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

by Lizzie Collingham

  The strongest motivational force which kept the Soviets going through the war was fear and hatred of the Germans. This was shared by virtually every Soviet no matter what their position with regard to the communist regime. Once civilians realized that labour camps, execution and starvation were the lot of Soviets in the occupied areas, a hatred of the Germans and a determination not to come under their rule became a driving force in the war effort. Victor Kravchenko explained that although he detested Stalin’s regime he nurtured a ‘passionate hatred for the invader’. This, he argued, was ‘the key to the mystery why the Russians fought and in the end conquered. They did not fight for Stalin but despite Stalin.’180 The Second World War was of a completely different nature from the First World War, when capitulation was an option. The Soviets were faced with ‘national extermination’ and they saw the conflict as a fight to the very end.,181 Thus, under certain conditions, the Soviets demonstrated that hunger, malnutrition and deaths from starvation do not necessarily prevent a nation from fighting, and indeed winning, a total war.

  *RSFSR–Russian Federation Council of People’s Commissars

  15

  Germany and Britain – Two

  Approaches to Entitlement

  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.

  1930S BRITAIN – A NUTRITIONAL DIVIDE

  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.

  1930S GERMANY – THE CAMPAIGN FOR NUTRITIONAL FREEDOM

  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, infertili
ty, 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