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

by Lizzie Collingham

  Italy’s agricultural sector should have been well prepared for war. When Mussolini seized power in 1922 one-quarter of Italy’s budget for imported goods and services was spent on wheat. Mussolini could see that if his plans for a Mediterranean empire were to be realized, food self-sufficiency would be an essential element in addressing the balance of payments deficit and freeing up foreign exchange. Once these problems were solved Italy would have a far more solid economic foundation for industrial development.87 Italy’s agricultural sector was certainly in desperate need of regeneration, marked as it was by low productivity, high unemployment and poverty. The ‘Battle for Wheat’ was launched in July 1925 and by dint of land reclamation the area under wheat was increased. Outreach and education programmes introducing machinery, fertilizers, higher-yielding wheat varieties and irrigation were extremely effective. By 1935 Italy had increased its wheat production by 40 per cent and significantly reduced its expenditure on food imports. The only problem was that internal wheat production did not cover the gap created by cutting imports, and the annual amount of wheat available across the population declined by 14 kilograms per person.88

  When Hitler invaded Poland, Italian officials began to panic-buy wheat from Hungary and Yugoslavia, afraid that they would be unable to feed the population with Italy’s own wheat harvest, and bread and flour shortages did indeed plague wartime Italy. Meanwhile, Darré went on a tour of the country to assess future prospects for food exports to the Reich.89 Once Italy had entered the war a general state of administrative chaos meant that Mussolini’s Battle for Wheat campaign was neglected and overall agricultural yields fell. In 1943 they had fallen by 25 per cent. Once the Germans had occupied the country they sank dramatically to 63 per cent of pre-war levels.90 Filled with contempt for their erstwhile allies and careless of its impact on the Italians’ food supply, the National Socialists continued to demand wheat, rice, tobacco, cheese, fruit and vegetables in exchange for coal. Those German soldiers stationed in the country were allocated a meat ration of 750 grams a week. This represented about double the amount of calories provided by the daily Italian ration. The Italians complained that the Germans were ‘eating away at Italy’.91 In 1944 the Agriculture Minister, Edoardo Moroni, begged for Germany to send a delivery of grain or at least trucks so that food could be transported to the cities. His pleas fell on deaf ears.

  The gradual worsening of the Italian food situation was reflected in the experience of the family of Giovanni Tassoni and his wife Guila. The family was very poor. They lived in a one-room shack near the gravel pit where Giovanni worked manufacturing lime in a kiln. The nearest town was Valmonte, two hours’ train journey from Rome. No one in their neighbourhood possessed a radio or read newspapers, so they were only vaguely aware of the course of the war and most of their information came from rumours. In the early years the war had little effect on the family. Women, children and the elderly became increasingly dominant in the town as the young men were conscripted, and food became more difficult to acquire. By 1942 the shortage of food began to make itself felt. The ration of bread sank to 150 grams a day, and meat, oil and butter rations were all gradually reduced. Then suddenly in August 1943 Germans appeared and, as the Tassonis realized, they were now in charge. ‘Food became even scarcer’, and this was not helped by the demands of the occupying troops who would come to their shack and demand eggs or bread.92

  By late 1943 at least thirteen people were living in the Tassonis’ hut besides the Tassonis and their own five children. It was a struggle to feed everyone. The Germans had requisitioned the local flour mill so ‘Giovanni reconstructed an old coffee mill for the milling of the flour. When properly fastened to the table, it was possible to produce four to five kilos of flour if one worked all night. At first the only wheat that was available was black, and when that ran out fava and ceci beans were ground to make the flour for bread.’ The family turned their entire garden over to the production of potatoes, and ‘Guila coaxed her hens to make more eggs so that she could trade some for bread, which the Germans baked in their giant ovens nearby.’93 The Tassonis were eventually driven out of their home by Allied bombing and went to live in a cave. German soldiers fleeing from the invading Americans would occasionally turn up there and beg for civilian clothes. Then one day the Americans arrived and scattered caramels from the turrets of their tanks. ‘Word spread quickly that the fields near Cisterna and Anzio where the Americans had been dug in, were full of such treasures, and so people from all over bicycled, ran, and walked in that direction to bring home whatever they might find. The scavenging was always dangerous because of the possibility of setting off a land mine. The food was as welcome as it was unfamiliar. Everything was in cans – even the spaghetti – and tasted of sugar.’94 When the Allies liberated Italy they were shocked by the utter deprivation of the urban population. As the troops arrived in the port of Naples they were horrified to observe malnourished people, dressed in rags, picking scraps of garbage out of crevices in the pier. In the town itself a prostitute could be bought for 25 cents, the price of an American C ration can of meat and vegetable hash.95

  Even if the Italians began the war as Germany’s allies their supposed racial inferiority and military ineptitude meant that the National Socialists accorded them little respect. In contrast, the Danes were regarded as fellow Aryans. Consequently, the occupying German authorities interfered less in the agricultural administration of the country and allowed the existing pre-war institutions to remain in place.96 This caused far less disruption to agriculture than was the case in Belgium or France and enabled the government to maintain greater control over its farmers.

  The Germans had highest hopes for receiving food imports from France and Holland. It was hoped that the Dutch surpluses, which had previously gone to Britain, would simply be redirected to the Reich. But this calculation failed to allow for the impact of the loss of agricultural inputs such as fodder and fertilizer because of the blockade. The Dutch responded to this problem by quickly converting from livestock to arable farming and although they were able to send large quantities of meat and fat to the Reich in the first two years of the war, by the end they were only able to supply potatoes, feed grain, sugar and large quantities of fruit and vegetables.97

  It was Denmark which surprised the Germans. Danish administrators adopted a pricing policy which encouraged farmers to maximize production of the commodities most desirable for Germany – beef, milk, pork and bacon – and, despite difficulties associated with the lack of imported feed and fertilizers, the farmers delivered.98 Control over Danish consumption was left in the hands of the Danish government and was limited to no more than butter rationing and restrictions on the purchase of meat. The reasonable rations meant that the black market barely existed in Denmark and the Germans were able to cream off a surprisingly large surplus. Denmark provided the Reich with about one month’s worth of butter, pork and beef a year. As food supplies in Germany decreased, this contribution became ever more important, providing perhaps as much as 20 per cent of the urban population’s meat in 1944.99

  Holland and Denmark both possessed relatively efficient agricultural sectors. In particular, scientific knowledge was integral to their agricultural processes. This meant that they were able to restructure their agricultural production, and the eating habits of their populations were sufficiently flexible to allow the substitution of one foodstuff for another. As a result their populations were the best fed in occupied western Europe. Nevertheless, there was a subtle difference between the diets of the two countries which was reflected in a rise in infectious diseases such as diphtheria and tuberculosis, measles, whooping cough, dysentery, bronchopneumonia, typhoid and flu among small children and young adults in Holland.100 Most of the factors which could explain the spread of infectious diseases – overcrowding, the increasing mobility of populations, lack of soap and poor hygiene, illegal and possibly unsafe slaughtering of meat – were present in both countries.101 The explanation seems to lie in
the micronutrient deficiencies in the Dutch diet which have a particularly pernicious impact on the development of the immune system in the young.

  Like the British, the Dutch switched to eating wholemeal bread and more vegetables and cut back on meat and fat. The poor in particular converted to a plant-based diet and swapped their meat coupons for bread on the black market. Lack of animal foods in the diet led in turn to a lack of trace elements such as iron, zinc, selenium, vitamins A, B6 and B12, which makes children more vulnerable to disease and increases the rate of child mortality.102 This phenomenon impacted on child health throughout all of German-occupied western and eastern Europe. It was only the Danes, who managed to maintain an adequate amount of meat in their diet, who escaped this side-effect of German occupation.

  Having spent the war relatively cushioned from wartime hunger, the Dutch suffered terribly at the end of the war during the battle to liberate Europe. In September 1944 the Allied operation to re-take Holland failed, and the provinces of North and South Holland and Utrecht were left in German hands. Thinking liberation was at hand, the Dutch railway workers had gone on strike, and in retaliation the Germans cut the gas, electricity, water and food supplies into these parts of Holland.103 Throughout the cold winter of 1944–45 the situation of the Dutch trapped in this pocket became desperate. Cornelia Fuykschot recalled that without water to wash, heating or light, life became dirty, cold and joyless. Every evening her family retreated into the kitchen ‘in the gathering darkness, the street empty, the curtains open since we had no light of any kind and our hands in our pockets because it was cold inside too’.104 Here they would huddle around the stove where a pot of black market dried peas would be cooking. Fortunately her mother had laid down a store of peas early in the war in case of an emergency. ‘We ate a pan full of them every day. They were our only meal and all there was. Parsley, celery, carrots and onions were finished. Even salt could no longer be bought … You had to chew carefully because some of the black was not pea, nor blight, but gravel, and that could cost you your tooth. Most of the peas went down unchewed; they had not even swelled up enough to become bigger, and we let our stomachs do the sorting and digesting.’105 By March 1945 the peas were beginning to run short and Cornelia’s family eked them out by limiting themselves to one cup each per day.

  The Red Cross lobbied to be allowed to transport food into the area. But Churchill remained as unwilling as ever to feed European civilians trapped behind German lines. He argued that the food would just be eaten by the Germans. The American government was also concerned that the Soviets might be antagonized if any food transported into the area by the Allies fell into the hands of the Wehrmacht. The Soviets were in no mood to countenance feeding German soldiers while the Red Army was still spilling blood trying to defeat the Wehrmacht in the east. Reports began to reach Britain that the Dutch were dying in the streets of Amsterdam.106 In the end the death toll reached 22,000.107 The Dutch prime minister in exile informed Churchill that his people would hold him responsible for the deaths, and General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, pointed out that he did not want to send Allied troops into an area where people were already starving.108 Conditions generally deteriorated for the first few weeks after liberation and the already dire food situation meant that chaos and a significantly increased death-rate were likely to ensue. These arguments persuaded Churchill to relax his stand. The American food administrators in Britain released some of the United States’ stocks earmarked for Germany, and the Allies began air-dropping food into the region in March 1945. Air-drops were chosen as the quickest and most effective way of getting food to the area from Britain. Once it had been decided to bring in aid, the measures were generous. From the end of April 1945, 800 Allied planes dropped 7,458 tons of food, including flour, chocolate, tea and margarine. Unfortunately many of the packages smashed, leaving a thin layer of fat all over the dropping zones. The Dutch authorities’ punctiliousness in first collecting and sorting the food before attempting to distribute it as fairly as possible, meant that it took another ten days before the civilians started to receive handouts. For some this was ten days too long and the delay cost lives.109 The Dutch were finally liberated by the Canadians in May 1945. Cornelia remembered the delight her family took in the military supplies that became available in the stores and her praise for reviled wartime foods indicates the level of deprivation the Dutch had experienced. ‘The grocery stores sold powdered egg, bought from army surplus, something we had never heard of before, and it fascinated us with its possibilities. You just had to add water and you could fry an omelette! … Another new item was Spam … canned meat. That too had myriad possibilities, all of them good.’110

  The fact that Denmark was able to export 200,000 tons of butter to the Reich between 1940 and 1943, in comparison to a paltry 49,000 tons of butter from France, demonstrates the superiority of the lenient occupational agricultural strategy adopted in Denmark.111 The situation in Denmark showed that with the right governmental pricing policies farmers could be motivated to overcome their difficulties and maintain yields. Even in Belgium, which was hard hit by the loss of imports, farmers demonstrated this point – although in Belgium’s case the motivational pricing was provided by the black market. Sensible pricing policies would also have addressed the problem of small farmers’ tendency to withdraw from the market and reduce their production.

  When imports are measured in quantity (rather than in monetary value) then the continental European countries delivered 40 per cent less food in 1943 than they had in peacetime.112 The German occupiers would have had a better chance of squeezing more food out of western Europe if they had invested in restructuring agriculture rather than concentrating on plunder. If the self-sufficiency lessons learned in Germany had been transferred to the relatively modernized western European farmers this would have gone some way towards addressing the problems created by blockade. In addition, if civilian rations had been maintained at a reasonable level, as they were in Denmark, the black market would have been made superfluous to survival and thus been dampened down. In this way the authorities would have gained control over a far greater proportion of the food the farmers actually produced. Backe’s insistence on looking eastwards to the less modern and adaptable Ukraine as a bread basket for the Reich revealed just how little he understood the economics and the logic of agriculture and food supply. Meanwhile, Göring’s insistence on regarding the occupied countries as short-term sources of food, and the ruthless requisitioning policies which he insisted upon, meant that hunger, malnutrition and, in the case of the Greeks, famine, were exported to millions of Europeans.

  *One of which was the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, now known by its abbreviation Oxfam, which was set up in response to the plight of starving Europeans.

  9

  Germany Exports Hunger

  to the East

  What can one do, how to live? They probably want to give us a slow death. Obviously it is inconvenient to shoot everybody.

  (L. Nartova, an unemployed teacher in Kiev, 25 April 1942)1

  Early in 1941 Hitler, Göring and Backe all set their sights on the Soviet Union as the solution to Germany’s food shortages. Their intentions were set out in the Hunger Plan – Backe’s scheme to divert food from the towns of the occupied Soviet Union, which it was estimated would result in the death by starvation of 30 million Soviets. The plan clearly stated that the first priority would be to feed the Wehrmacht. The National Socialists wanted their troops to be well fed, but Backe was adamant that over a prolonged period German agriculture would be unable to bear the strain of feeding at least 3,000 calories per man per day to a military force which, at its peak, numbered 9.5 million men (about one-seventh of the total population).2 The Wehrmacht was particularly greedy for grain, meat and fat. By the beginning of 1943 the army was consuming 40 per cent of the total amount of grain available to the Reich, and 62 per cent of the meat.3 Even in 1941 it was clear that Germany’s campaign for self-s
ufficiency would be unable to close the meat and fat gap for the civilian population and the extra food to feed the army would have to be found from elsewhere. Hence the clear statement in the Hunger Plan of 1941 that ‘the war can only be continued if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia in the third year of the war’.4

  It was hoped that the Ukraine would produce enough food not only to feed the army but to supplement the food supply within the Reich. Within Germany memories of the First World War did much to dampen down enthusiasm for going to war. The German people were afraid that the Second World War would bring a repeat of the dreadful turnip winter of 1916–17. The Sicherheitsdienst, whose job it was to monitor the public mood, found that already in the summer of 1941 food shortages and the unequal distribution of rations were the most complained about issues after the resentment caused by the conscription of women.5 The Sicherheitsdienst claimed that across the whole of Germany a psychosis of anxiety had developed over food.6 They cited depressed workers in Cologne upon whom the victories in Russia appeared to have made little impression. As they stood queuing for food outside the shops they had been heard to declare that ‘the alleged victories in the East were less important than the necessity of getting enough to eat’.7

  Nutritionists fed the sense of anxiety which surrounded the issue of food. When Germany invaded Poland, Franz Wirz, campaigner for the improvement of German health, wrote to Leonardo Conti, head of the Department of Health. During the First World War, he warned, ‘mal-nutrition prepared the ground for the poison of defeatism and revolution. In the present war the strength of the homeland and performance levels of the workers play an even greater role than ever before.’8 In 1940 Leonardo Conti was already arguing that German rations were at the limits for maintaining health.9 At the Institute for the Physiology of Work Heinrich Kraut had developed the idea of the ‘full person’, who on average needed 1,800 calories a day for his body to carry out its normal existential metabolic functions such as breathing and digestion. Kraut correctly concluded that only the number of calories which were added to this basic requirement made any difference to productivity. He calculated that a ‘normal user’ (Normalverbraucher) required an extra 230 calories to carry out everyday physical activities. A hard labourer on the other hand would need an extra 1,750 calories.10 Kraut’s calculations provided the basis for the original ration quantities allotted in 1939. These rations were, however, regarded as a minimum and many German scientists believed that fewer calories would damage health and impact upon workers’ productivity.