argued that ‘there is not today in Germany a definite, specific state of hunger such as reigned in the days of the World War blockade. But there does reign, instead, the much more treacherous and incomplete state of hunger which is a continuous and chronic state of under nourishment – the result of a self-blockade arising from the idea of agricultural autarky.’58
Food deficiencies in Germany in the 1930s should not be blamed on the policy of food autarky alone. At least in part they were also attributable to class-based inequalities which skewed the distribution of foods in all European societies. Given the National Socialists’ dislike of criticism, independent investigators did not challenge the official statistics by surveying the nutritional standards of the German poor and underprivileged.59 However, Germany, like Britain, certainly had urban slums, and a stubborn sector of long-term unemployed existed at least until 1936. Ethnologists who went into the rural districts in search of healthy settlers for the conquered eastern territories also uncovered depressing levels of poverty. The policy of food autarky will have done nothing to alleviate the class-based problem of poverty and malnutrition.
Once the war began, the British and German governments both aimed to feed their populations as well as possible and thus fend off the problems of low morale and discontent which they anticipated as a result of wartime food shortages. Both governments sought to distribute their limited food resources efficiently, and at the same time be seen to do so fairly. They took different routes in order to achieve these common goals.
The National Socialists had no intention of repeating the mistake of the First World War, when rationing was introduced too late and disillusion with the government and its ability to feed its people was already widespread. There was to be no delay this time. Rationing was introduced in Germany in August 1939 even before the Wehrmacht had marched into Poland. The German ration was both comprehensive, covering foodstuffs such as bread, and highly differentiated. The nutritionist Heinrich Kraut from the Institute for the Physiology of Work worked out a system which allocated those undertaking heavy and ultra-heavy work substantially more food (3,600 and 4,200 calories respectively) than a ‘normal user’, who received a basic ration which amounted to 2,400 calories.60 Children and young adults were allocated smaller quantities of food but pregnant women and nursing mothers were given supplementary rations.61 The aim was to distribute a limited supply of food across the population as efficiently and fairly as possible, while at the same time securing the loyalty of the working classes.62
What made the German food system distinctive was that while the entitlement of every ‘good’ German citizen to a decent ration was held as sacrosanct, the non-productive and racially undesirable were not accorded the same right to food. Below the normal rationing system, there operated a second tier of food allocation for non-Aryans. From August 1939 Jews were allowed to shop only at designated stores, which often charged them an extra 10 per cent. The time when they could go shopping was limited to one hour each day, after four o’clock, by which time many stores had run out of most goods.63 Lucia Seidel, who ran a grocery store in Kassel, took pity on her Jewish customers and would often package up their shopping before the day’s supplies ran out and send her young son to deliver it to their houses.64 When food shortages began to occur in the towns, signs went up in shop windows warning that scarce foods would not be sold to Jews. Those Jews who were forced into heavy labour were able to obtain a tiny quantity of meat, but by 1941 meat, fruit and butter were virtually unobtainable for most Jewish shoppers, who were also forbidden to buy tinned food, coffee and most vegetables.65 Only those with tiny children were able to buy milk. Their neighbours sometimes policed the restrictions. When one Jewish woman sent her small son to buy milk, the other shoppers protested so loudly that the shopkeepers stopped serving him. The neighbour of another little Jewish girl would stand in front of her to prevent her from going out into the street with her shopping bag until the clock struck four.66
Refugees in their own country, forced to move house continually, shunned in the bomb shelters, unable to buy clothes or shoes, and banned from public laundries, many Jews worried most that they might starve to death.67 Even if they were able to obtain food on the black market the frequent Gestapo raids on Jewish homes meant that it was dangerous to store illegally acquired foodstuffs. By 1942 the deportations to the east were well under way. In the autumn of that year, just as the food situation in Germany was improving, a new rule ominously announced that those Jews still living in the Reich were no longer allowed to buy meat, eggs or milk, and that Jewish children were no longer entitled to special supplements.68 As the Jews were loaded on to the trains which took them to the extermination camps many were already gaunt with hunger.
The mentally ill and disabled, defined as a burden on society, were also victims of this starvation policy. In 1940 the director of a large mental hospital, Dr Valentin Falthauser, came up with the idea that his young charges could be fed a diet of potatoes, turnips and boiled cabbage, which was devoid of fats and very low in protein. After about three months they starved to death. He argued that this was a practical solution to the problem of disposing of these unproductive members of German society, as it allowed the doctors to feel that they were simply allowing their charges to die rather than actually murdering them.69 Nevertheless, the asylum prohibited the ringing of church bells at the funerals of the six or seven people buried each day so that the local inhabitants would not become aware of the suspicious death-rate in the asylum.70 The Falthauser diet spread to other institutions and ‘deliberate starvation based upon differential diets was practised in asylums throughout the length and breadth of Germany’.71 Hermann Pfannmüller introduced two special ‘hunger houses’ into his asylum at Eglfing-Haar where 429 patients died between 1943 and 1945. Pfannmüller would frequently visit the kitchens to taste the food and check that it was devoid of protein, while the cook did her best to subvert his efforts and slip nourishing ingredients into the gruel.72 It is unclear how many of the 200,000 people commonly labelled as victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme in fact starved slowly to death.73
The British government, unlike the National Socialists, did not spring into action on the food front as soon as the war began. Lulled into a false sense of security by the first few months of phoney war, the cabinet was surprisingly reluctant to introduce rationing. Plans were in place, which the Ministry of Food was keen to implement, but Churchill* was reluctant to restrict the liberty of British citizens and he especially disliked placing limitations on people’s eating habits.74 Butter, bacon and sugar were eventually rationed in January 1940 and meat followed in March.75 Unlike the German ration, the initial British ration was worked out without any reference to nutritional advisers. It was very similar to the one that had been in place during the First World War and it reflected the limitations imposed by British agricultural production and the fall of imports due to the shipping crisis. There was no pretence that this would necessarily provide a nutritionally balanced diet.76
The system worked according to two principles. Firstly, the amount of food stated on the coupons represented a minimum amount of food which the government guaranteed to distribute to each person. Secondly, everyone, from miners and steel-workers, engaged in the heaviest work, to the sedentary office worker and housewife, received the same 4 ounces of bacon or ham, 4 ounces of butter, 2 or 3 ounces of margarine, 1 ounce of cheese, 12 ounces of sugar, one shilling’s worth of meat (or 14–16 ounces), 2 pints of milk and 2 ounces of tea a week.77 Children were allocated less food, but among adults there was no differentiation according to gender, class or the contribution of one’s work to the war effort. Even those members of the military who were stationed in Britain with a desk job, and who could hardly justify a bigger ration on the grounds of physical exertion, were given the same rations as the rest of the civilian population. Food Minister Lord Woolton commented in his memoirs: ‘This was not only right and just, but it was good for the morale of the civilian population, who otherwise would have been critical and justifiably envious of the armed forces.’78
The British government was aware that in a planned economy every transaction took on an aura of purpose and thus social inequalities, which in peacetime appeared to be the ‘neutral’ result of an impersonal market, would, if reinforced by rationing, take on the appearance of having been consciously created by government.79 The British working classes were deeply suspicious and believed that if there were sacrifices to be made they would end up making them while the rich sidestepped the rules.80 The British food rationing system was designed to avoid deepening social rifts, and instead to foster social consensus. Lord Woolton explained: ‘I believed that if food control were to be readily accepted by British people it had to remain essentially simple and have the appearance of justice.’81 By allocating everyone the same amount of food it emphasized its purpose as the equitable distribution of food and scarce goods across the entire population. This distribution of food resources, which apparently privileged no section of civilian society, is one of the characteristics of government wartime policy which earned it the title of ‘war socialism’.
In fact, while giving the ration the appearance of equity, this principle made it deeply inequitable. In the first two years of the war the British underwent a painful period of adjustment to wartime conditions. Food prices rose and the poorest families and those in low-priority occupations were worst affected. Christopher Tomlin, a stationery salesman whose family’s weekly income amounted to £3 15 s., declared himself ‘white hot with fury at recent price increases … We can’t afford to pay the extras on milk and eggs. It’s a good thing for munitions workers who earn £5 a week … it’s a bloody disgrace for families in circumstances like mine.’82 Pam Ashford in Glasgow recorded shortages of eggs, fish, onions and milk in the city. It was working-class women who initially bore the brunt of rationing. They tended to sacrifice a large share of their meals to their husbands or children. Those families with adolescents struggled the hardest as the young adult ration was often too small for a growing teenager. Families with small children did better, as the children’s ration was generous and could be shared out among the rest of the family.83 In 1941 the sugar ration was cut by 4 ounces. This was felt hardest by the poorer families, who relied on sugar as a primary source of energy. Air raids during the Battle of Britain made matters worse, as women often did not bother to cook an evening meal, instead taking sandwiches and cocoa into the shelters. Government surveys in 1940 and 1941 found that the energy level of the British diet had fallen by 7 to 10 per cent, and the diet of the poorest third of the population remained deficient in vitamins and calcium.84 In particular, the government was concerned the population was not eating enough to sustain the longer and harder working hours which were called for by wartime mobilization.
The British Ministry of Food’s thinking was that bread and potatoes should not be rationed as they were the main energy-giving foods in the wartime diet. In theory, this meant that British workers did not need supplementary rations because they could boost their energy intake with unrationed foods.85 However, it is much harder to consume the 4,000 calories a day required by a man engaged in heavy physical labour if most of the energy is supplied by bulky foods. Men working in heavy industry regarded meat as an essential source of nutrition and complained bitterly that the ration provided insufficient quantities for working men. The wartime social survey of 1942 found that 42 per cent of men in heavy industry and 45 per cent of those in light industry did not feel that they were getting enough food to stay fit and healthy. The equal ration for everyone demonstrably disadvantaged miners, steelworkers, dockers and shipyard workers, who were found by the survey to be significantly less well nourished than the middle classes.86 It was clear to the Ministry of Food that action needed to be taken to provide workers with more food. Rather than introducing a complex system of differentiated rations, the Ministry decided to provide workers with canteens where they could buy extra meals. In 1943 it became compulsory for all firms employing more than 250 people to set up a canteen. Working men’s canteens served double the meat allowance permitted in an ordinary restaurant. By the end of that year there were 10,577 factory canteens and 958 on docks and building sites and at mining pit-heads, supplying the men with hot, meat-based meals for one shilling or less.87
The needs of manual workers in the countryside, who were too dispersed to congregate in canteens, were addressed by the Rural Pie Scheme. Food manufacturers, including a subsidiary of Lyons, made meat pies and delivered them to the Women’s Voluntary Service, who then distributed them to farm workers. The demand for pies grew so large that Lyons had to set up satellite pie plants in their provincial bakeries.88 Agricultural workers also received an extra cheese ration as this made for a portable lunch, but many land girls complained that the cheese disappeared into their landlady’s larder, never to emerge in their sandwiches.
Supplementary to the factory canteens was a network of what were originally termed ‘communal feeding centres’. Despite presiding over the administration of ‘war socialism’ it is said that Churchill could not stomach the communist image evoked by the name, and instead christened them British Restaurants, which he felt had a more patriotic ring.89 They were set up partly in order to maintain social harmony. A middle-class housewife writing for Mass Observation in October 1941 registered her resentment that the air raid protection workers and police had their own canteens run by the Women’s Voluntary Service, where they were provided with hot meals at midday. While she agreed that ‘it’s only right that miners, blastfurnace men, dockers, shipyard workers, agricultural workers etc. should have the lion’s share of meat, cheese, sugar and butter’, these men, who in Bradford had nothing to do but sit about playing cards, were able to eat egg, sausage or fish and chips, scones, biscuits and jam tarts off the ration ‘at jolly low prices’.90 At the other end of the scale there were the rich and privileged, who were able to evade food restrictions and eat well at fancy restaurants. Even though a maximum charge of 5 shillings was imposed on restaurant meals in June 1942, the real cost of the meal was covered by phenomenally high prices for wine or a fee for using the dance floor. Anthony Weymouth, a middle-class professional, only ate in restaurants if someone else was paying.91
British Restaurants appeased these resentments by providing the entire population with affordable opportunities to eat off the ration. In September 1942 the laboratory technician Edward Stebbing ‘paid [his] first visit to a British restaurant and had a very good lunch; stuffed lamb, potatoes and cabbage, date roll and custard, and a cup of tea, at the very modest price of 11d.’.92 Much has been made of the significance of British Restaurants. In fact, only 5 per cent of the population ate in them on a regular basis, choosing to go to one only if they could not get home for lunch.93 However, taken as a whole, the system of canteens, restaurants and the pie scheme proved an efficient way of ensuring that extra food was channelled into the stomachs of the working population. Don Joseph, an apprentice at an aircraft factory in London during the war, recalled, ‘many families had double the official ration because they ate at their place of work’.94 Every day he ate lunch, as well as sandwiches during his two tea breaks, at his work’s canteen, and three times a week he ate his supper at the technical college canteen where he attended evening classes.
Factory canteens and British Restaurants provided the teams of food experts and nutritional advisers who were appointed to oversee the kitchens with an excellent opportunity to try to improve working-class diets. But their efforts did not always meet with enthusiasm. A former hotel chef sent to manage a factory canteen in Birmingham despaired at the workers’ resistance to his attempts to provide them with healthy, productivity-boosting meals. When he tried to cheer up a dish of boiled beef and carrots with a white sauce, there were protests. Salads and savouries were refused. The men wanted ‘fish and chips, cream cakes, bread and butter, and brown gravy over everything’. Sadly, he concluded that ‘Birmingham people do not understand food.’95
A particularly knotty problem for the Ministry of Food was the question of how to distribute fairly foodstuffs which suffered from an erratic supply, such as tinned meat, fish and fruit, dried fruits, tapioca, rice, biscuits, dried peas, beans, breakfast cereals, suet and jellies. None of these was imported in sufficient quantities or in a steady enough flow to be able to guarantee their supply and put them on the ration. M. P. Roseveare, Principal Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Food, came up with the ingenious points system.96 The foods were given a price in points as well as pounds, shillings and pence, and each person was allocated a certain number of points each week. The Ministry would adjust the points price of foods according to the quantities available. If they were in short supply the number of points they were worth would rise, and as they became more widely available their points value would decline. In this way consumer demand could be steered away from foods in short supply. At Christmas the number of points would be adjusted to allow for a little luxury, and Doreen Laven can remember ‘my mother and aunt sitting in the fading light either side of the living room boiler, listening intently to the radio as these increases were announced and making comments like “half a pound of sultanas, that’s not bad Grace,” or, “I’d hoped there might be more margarine.”’97 By the end of the war British households were spending about 11 per cent of their food budget using points. Given that about 30 per cent of the budget went on rationed food, another 15 per cent on ‘controlled distribution’ foods such as onions, and the rest on unregulated foods such as bread, flour, oatmeal, potatoes, fish, fresh vegetables and fruit other than oranges, a psychologically beneficial illusion of control and choice was present in the system.98 As Lord Woolton remarked somewhat condescendingly, ‘for the women it became “shopping” instead of “collecting the rations”, and this gave them a little pleasure in their harassed lives’.99
By the beginning of 1942 the British Ministry of Food had succeeded in creating a stable system which distributed food relatively evenly across the civilian population. A Mass Observation survey of ‘food tensions’ found that 77 per cent thought that the situation was better than they had expected and a Gallup poll of the same year reported that 79 per cent of its respondents thought Lord Woolton was doing a good job.100 The high degree of satisfaction with the government was in large part attributable to the fact that it was very rare that people felt they were unable to obtain their full share of what was available. Owing to the fact that not all calories consumed were covered by the rationing system, it is only possible to arrive at estimates, but after a low point in the second winter of the war, the average British person’s calorie consumption appears to have recovered to about 3,000 calories a day.101 This was a generous amount of food to allocate to every person in the country and indicates the fact that, despite U-boats, the shipping shortage and wrangling with US officials, the British were able to maintain a satisfactory level of food supply throughout the war. The sense that the food supply could be relied upon and that on the whole shortages were being shared out across the population appears to have made food one of the factors that contributed to good morale among the British.102
The initial German ration was generous and appears to have initiated a process of levelling up, whereby the poorer families gained access to more and better food. In 1939 the Research Institute of the German Labour Front calculated that 42 per cent of working families were entitled to more food than they had eaten before the war.103 Elisabeth E. recalled that children-rich mothers had so many more sugar coupons than they needed that they were happy to give them away to others.104 Nevertheless, price rises and food shortages affected the cities, and meat, poultry, game, eggs, oil and fats all became increasingly difficult to find in the shops despite the fact that they were on the ration.105 Price-capping policies demotivated farmers from growing fruit and vegetables and grocers passed on to their customers the cost of the hefty bribes they were forced to pay wholesalers in order to persuade them to release their limited stocks of vegetables.106 Working women, who could only go shopping after work, arrived in the evenings to find empty shelves, and there was much resentment that shopkeepers held back the best foodstuffs under the counter for their wealthiest customers.107
German workers were resentful of the fact that they were now expected to work overtime without supplementary pay, and those whose jobs were classed as heavy campaigned to have their work reclassified as ultra-heavy so that they could receive a larger ration.108 Like industrial workers in Britain, German working men felt that they did not receive enough meat and they looked on enviously as soldiers, who were not in what might be termed ‘action’, manning anti-aircraft batteries in the cities, were fed substantial front-line rations. One of the things military recruits most enjoyed was their generous meat ration. Fritz Harenberg recalled, ‘I liked the military period in the barracks. We received very good food. Cutlets … as big as a toilet lid … salad, potatoes, gravy and everything. And not once a week, many times in a week.’109 Compared to the heavy workers’ daily 171 grams of meat, the field ration of 250 grams seemed excessive for soldiers who were not engaged in actual combat. But the Wehrmacht was jealous of its privileges and resisted any attempts to cut rations among troops stationed within the Reich.110 Workers began to demand the same rations as the Wehrmacht.111
The German rationing system was equitable in that it acknowledged the need of physical labourers for larger quantities of food but, despite the best efforts of Kraut to calculate the nutritional needs of each ration class, the rations were too low for heavy workers in the physically demanding war industries. In the first year of the war, workers began to lose weight.112 Göring recognized that the high-calorie needs of miners, upon whom so much of the war effort depended, were not being met by the ration, and he issued a decree which stipulated that miners working overtime should be provided with a warm meal. Here, as so often, the German government was not speaking with one voice. Backe was adamant that the German food budget was too tight to free up extra food at Göring’s whim, and the Ministry of Food only stopped demanding food coupons in return for the extra meal after the capture of France guaranteed that the German food supply would be augmented. More often than not, the warm meal miners were supposed to receive turned out to be just some extra bread, and miners in the Ruhr area derisorily referred to the supplementary food as the ‘Göring sandwich’.113 Eventually, under pressure from employers as well as workers, the Ministry of Food created a further category of workers. Night workers and those who worked a particularly long day, either because of exceptionally long hours or because they had to walk a considerable distance to the factory, received more food.114 Overtime was often rewarded with bowls of soup, and workers who put in more than sixty hours a week or worked shifts of more than twelve hours were rewarded by 250 grams of tinned fish in oil, or tomatoes.115
But the Ministry of Food did not feel sufficient food could be made available to increase ration quantities significantly (rather the ration was progressively cut over time) and it certainly did not feel that enough food was available to allow workers to supplement their diet off the ration. The German Labour Front tried to solve the problem of hungry workers by attempting to persuade them to eat in factory canteens. This was seen as a way of preventing the men from sharing their extra ration allocations with their wives and children. If the extra food at the canteens had been provided off the ration, as it was in Britain, no doubt the men would have been willing to eat in them. But the workers were required to surrender some of their ration coupons in return for canteen meals and they distrusted such a system, fearing the kitchen workers would cheat them of their full food entitlement.116 Given that their food intake was limited, it was natural that they preferred their wives to control how the food was cooked and eaten. In the face of entrenched resistance many factories eventually capitulated and instead provided the men with the means to warm up their own food.117
In the winter of 1941–42 the Wehrmacht on the eastern front were bogged down, cold and hungry, the Ukrainian harvest had been disappointing and the farmers within Germany were struggling to grow enough potatoes and produce sufficient pork. Ration cuts in the spring of 1942 roused the regime’s worst fears that they were facing a protracted war without sufficient food supplies. To make matters worse, over a million German soldiers had been killed or gone missing on the eastern front. The war in the Soviet Union was proving a voracious consumer of men and materiel. From the autumn of 1941 the military began drafting industrial workers into the army, despite the fact that there was no one to replace them on the assembly lines.118 The Reich was facing serious food and manpower shortages. Nutritional research shifted its emphasis from the health benefits of an autarkic diet to research into food as a tool for maximizing physical efficiency. Robert Ley, head of the Labour Front, pronounced that ‘it was the highest social achievement to preserve the health, and thus the ability to work, of the productive people’.119 In 1942 the academic journal of the Institute for the Physiology of Work published the findings of investigations which calculated the precise amounts of calories required for a range of jobs, from foundry workers and carpenters to concentration camp guards.120 Another study examined the impact of glucose and a glucose–vitamin B1 preparation on the performance of workers in hot working conditions, and a further paper published findings on a study of ‘the impact of warm meals on the productivity of women doing night work’.121 It was found that the women’s productivity actually sank by 16 per cent if they were given a cup of warm tea, in contrast to a warm meal, which made them 10 per cent more productive.122 These nutritional studies were a rational attempt to find ways to expend every gram of food as efficiently as possible and use food and manpower resources as effectively as possible. However, when it came to feeding foreign workers the idea of using food resources efficiently was obscured by a mass of ideological principles.
In early 1942 Hitler sought to overcome the manpower shortage by appointing Fritz Sauckel as the General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization. In the same reshuffle he appointed Albert Speer as Minister of Armaments and War Production and Herbert Backe, who had long overridden Walther Darré in matters of food, was confirmed in his position as acting Minister for Food and Agriculture. Hitler looked to these three men to revitalize the war effort. Sauckel immediately set about solving the manpower shortage by importing foreign workers from the east at the rate of 34,000 a week. By the summer of 1943 there were 6.5 million foreign workers in the Reich.123
In contrast to western European forced labourers, who received only marginally less food than German workers, the eastern workers were given completely inadequate rations. The watery soups which they were fed contained agonizingly little fat and protein, and the bread they were allocated was virtually inedible. Known as ‘Russian’ bread it was made of a mixture of rye, sugar beet waste and straw.124 The work by physiologist Nathan Zuntz during the First World War had demonstrated that it was possible for a human on an inadequate diet to continue physical work right up to the point where starvation caused the failure of the vital organs.125 But in following this principle with the Soviet forced labourers the National Socialists came up against the limits of the human basic metabolic rate. They discovered that feeding one worker 3,000 calories was more effective than feeding 1,500 calories to two workers. The two workers on 1,500 calories each used up all the energy simply staying alive. The well-fed worker could stay alive and expend the surplus energy on productive physical activity. The military administration complained, ‘It is illusory to believe that one can achieve the same performance from 200 inadequately fed people as with 100 properly fed workers … the minimum rations distributed simply to keep people alive, since they are not matched by any equivalent performance, must be regarded from the point of view of the national war economy as a pure loss, which is further increased by transport costs and administration.’126 At the IG Farben factory in Landsberg only 158 of the 500 eastern workers employed at the factory were fit enough to work. A manager at a screw factory in Nuremberg was concerned that his German employees might start to sympathize with the Russian women labourers who sat in the workrooms crying with hunger.127
The regime was divided over the matter of eastern workers’ rations. Speer and the Wehrmacht wanted the rations to be improved. They were motivated by practical, not humanitarian concerns. The German armament industry was by then reliant on Soviet forced labour and Speer was struggling to rescue the failing war effort. However, he came up against the Foreign Department of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) which represented the interests of the ideologues in the party. For them the sizeable population of eastern workers within the Reich represented an unsavoury pool of contamination.128 It would be politically unthinkable to improve the diet of these sub-humans until the civilian ration, which had been cut in the spring, was again raised. They insisted that, rather than following a ‘goal-rational’ logic, the feeding policy for eastern foreign workers follow a ‘value-rational’ logic.129
In the autumn the plunder of the food supplies of the occupied territories eased the food situation within the Reich, and the civilian ration was raised. Even then the forced labourers’ diet was only improved by a 10 per cent increase in calories and it was rare for eastern workers to receive their full food allocation. Often much of the food that arrived at the camps was rotten and had to be thrown away.130 Olga Fjodorowna Sch., a Pole who worked for IG Farben, recalled that she and her fellow workers supplemented their diet with ‘grasses and leaves … but they gave us cramps and pains in the heart. When the Americans freed us I could not even drink a glass of milk. I was eighteen years old and weighed thirty-one kilos.’131
In 1942 the manpower shortage led the pragmatic wing of the National Socialist regime to look to the concentration camps as a possible source of labour. Until this crisis point in the war the hard labour of concentration camp inmates was regarded merely as a form of punishment and was not supposed to be productive. In fact, according to Himmler, ‘the more physically exhausting and senseless the work was, the more successful the measure’.132 For the political opponents of the regime, the Polish and eastern European intelligentsia, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, Catholics, members of the resistance, common criminals and Jews in the concentration camps, hunger was so overwhelming that all other desires faded away, leaving only an obsession with food. ‘Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than everybody,’ wrote Primo Levi in a description of his time in the work camp of Buna (a sub-camp of Auschwitz). ‘[Sigi] slipped on to the subject of food and now he talks endlessly about some marriage luncheon … everyone tells him to keep quiet but within ten minutes Béla is describing … a recipe to make meat-pies with corncobs and lard and spices … and he is cursed, sworn at and a third one begins to describe …’133 In Auschwitz these conversations were known as ‘stomach masturbation’.134
In 1942 concentration camp prisoners were transferred to undertake productive work in the aircraft and rocket industries. The most notori-ous of such projects was Dora Mittelbau in the Harz mountains, where concentration camp inmates constructed an underground factory for the production of the V2 rockets which were to menace Londoners in the final months of the war. They had to sleep inside the tunnels amid the noise and dust of the work, and saw daylight only once a week. The sanitation was rudimentary and they never had enough water to drink. One third (20,000) of the workers died. The tunnels were littered with the dead bodies of prisoners who had collapsed from overwork and malnutrition, and corpses swung from the ceilings overhead, placed there to remind the workers of the fate of recalcitrants. When Speer and his staff visited on a tour of inspection some of his team were so distressed by what they saw that they ‘had to take extra leave’.135
Himmler began to look for cheap ways of feeding the concentration camp prisoners so that they would have enough energy to work like ‘Egyptian slaves’ for the regime.136 The SS Brigadier Walter Schieber of the Armaments Supply Office invented a sausage made from the waste products of cellulose production. It was flavoured with a liver aroma and looked and smelt like liver sausage, and was christened ‘eastern food’. Himmler was delighted with the sausage and described it as an ‘unbelievably nourishing, tasty, sausage-like paste, that made an excellent foodstuff’.137 It was given to inmates at Mauthausen and the guards described the prisoners as enthusiastically spreading it on their bread. But Ernst Martin, an inmate who worked as a clerk in the clinic there, secretly examined the paste under a microscope and found it was crawling with bacteria. He recalled that even the guard dogs would not touch it. Soon after its distribution the incidence of stomach and intestinal disorders increased and killed 116 of the prisoners. Nevertheless, a production centre for the sausage was set up and 100,000 of the prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were fed the revolting paste with unknown consequences for their health and mortality.138
Although the National Socialists did acknowledge that western Allied prisoners of war were protected by the rules of the Geneva Convention, and officers were exempted from labour, the ordinary soldiers were also put to work for the regime on a minimal diet. R. P. Evans, captured in France in 1940, was sent to Stalag VIII B in Upper Silesia, where he worked alongside Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Italians and Jews. The British prisoners cleared tree stumps and constructed roads on a site which was destined to become a plant for extracting petrol from coal. ‘After a twelve hour working day, we were absolutely exhausted when we returned to camp. After a wash with ersatz soap … we were then issued with our food. This consisted of about a pint of watery vegetable soup, usually mangold or sauerkraut … three potatoes boiled in their jackets, and a loaf of black bread between twelve men, and sometimes a minute piece of ersatz margarine.’139 Often the men could not resist eating the bread, intended for their breakfast, which meant that, apart from an early morning cup of ersatz coffee, they frequently had to wait another twenty-four hours for their next meal. Comradeship among the men weakened in the face of hunger: ‘it became a case of each man for himself, and devil take the hindmost’.140
It was only when Red Cross parcels began to arrive in the camp about eighteen months after their imprisonment that the food situation improved. From then on they received a steady supply until just before the end of the war. The survival of British, French, Canadian and American prisoners of the Germans was good, only 4 per cent dying in captivity. R. P. Evans was convinced that the Red Cross parcels were the key to their survival. When the first parcels arrived ‘we carried them back to our rooms and sat and gloated over them … The first cup of tea was like drinking nectar … Some chaps started eating, and kept right on until it was all gone. True to my nature, I rationed mine, and had a little each day to supplement the German rations.’141
The level of black market activity in any country during the war can be read as an indicator of the level of acceptance of the food rationing system among the population. It also acts as an indicator of whether rationing was providing people with sufficient food. By its very nature black market activity is difficult to measure, but what evidence there is suggests that although the German and British black markets did not approach the size of those in occupied Europe, there was a black sector in both countries.
Farmers, food processors and food retailers acted as the main generative source of black market dealings. In Germany, small farmers had resisted government controls since the Reich Food Corporation was founded in 1934. In particular, they disliked the centralized collection of milk which denied them the ability to make good profits selling home-made butter in the local urban markets.142 Evasion of centralized controls continued into the war when they became particularly common in the meat market. There was a variety of tricks that could be employed, such as simply failing to register livestock, sending healthy animals to the knacker’s yard, and failing to weigh the carcasses with the heads so that the equivalent of the weight of the heads could be kept back in good meat for illegal sale.143 In Britain and Germany farmers and slaughterhouses used all these ploys. However, the amount of black market meat emerging from the slaughterhouses in Britain appears to have consisted of a tiny proportion of the legal total, while in Germany, perhaps because of the greater number of smallholders, it seems to have been more prevalent. In Germany, the special courts set up to prosecute black marketeering dealt most often with charges of illegal slaughter.
In 1942 the mayor of the commune of Rottweil, near Stuttgart, his son, two clerks and an official from the Reich Food Corporation were tried for a scam which they had been operating with the farmers since 1939. Slaughtered pigs were weighed without their heads or trotters and the equivalent weight in meat was withheld. The conspirators were accused of removing 5,080 kilograms of pork (equivalent to 2,500 weekly basic ration portions) from the system. The mayor and the Food Corporation official were lucky to escape the death penalty and received a prison sentence instead.144 The magistrate argued that use of the death sentence would create an undesirable atmosphere of conflict with the farmers in the region. This tendency towards leniency in the courts, and the National Socialists’ reluctance to prosecute prominent officials for fear of publicizing the disreputable behaviour of party members, meant that the threat of the death penalty did little to discourage this kind of activity. Besides, the state lacked the manpower to monitor the actions of every official and it seems that many took the risk, calculating that the chances that they would be found out were relatively low.145
In wartime Britain the term black market conjured up images of an underworld of organized crime run by suspiciously well-dressed men known as spivs. It was seen as having little to do with ordinary, respectable people.146 In fact, most black market transactions were petty infringements, like the exchange which took place between Vere Hodgson and her grocer in February 1941. ‘Went for my bacon ration and while he was cutting it had a word with the man about the Cubic Inch of Cheese. He got rid of the other customers and then whispered, “Wait a mo.” I found half a pound of cheese being thrust into my bag with great secrecy and speed!’147 Shopkeepers would process their wares carefully and build up a surplus of under-the-counter stock which they could slip into the shopping baskets of their favoured customers. In Germany, Inge Deutschkron, a Jew living underground with a couple who ran a bookshop, recalled that the husband expected his wife Grete to put meals on the table that were just as in normal times. In her effort to provide sumptuous meals Grete was sucked into a complicated, network of transactions. Her parents ran a food shop and she got as much butter as she wanted from them. Then there was Frau Marsch, who worked in a butcher’s. She would smuggle meat out and swap it for real coffee, or swap butter for coffee, coffee for meat, meat for soap. In the end, ‘Grete was so wrapped up in her black marketing that she could hardly think about anything else.’148
Too much has probably been made of the idea that the British pulled together during the war, but the Ministry of Food did manage to cultivate a sense of social justice which seems to have been shared by the population at large. Those who admitted to a Mass Observation survey conducted after the war that they had dabbled in black marketeering looked back on their behaviour with a mixture of guilt or self-justification.149 The great majority of black market users were conscious that they were taking more than they were entitled to and thus disrupting a system which they accepted did a relatively good job of equitably sharing out the hardships of war.150 The greatest danger to the Ministry of Food’s carefully constructed image of fairness was the ‘luxury feeding’ of the rich. A Home Intelligence report from March 1942 warned that a sense of inequality of sacrifice was being fuelled by ‘the resort of the rich to expensive restaurants’.151 Even after the regulation of restaurant meals in June, chefs were still able to commandeer plentiful supplies of unrationed meats such as fish, lobster, chicken and rabbit, and there was no denying that the rich could still eat well if they paid for it. However, aristocratic indulgence does not seem to have thoroughly undermined the sense of common sacrifice which developed within British society during the war years. George Orwell, who in the 1930s refused to believe that Britain’s ‘bitterly class-ridden society’ would be able to unite over a war, was as early as December 1940 surprised to find that ‘patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred’.152 The British working classes expected the British aristocracy to indulge, and it seems that the general consensus was that despite their fine dining habits they were held sufficiently in check, while at the same time the government did enough to protect the interests of the working people.
In Germany there was certainly plenty of luxury feeding in Berlin restaurants. In February 1941 Marie Vassiltchikov, who worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, ‘lunched at Horcher’s and simply gorged. As the best restaurant in town, they scorn the very idea of food coupons.’153 Horcher’s was one of Göring’s favourite restaurants and he is said to have regularly indulged in meals which consumed a week’s worth of an ordinary German’s rations. Since the early days of the regime Goebbels had been trying hard to build up a public sense of the German people as a Volksgemeinschaft or a society of equals. Göring’s flamboyant lifestyle, drinking, eating and partying to excess at the various castles and hunting lodges which he built for himself, consistently undermined the propaganda and destroyed the idea of the National Socialists as restrained and upright leaders. While Göring might greet supper guests at his palatial residence at Carinhall wearing a ‘blue or violet kimono with fur-trimmed bedroom slippers’ and a girdle set with jewels, guests dining at the house of Goebbels would be met by liveried footmen who would collect their ration coupons on silver trays. Goebbels’ guests were frequently disappointed to discover that their coupons had earned them a meagre dinner of herring with boiled potatoes.154 Hitler himself ate a peculiar vegetarian diet and generally served austere and execrable food at his dining table. A typical meal might consist of ‘a horrible grey barley broth – with crackers and some butter with Gervais-cheese as pudding’.155 His weakness was sugar. Hitler loved fancy cakes and chocolate bars and could eat as much as 2 pounds of chocolate in one day.156 In 1943 after Goebbels had announced that Germany must now invest every ounce of energy in waging total war, he was so incensed by Göring’s continued extravagance that he arranged for an angry mob to attack Horcher’s. In defence of his right to luxurious meals Göring posted a contingent from the Luftwaffe to guard the restaurant. He eventually lost this particular battle when the restaurant was forced to close for lack of foodstuffs. (The family and their staff relocated to Madrid.) But to Goebbels’ despair many Nazi potentates followed Göring’s example and sought to capitalize on their positions of power.
The public’s awareness that corruption was entrenched among the ‘upper ten thousand’ of the National Socialist administration undermined Goebbels’ rhetoric about the need for full mobilization and sacrifice. Hitler issued a decree in March 1942, and again in May 1943, calling on those in top positions to set a good example under the present conditions of total war, but this was to little avail as self-serving corruption appears to have been the norm.157 In 1942 a long-standing arrangement between a Berlin delicatessen trader called August Nöthling and an array of members of the Nazi elite to supply rationed goods without taking payment in coupons was exposed. Among his customers were Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Food and Agriculture Walther Darré, the Chief of Police Wilhelm von Grolman, Field Marshals Walther von Brauchitsch and Wilhelm Keitel and the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, who was listed as having received off the ration, ‘ham (smoked and tinned), tins of corned beef and sausage, venison, butter, fat, poultry, chocolates, tea, cocoa, sugar, oil, sweets, honey and fruit’.158 The report on Nöthling’s activities was written by the Police President Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, who failed to mention that he had himself bought spirits, wines and Cognac from the shopkeeper.159 When the affair came to Goebbels’ attention and he confronted the culprits they came up with an array of what Goebbels dismissed as ‘soggy’ excuses, the most common being that the food shopping was handled entirely by their wives, who had not realized that they were doing anything wrong.160 Goebbels’ determination to make an example of these men at a public trial was frustrated by Nöthling, who, it was claimed, committed suicide in his cell.
It was perhaps the awareness of the prevalence of high-level corruption which made Hitler and Göring (to Goebbels’ annoyance) reluctant to punish small-scale black marketeers who went out from the towns to barter in the countryside for food, a practice endearingly known in German as ‘hamstering’.161 Henry Picker, an adjutant at Hitler’s headquarters, reported that at lunchtime on 23 June 1942 Hitler held forth on the subject of hamstering, arguing that the police should not search people coming into the cities from the countryside for a few eggs. He demonstrated his failure to grasp the economics of agricultural supply by arguing that as long as the farmers filled their quotas this sort of traditional trade did no harm. Goebbels pointed out that ‘the end result is that there are absolutely no fruit or vegetables in the shops’.162 He was put down by Hitler, who argued that too much transportation of vegetables meant that they spoiled and this, in fact, was a more efficient way of ensuring that the towns were fed by their hinterlands. This was not a view which would have been shared by the townspeople who were bartering away their Persian rugs, table linen and children’s toys in exchange for potatoes, a little milk, a few green vegetables or fruit. The growth of a black market of barter in Germany indicated the seriousness of food shortages within the industrial cities. It was a disturbing signal that the ration was failing to ensure all German civilians an adequate diet.
In Britain the food situation had stabilized by the end of 1941, and even if meals were monotonous and not particularly tasty, the food supply remained stable and adequate throughout the rest of the war. In Germany, in contrast, the food situation in the cities progressively worsened until a crisis was reached in the winter and spring of 1941–42. Potato shortages had begun to impact upon urban dwellers in the summer of 1941, but by the time the exceptionally cold winter months set in there were serious problems with the potato supply to the cities and shortages were reported in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Wilhelm Kiel, a social democrat living in the northern industrial area, described how he had to ‘literally go begging to the farmers, from house to house, in order to obtain, pound by pound, the quantity of potatoes we need, in order to eke out a bare existence until the autumn’.163 Women tried to disguise the lack of meat on the menu by making ‘false meatballs and cutlets’ out of potatoes, lentils, turnips and white cabbage, but with a shortage of potatoes and vegetables it became increasingly difficult to make filling meals.164 Berliners were so starved of greens that nettles and sugar beet leaves sold for high prices in the markets.165
A further depressing development was the progressive decline in the quality of bread, the other mainstay of the diet.166 Over the months and years of the war the milling grade of wheat was continually increased until by April 1942 virtually none of the bran was removed. Gradually, more and more barley, potato and rye flour was mixed in with the wheat flour. This did not necessarily affect the nutritional value of the loaves but food offices began to complain that the bread was causing digestive problems and diarrhoea. In 1942 a report from Regensburg complained, ‘a good bread for labouring people is half the meaning of life and has a tremendous impact on productivity as well as morale’.167
The decline in the quality and quantity of staple foods was accompanied by a Ministry of Food campaign to encourage people to find substitute foods. Teachers were instructed to take their classes out into the fields to gather weeds and grasses such as yarrow, goat’s rue and stinging nettles as replacements for cabbage. Even the roots of carnations were recommended.168 In the autumn of 1942 the Württemberg Milk and Fats Trade Association encouraged people to go out into the woods and collect beechnuts, from which a valuable edible oil could be extracted. For every kilogram delivered to them they promised to issue a voucher for 200 grams of margarine or oil.169 Unfortunately, the beechnut crop was poor that year and these exhortations to find substitute foods did nothing but remind civilians of the hunger winters of the First World War, when people were so desperate they too went out into the fields to gather wild foods.
In the autumn and winter of 1942 the intensive exploitation of the occupied territories brought temporary relief and rations were raised. But the relief did not last long. The year 1943 brought yet more food shortages to Germany’s cities. In Essen bread and potatoes made up 90 per cent of what most people ate and the industrial towns were once more hard hit by an unsatisfactory potato harvest in the summer.170 The Ministry of Food began to make plans to distribute swedes and turnips, and Italian rice and lentils were brought in to eke out the supplies of staple foods.171 The basic meat and fat ration had to be cut yet again in May.172 Even though military rations were cut by 20 per cent, the army was too large a burden on the system. All this was exacerbated by the 7 million foreign workers in the Reich and the fact that local officials began to distribute generous rations to the homeless in the bombed-out cities.173
In the spring of 1943 Sybil Bannister, an Englishwoman married to a German gynaecologist, discovered how serious the food situation in the towns was in comparison with the comparatively plentiful food supply in the countryside. Sybil spent the first years of the war living in Bromberg, a town in the annexed part of Poland. Here she missed cheese and sauces but felt that she ‘could not grumble. We were always able to buy a winter store of potatoes … in the summer we had ample fruit and vegetables to bottle for the winter months.’174 Then she took her baby son to stay with his grandfather in Wuppertal-Barmen. Here everyday life was much more difficult. ‘Besides the war in general, there were two things which were obviously lowering their vitality; one was the food shortage, and the other the continued air-raids … The food shortage was as yet not desperately acute. There were enough goods in the shops to supply the full complement on the ration cards, but this was just not enough. It is easy to go short for a few days or a few weeks without noticing many ill effects, but when it runs into months, the need accumulates until a permanent state of hunger and enervation ensues … in May 1943, coming straight from the country in the East where we had unlimited supplies of milk, potatoes and vegetables, into a town in an industrial centre in the West, it was remarkable to notice what a difference the deficiency in these foods made to the possibility of varying the menu and still more of satisfying appetites … In Barmen there was not only no full milk for adults, but potatoes were rationed and vegetables in short supply. As it was impossible to “fill up” with these commodities, the bread ration also proved inadequate … It was a constant worry to know how to fill the hungry mouths.’175
It is not necessary to be actually starving in order for food deprivation to cause psychological and physical distress. Women used up a great deal of mental and physical energy thinking up different ways of preparing the same foods and producing something edible out of a few potatoes and lentils, with barely any fat or green vegetables. Long and tiring food queues, anxiety about where the next meal would come from, interspersed with periods of real deprivation, all combined to cause great stress. Then the Allied aerial bombing campaign began to hit the industrial areas in earnest and the inhabitants of the cities were reduced to a state of misery.
Sybil Bannister was unlucky enough to experience the first bombing raid to hit Wuppertal-Barmen while she was visiting her father-in-law. The family’s home was destroyed. They were given chits which allowed them to buy food in the shops. As the air raids in Wuppertal had only just begun, the shops were still stocked but, ‘Later on … there were no goods available in the shops.’176 The bombing raids took their toll on food warehouses and household stores. More and more food had to come out of the regular rationing system to set up emergency kitchens for the homeless.177 In the city of Cologne, the last two years of the war were appalling. Lengthening food queues were matched by long walks to work as the public transport system broke down. Lack of fuel for cooking and heating, combined with frequent air raids, made home life debilitating, and the shabby clothing and worn shoes gave the civilian population a depressing air. There were no work shoes to be had or rubber boots. Washing was difficult with the tiny piece of in-ferior soap which was allocated on the monthly ration.178 The deaths of friends and neighbours from the bombing campaign, and the increasing loss of men at the front to death and injury and military defeats – first at Stalingrad, then North Africa, Italy, on the Atlantic in the submarine war, and over and over again on the eastern front – all wore down civilian morale.179
Under these circumstances of increasing hardship industrial workers began to turn to factory canteens. Workers’ families were evacuated and the men were left with no one at home to cook for them. Others were bombed out and had no alternative but to eat at the factory canteen. The numbers using them rose from 800,000 to almost 5 million.180 Sybil Bannister was extremely glad of her canteen meals. After visiting Wuppertal she had returned to Bromberg, only to flee before the Russians in January 1945. She ended up in Hamburg working as a nurse for sick workers at a factory, where ‘there was a canteen … where they served up a wholesome hot-pot with very little meat in it, but certainly as much as the number of coupons they asked for, added to which (thrown in, coupon free) there was a good helping of potatoes and vegetables, which were rationed and in short supply. We lined up to fetch the soup-plate full of steaming stew.’181
In Britain, as the next chapter will discuss, the diet of the working classes improved despite the exigencies of war. In Germany, even though the regime intended to spare the workers from hunger, it was the industrial working population which bore the brunt of wartime food shortages. Germany simply did not have enough food and too much of what was grown stayed in the countryside rather than being transported into the cities. By 1944 German townspeople were eating barley grits rather than meat and potatoes, and shortages in the cities had become the norm.182 The loss of the Ukraine intensified the meat and fat shortages and led to a drastic cut in sugar supplies.183 Nevertheless, at no time did the food situation reach the disastrous levels of the last two winters of the First World War. When food shortages were at their worst between 1914 and 1919, the meat supply afforded each person only a paltry 14 grams of meat per day, while in 1944–45 Germany had enough meat to allocate each citizen a still meagre but more adequate 48 grams a day.184 There was no question of famine or mass starvation even in the urban areas. Nor was there ever any question of social unrest or worker revolt as a result of hunger, although the Sicherheitsdienst constantly warned that the workers were in a dangerously critical mood. The National Socialists had so effectively destroyed the social democratic, communist and trade union leadership during the 1930s that an organized opposition to the National Socialist government no longer existed. Ration cuts were accepted with grumbles and complaints. Those who acknowledged that working to the bitter end would help to prop up a government they detested resigned themselves to the situation, concentrated on getting on with their lives, and quietly made a concerted effort to obtain food on the black market.
As the war came to a close in late 1944 and early 1945, the black market became an increasingly important source of food. Those with possessions to barter occupied a position of privilege. Ruth P., a child at the time, recalled with sadness how her beautiful white doll’s bed, her doll Christel, and a marionette with a black pony ‘were all given away for barter for a goose and a duck, a rabbit or something. All for something to eat.’185 Those with neither possessions to barter nor useful social connections, including many families who had fled their homes in the east or lost them to bombing, found themselves at the bottom of the social order. In a letter to her husband, written at the very end of 1944, Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg wrote, ‘We sometimes have very little and don’t look exactly blooming. Especially at the end of each rationing period [of 4 weeks] we have virtually nothing. We get only ¾ lb of butter each month, a disappearingly small piece of cheese, very little meat, each only ½ lb … Even the bread is insufficient … sometimes I spend hours wishing for lots of good fat things to eat! And sweet things.’186 In contrast, her landlady seemed to be faring quite well and her Christmas celebrations included real coffee made with beans, and Christmas cakes. There was still good food to be had if one had the means to acquire it. Despite a great deal of misery and some deprivation, even the least well-off in German society were still far better off than most of the rest of continental Europe. Maria H. recalled, ‘We were hungry, actually we were always hungry, but it was not as though we suffered from starvation.’187
*At this point in the war he was First Lord of the Admiralty