The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food

by Lizzie Collingham

  THE BATTLE FOR PRODUCTION

  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 b
een 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 fort
unate 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.