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

by Lizzie Collingham

  The only sure way of obtaining food was to work for the Germans in one of the small factories that were still functioning, on the railways or in an administrative office. A cleaning lady for the railway administration recounted how she received millet soup and porridge at work, which enabled her to survive. In the winter of 1941 Kiev’s Labour Office was ‘besieged by hungry people’.86 But the sick, the elderly, the young and the unemployed – among them many scientists and scholars from the universities and academic research institutes – were unable to scratch together enough food. The mayor of the city did what he could, protecting food supplies for the hospitals from the depredations of the police and distributing food to the elderly and the scholars. But people began to die. From the (probably inaccurate and low) figures of the Sicherheitsdienst it is possible to see that the mortality rate rose steeply from 58 deaths in October 1941, to 1,120 in February 1942.87 In November Mikhail Iakovlevich Gerenrot, a former communist official, reported that the city was deserted. The only people on the streets were ‘emaciated or swollen from hunger, they roam the streets and walk from house to house in search of charity … I also came across people who were lying and sitting; they were so emaciated that they were unable to move.’88 A. Anatoli Kuznetsov commented on the mood of those who were managing to survive: ‘It was bitterly cold and the people walked down the streets with grim expressions on their faces, hunching themselves up from the wind, worried, in ragged clothes, in all sorts of strange footwear and threadbare coats. It was indeed a city of beggars.’89

  In Kharkov the horror began with the Soviet scorched earth policy. By the time it became clear that the Germans were going to capture the city it was too late to evacuate the remaining 450,000 inhabitants (before the war the population was about 1 million). Instead, the authorities simply began blowing up buildings, to the surprise and shock of passers-by. In an article entitled ‘Lest we forget’, in the Ukrainian Quarterly of 1948, an anonymous ‘citizen of Kharkiw’ described what happened: ‘The government authorities … took great trouble to destroy all food products. Declaring the remaining part of the population as traitors and “enemies of the nation” the authorities fully justified themselves in destroying all food stores. Long grains and vast stores of corn, flour and vegetables were destroyed, burnt or spoiled by soaking with kerosene. These enormous quantities of food if justly distributed among the people who stayed would have saved the majority of them from starvation.’90

  Kharkov was a ruined city of bombed and burned-out houses, ‘the black silhouettes of exploded and burnt factories and official buildings’ stood out against the skyline, bomb craters were scattered across the city, and where once there had been bridges there was now a ‘chaos of stone and iron’.91 The infrastructure broke down and the people were left without electricity, water or a sewerage system. The anonymous citizen described how ‘every kind of communication and transportation facility is totally destroyed. The entering and the leaving of the town is strictly prohibited. Communication of any kind is cut off even between the parts of the town situated on both sides of the small river … There are no stores, no markets, no shops of any kind.’92 Those who worked for the Germans received about 300 grams of bread a day. The only way of surviving was to evade the police checks and barter for food in the countryside.

  That winter of 1941–42 ‘the silence of death prevail[ed] in the main streets which only a year ago were crowded with people and traffic … No people are to be seen anywhere … No sign of life is to be found. But you can notice some window frames closed with boards and a crooked stove-pipe emitting a faint stream of smoke. Here people live! People who have found a miserable corner to go and hide in, a wretched nook slowly to die in. In these very small kitchens life is pulsating still. Here a whole family and sometimes many families have found their poor shelter. All the inhabitants of Kharkiw live this winter in small kitchens often with seven to ten people together. They sleep on benches, tables and simply on the floor in dust and smoke amidst dirty dishes and garbage. In the daytime they all crowd around the kitchen stove, – dreary figures wrapped up in odds and ends of raiment and in old galoshes, snow-boots, warm slippers etc. The rooms are extremely cold because of the prevailing cold of thirty degrees below zero … Food is an article still more rare and consequently more expensive than fuel … The small supplies of food stored by the population have been long consumed. The town is void of eatables like a desert.’93 By the end of 1942, 150,000 of the 450,000 inhabitants who had stayed in Kharkov had died, the great majority of them from starvation.94

  THE FOOD CRISIS OF 1941–42

  The massacre of the Soviet Jews, the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners and the agonies of the citizens of Leningrad, Kiev and Kharkov as they slowly wasted away from hunger did nothing to alleviate the food crisis which developed on the eastern front that winter. By the autumn of 1941 it was clear that the Red Army was going to put up far greater resistance than the Wehrmacht had expected and that Germany was facing a long and immensely tough battle in the east, which would require large amounts of equipment, men and food. The German army was now fighting on an ever lengthening front (it grew from around 1,200 kilometres to about 2,400 kilometres) with supply lines which stretched back over more than 1,500 kilometres of mainly unpaved roads.95

  As the winter of 1941 approached, the Wehrmacht supply officers became increasingly anxious that they had been unable to build up sufficient stocks to feed the men at the front over the cold months to follow. Army Groups North and Centre were still requesting supplementary food supplies from the Reich. Even the SS were complaining about the food their men were receiving. What was more, the German administration’s grip over the areas it occupied was threatened by increasingly effective partisan action behind the lines. But the main problem was transport. The supply troops simply could not get the food through to the men at the front. When the autumn rains set in the roads turned into muddy quagmires. Most of the divisions at the front relied on horse-drawn wagons to bring up food and weapons. The commander of the 16th Army’s II Corps reported that ‘from my own experience I know that while walking on the roads one sinks to one’s knees in the mud, and the water pours into one’s boots from above … [Horse-drawn] panje-wagons could not get through and the number of food-carriers [on foot] did not suffice.’96

  A couple of weeks in November brought some relief as the rains stopped and the frost set in and ‘solidified the monstrous ruts leading to the east’.97 Then the winter snows arrived and in that first unbearable winter the temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees Celsius. The motorized Panzer divisions experienced a process of demodernization as those tanks not wiped out by the Russians broke down. Wolfgang Reinhard of the 18th Panzer Division recalled that if the complicated spare parts could not be obtained then ‘nothing could be done’.98 Leo Mattowitz despaired as ‘everything mechanical came to a dead halt. Nothing worked at all. Not like the Russians. They were used to it, they took proper precautions. Their machine guns worked, their motors kept running. We didn’t even have anti-freeze. Just imagine it: before we left the vehicles we had to let the water run out because it would freeze overnight … we were totally unprepared for winter. Totally.’99 The Germans found that even their railway locomotives were inferior. The Soviets insulated the boilers on their engines in order to prevent the heat escaping into the frosty air. The German trains, without insulation, used excessive quantities of fuel. To make matters worse, they would not run unless the low-quality coal which had been captured in the Donbas region was mixed with higher quality German coal or oil, which had to be imported.100

  The modern war of ‘quick marches and decisive encounters’, which the German troops had been expecting, suddenly descended into trench warfare horrifyingly reminiscent of the First World War.101 Having marched nearly 1,000 kilometres in five weeks the men of the 16th Army found themselves halted in a swamp east of the River Lovat. They dug in and stayed there for fourteen months.102 Karl Meding, aged nineteen, found himself living
with a comrade in a hole near Vitebsk in central Russia. ‘There were wooden poles over it and on that lay hay and on top of that, snow … One of us always had to stand outside this hole and see if the enemy was coming. We were always looking towards the east and the wind came from the east. Even the fear of death … wasn’t as terrible as this. It was undoubtedly my very worst experience in Russia. Everything froze. We used to huddle there with our feet wrapped in straw … You couldn’t make a fire and all we had to warm up our coffee was some little candles’103 Guy Sajer claimed that ‘the punishment we suffered, not at the hands of the Russian Army … but from the cold, is almost beyond the powers of description’.104 If the men in their fox-holes were lucky enough to be sent hot stew from the field kitchens it often arrived stone cold, sometimes frozen solid.105

  The soldiers were a ‘pitiful sight’. The Wehrmacht had not prepared for a winter war and there were not enough warm clothes. Many wore ‘light coats, rags wrapped around feet or shoes’ in temperatures of minus 40 degrees.106 Frostbite claimed many victims. There were barely any washing facilities, there was nowhere that was dry, clean clothes were an unknown luxury and the soldiers became infested with lice. The tiring noise and anxiety of being hit by the artillery barrage and the disturbing nature of hand-to-hand combat combined with fatigue to induce some level of battle exhaustion in virtually every soldier. ‘Now I have barely any appetite,’ noted one depressed German.107 Illness was rife. Weakened by exhaustion and malnourishment the troops fell victim to typhus, spotted fever, skin and bladder infections. Guy Sajer began the war thinking himself ‘invulnerable, filled with pride we all felt’, but in the trenches on the banks of the Don river, ‘we seemed like nothing, like bundles of rags which each sheltered a small, trembling creature. We were underfed and unbelievably filthy. The immensity of Russia seemed to have absorbed us.’108

  The doctor for the 12th Infantry Division complained that there was not enough meat, potatoes or pulses, and the supply of sugar, which the men needed to provide sufficient energy to withstand the cold, was too small.109 Transport problems were mainly responsible for the food shortages but this was exacerbated by the irresponsible plunder of the troops themselves. Along the eastern front there stretched a desolate barren zone which the Germans referred to as the Kahlfraß, or defoliated zone, where the villages had been stripped of food. The devastation was at its worst closest to the front line but in some places it stretched back hundreds of kilometres.110 In December the 18th Panzer Division’s quartermaster warned that any further requisition orders were unlikely to be fulfilled because the inhabitants had nothing left. Their food stores were bare, and their winter equipment – sledges, snowshoes and felt boots – had all been taken. One field commander in the south complained that the Hungarian and Romanian troops were the worst offenders, taking ‘everything that was not nailed down’.111 Their depredations around the Black Sea and Donets Basin in the autumn of 1941 left the Wehrmacht without sufficient supplies for the winter.112 Underfed front-line troops resorted to further ‘wild’ actions. Lacking fodder for their horses, the soldiers fed them straw from the thatched roofs of the village houses.113 They paid for their violence with their own hunger. In February 1942 the 18th Panzer Division’s bread ration was cut in half, down to 300 grams a day.114

  At the end of 1941 Herbert Froböse was flown in to Kaluga, about 80 kilometres from Moscow. He went to join a division which had taken shelter in an old factory. His new comrades’ first reaction was to think, ‘Oh no, not more people to feed.’ But the welcome was warm when it was discovered that they had brought food. Froböse spent his time at the factory frozen, filthy and itchy with lice. Within two weeks half of his fellow replacements had been sent back with frostbite. They were sent bread, sometimes a little margarine, but no jam. At night the field kitchen was sometimes able to drive some soup over to them but it arrived cold. Then the supplies of food stopped coming. ‘The road was just snow and mud and you could not get through any more. Even the oil was frozen.’ Their one motorbike had to be pulled on skis by a horse. In February 1942 they began to retreat through an area of burned-out villages. It was chaotic, everything was frozen, there were no food supplies, and they survived for two months on horsemeat.115

  If the civilian and military occupational administrations were unable to requisition sufficient food supplies for the soldiers on the eastern front, the Reich was not in a position to alleviate their position by sending in large quantities of German supplies. The winter was bitterly cold and collections of clothing for soldiers at the front were met with resentment by the people of Cologne, who were themselves extremely short of warm underwear and sweaters.116 Food shortages had become commonplace in German cities. Potatoes periodically disappeared from the shops and fruit and vegetables were rarities. Nutritionists were concerned that industrial workers were still losing weight, especially miners in the Ruhr area, who were thought to have lost up to 6 kilograms.117 It was thought that this would significantly reduce productivity, as the labour force had used up its fat reserves and was now making inroads into its muscle tissue.118 In the spring of 1942 bread consumption began to eat into the country’s grain reserves and Backe realized that he was failing in his aim to ensure that all German civilians received at least 2,300 calories a day. Conti warned that at 1,358 calories per day, the basic ration – received by non-workers – had fallen well below the minimum 1,700 calories essential for an adequate diet.119 But grain, meat and fat shortages meant that the rations would have to be cut again. The Sicherheitsdienst inflamed the situation by warning that the workers and urban population were in a mood reminiscent of 1918, pessimistic about the outcome of the war and critical of the regime.120 The National Socialist leadership was determined to distance itself from the incompetence and indecision of the German government during the First World War and decided that it was time for radical action to be taken. The occupied territories must be made to release their food stocks with no regard for the consequences for the indi-genous population. It was now that the mantra that other peoples should starve before the Germans was taken up by the National Socialists. The Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, made a note in his diary to this effect.121

  In March Hitler attempted to promote the exploitation of the occupied territories by ordering that all soldiers on leave or travelling to the Reich for duty should return with packages containing as much food as they could carry. These food parcels became known as ‘Führer-pakete’. It was hoped that in this way Germany would tap the food which was being siphoned off into the black markets of the occupied territories.122 In her diary in April 1942 Maranja Mellin recorded the return of her father from Paris with a Führerpaket. ‘He brought lots of things with him. Clothes, stockings, dried beans, writing paper, liver sausage, carrots in meat sauce, gloves, soap, belts, shoes, washing powder … Four pears and almonds, cinnamon and pepper. The table was full … wherever the men are they buy things.’123 Another young girl, astonished by the ‘mountains of booty’ that her father brought home, said, ‘if everyone is sending this much home, then there is nothing left in France’.124

  Meanwhile, not disheartened by the disappointing results of the Hunger Plan, Backe and Göring returned to its logic. In order to free up more food yet more people needed to be exterminated. Attention was now turned to the Polish Jews and the Hunger Plan was reshaped into a more targeted instrument of racial genocide.125

  THE HOLOCAUST in poland

  At the end of 1941 a line of demarcation existed along the old Soviet–Polish border of 1939. To the east the policy was one of total extermination, to the west only about 10 to 20 per cent of the Jews had been murdered.126 The National Socialist precaution of keeping written documentation of inflammatory policies to a minimum means that there is still a question mark over the exact timing of the decision to murder the Polish Jews. Hitler’s regime did not begin the war with a clear plan. There were various outlandish ideas floating about, including the notion that it might be possible to
deport all European Jews to the island of Madagascar. Most officials seem to have expected that after the conquest of the Soviet Union the Jews in Poland and western Europe would be deported into the Siberian wasteland where they would be worked or starved to death.

  The Holocaust was not just the product of an irrational ideology but the conclusion of a series of crises in the German conduct of the war. The failure to conquer the Soviet Union, the rise of partisans in the occupied zones, a dwindling food supply in the Reich – which was diminishing the productivity of workers and might provoke resistance to the regime – all created an atmosphere of crisis and the belief that extreme action was necessary to remedy the situation. This came together with the unfortunate circumstance that the organizational and military means to commit murder on a vast scale were being put into place. The appetite of the SS had been whetted by the ease with which the Soviet Jews had been eradicated. An extermination camp at Chelmo had already been built as an experimental pilot project and the systematic gassing of Jews from the Warthegau had been carried out there. It had always been the intention of Hitler and a section of the National Socialist leadership to eradicate the Jews from Europe. The food crisis of 1941–42 provided an ostensibly rational reason as to why the crime of murder should be committed. The Jews could not be allowed to continue eating the precious food which the German workers deserved: they must die in order to free up desperately needed food supplies.127 Thus food worries gave added impetus to the Holocaust. The historian Christian Gerlach argues that without the food panic that winter, many more Jews might have survived, albeit under terrible conditions as forced workers.128