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

by Lizzie Collingham

  Nevertheless, the German economy continued to expand and more and more imports of raw materials and food were required. The German chancellor, Count Leo von Caprivi (1890–94), tried to solve the problem of dependence on food imports by increasing Germany’s self-sufficiency in food and this was fairly successful. In 1916 German farmers were feeding about seventy people per 100 acres of cultivated land, in contrast to the British farmer who fed about forty-five people from an equivalent area. Only 19 per cent of the German population’s calories came from imports. But these meat, livestock feed and fat imports were important sources of energy and taste, providing 27 per cent of the protein and 42 per cent of the fat consumed in Germany. By 1914 Germany (together with the Low Countries) formed the largest wheat-deficit area in the world.17 But by delaying migration from the countryside to the cities, agricultural protectionism had burdened the nation with a large agricultural sector which held back the process of industrialization. It also kept food prices artificially high, with the result that urban working-class protests about the price of milk, butter, and especially meat, erupted between 1906 and 1912.18 Those who advocated free trade within Germany argued that it was only by becoming a manufacturing and trading nation that Germany could hope to raise the standard of living of its growing urban population.19

  For the British, the German loaf of rye bread symbolized the barbarism of autocratic German society, hemmed in by protectionism. German politicians were frustrated by their inability to challenge American and British dominance both over the world’s wheat-growing areas and the sea lanes, and by Germany’s lack of a dependent agricultural hinterland which could supply raw materials, or colonial markets to boost the German economy, in the same way that the empire created British wealth.20 Behind the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century jostle for a balance of power between Britain, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and France, lurked the problem of how to feed a working population within the constraints of the economics of global trade. Within Germany, nationalist social commentators, and an increasing number of German Conservative Party politicians, thought that successful pursuit of profit, power and influence was contingent on the country finding a more equitable position in the global economy of food production, import and export, and the only way to achieve this was through war. If it fought a short war the German government felt confident that it could feed its people for the duration of the conflict. Then, if Germany were victorious, it could defeat France and expand eastwards into a belt stretching from Finland to the Black Sea coast, thus establishing German dominance over western and eastern Europe. When they went to war in 1914 German politicians were hoping that the conflict would be decisive in disentangling the German nation from the world markets which put it at such a disadvantage.21

  DEFEAT, HUNGER AND THE LEGACY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  If the problem of food supply was one of the factors which placed the great powers in hostile relations with each other, it was also one of the causes of Germany’s downfall in 1918. The First World War is associated with stagnant trench warfare but the battle was also fought in the Atlantic. For the first time naval battles became subordinate to commercial warfare, and in this way the First World War prefigured the Second. The international specialization of food production made both Britain and Germany vulnerable to blockade. Both countries relied on imports of raw materials, food and fodder to keep the war economy afloat and to feed their people. Even a reduction in imports could cause food prices to skyrocket and cripple industry. Hungry, unemployed workers might then pressurize the government to negotiate a peace before a military victory was clear.

  The British Admiralty planned to impose an economic blockade on Germany long before the war began, and a new dimension was added to the concept of blockade when the British revised the naval code in 1907 and 1908, extending the definition of an instrument of war to food, and changing the rules of engagement to allow for attacks on neutral shipping, if the ship was carrying supplies to the enemy.22 When the war began Britain not only blockaded the German ports but extended the action to neutral continental countries by severely limiting the amount of imports they could receive, in an effort to prevent them from re-exporting surplus goods to Germany.23 During the Second World War these principles were applied even more harshly when occupied countries came under a complete blockade and the amount of food and petrol allowed in to neutral countries such as Spain was strictly limited.24

  The German Admiralty introduced their own crucial change in blockade techniques by using the submarine as a weapon against merchant shipping. They wanted to use the submarines to attack Britain’s supply of wheat, but in the early years of the war the German military command hesitated to employ this strategy for fear of hitting an American ship and thus drawing the United States into the conflict.25 The Germans did not adopt all-out submarine warfare until mid-1917, by which time America had entered the war. However, by then the Allies had begun to co-ordinate their use of shipping space and had introduced the system of grouping ships into convoys travelling together with escort vessels, which was very effective in reducing the number of sinkings.26 German submarines did, however, inflict painful damage on Allied shipping and in 1917 Britain came close to using up its food reserves.27 High food prices even caused a certain amount of industrial unrest but Britain was able to keep open its supply lines and feed its population adequately. Ultimately, the international system of maritime trade was not only a weakness but also a strength as it enabled Britain to draw on the economies of the Commonwealth and the colonies, which provided raw materials, men, clothing and food.28 It was to prove equally crucial as a site of vulnerability and a source of strength during the Second World War.

  The German submarine campaign was less successful than Britain’s traditional blockade, which succeeded in cutting Germany off from ‘direct imports from five enemy nations that together in 1913 had accounted for 46 per cent of Germany’s total imports’.29 When America entered the war in 1917 Germany’s fate was sealed, as the United States placed an embargo on exports not only to Germany but also to neutral continental countries. This put an end to Germany’s indirect trade with America while at the same time Britain gained better access to the boundless resources of the United States.30 Eventually, a shortage of agricultural labour combined with the blockade to reduce the Germans to a miserable state of hunger.

  Inspecting the food ration lines in Berlin in the autumn of 1916, the American newspaper correspondent George Schreiner wrote: ‘among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the younger women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless.’31 Shortages began with bread, and then spread to potatoes, butter, fats and meat, until the Germans were forced to resort to eating turnips and swedes, which were normally fed to animals. The winter of 1916–17 became known as the turnip winter. Ethel Cooper, an Australian then living in Leipzig, wrote to her family: ‘I think that if I were to bray … it is all that could be expected … after a month of living on parsnips and turnips.’32 It was bitterly cold, coal ran out, electricity was cut off, the trams stopped running, even turnips were running short. ‘Germany’, Ethel wrote, ‘has at last ceased to trumpet the fact that it can’t be starved out.’33 Life was thoroughly exhausting and uncomfortable, interspersed with periods of absolute deprivation when the urban population teetered on the verge of starvation. The Germans lost weight, the birth-rate fell and the mortality rate rose. Deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis increased significantly, a strong indicator of malnutrition and poor sanitary conditions. Three-quarters of a million Germans died of malnutrition. George Schreiner noticed that the underfed bodies on the trams gave off an odour reminiscent of ‘a cadaver’.34

  Despondency and fatigue overwhelmed the nation. If the lack of food contributed to the German defeat it was not because the Germans were dying in vast numbers but because the grinding misery of never having quite enough to eat wore down the morale of the people. New r
ecruits and soldiers returning from leave brought news of the misery to the front line, where the troops themselves were hungry and ill. They stole the barley feed meant for the horses and ground it in their coffee mills to make flour for pancakes.35 The horses died; the soldiers’ will to fight dissipated. The German request for an armistice in October was the result of failure on the battlefield. But to many of those who witnessed these events, it appeared as though hunger was the victor, and that it was starvation among the army and civilians which had brought about a humiliating defeat.36

  Even after Germany had signed the armistice the British continued to impose an economic blockade. This was supposed to help suppress a communist revolution and pressurize the Germans into accepting the unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Versailles.37 The winter of 1918–19 was the hungriest and most miserable for the German population. From the regimental barracks in Munich the twenty-nine-year old Adolf Hitler, who had served in the German army as a dispatch runner at the rank of corporal, watched how the city came under the rule of, first, a Jewish radical Social Democrat, and then of a number of Soviet-style councils, until it was eventually brought under control by the troops of the newly formed Weimar Republic.38 These events, which demonstrated the vulnerability of a hungry and defeated Germany to the threat of communist revolution, ensured that Hitler (and many others who would later take up positions of power under the National Socialists) developed an acute awareness of the dangers of civilian hunger. Indeed, Hitler developed an obsession with the need to secure the German food supply, especially at a time of war. This would later provide him with one of the reasons for the attack on the Soviet Union, and add fuel to the fire of progressive radicalization which characterized the National Socialist regime during the Second World War. On 8 March 1919, Lloyd George warned the Supreme War Council and the Allies that ‘the memories of starvation might one day turn against them … [T]he Allies were sowing hatred for the future: they were piling up agony, not for the Germans, but for themselves.’39 Lloyd George’s comments were alarmingly prescient. The hatred the Allies had sowed came back to haunt the British in 1940–42 during the height of the U-boat blockade. But it was the inhabitants of eastern Europe who experienced the worst of the agony that Lloyd George had foreseen. During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

  AUTARKY AND LEBENSRAUM

  The First World War intensified Germany’s problems with regard to its position in the world food economy. The most critical problem was the country’s lack of foreign exchange. Germany’s manufacturing industry did not produce enough exports to earn sufficient foreign exchange to pay for all its import requirements. Food and fodder for livestock made up half of all Germany’s imports, but it also needed raw materials to generate industrial growth and the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles swallowed up yet more foreign exchange. In 1927 the prominent agronomist Friedrich Aereboe published a study of the influence of the First World War on agricultural production and concluded that Germany would have been better off if it had followed the liberal course of integrating into the world economy in the nineteenth century. Agriculture should have been scaled down, freeing up workers for industry to produce manufactured goods for export which would then, in turn, have paid for increasing imports of food and consumer goods.40 By not following this course Germany had burdened itself with an agricultural sector which was too large for a modern economy and farms which were too small, inefficient, and wallowing in debt.41

  In the inter-war years it was not too late for Germany to choose to follow the liberal course mapped out by Aereboe, and fully (and peacefully) integrate itself into the global market economy. However, even Britain and America were moving towards protectionism in the 1930s. When the First World War came to an end a sudden drop in the demand for food left Europe and the United States with a surplus of foodstuffs. The interests of the farmer and the working man now converged. Both favoured a secure food supply and stable, if higher, prices. The economic impact of the Great Depression intensified the problem and in response the United States increased tariffs on both imports and exports. The days of British free trade came to an end with the Ottawa agreements of 1932, which gave favoured access to foodstuffs entering Britain from the Dominions in return for special privileges for British manufactured goods in the Dominions’ home markets. France and Italy defended their low-productivity farms as the site of national identity and set up walls of protective tariffs, while injecting money into farming in an attempt to increase agricultural productivity.42

  August Skalweit, another prominent agriculturalist, who published his analysis of the German food economy during the First World War in the same year as Aereboe, drew the opposite conclusion to his colleague. He argued that it was imperative that Germany should become less dependent on this hostile world market.43 In conservative circles, which favoured this alternative course of action, food preferences were transformed into a political statement. German housewives’ associations, with strong links to centre-right political parties, campaigned for patriotic consumption choices.44 Germans preferred to eat crusty white rolls but two-thirds of the wheat to make them had to be imported. ‘Good’ German women were encouraged to support the German farmer and preserve the traditional social hierarchy and lifestyle, by purchasing rye bread made from home-grown grain. Housewives’ associations also promoted German-produced potatoes, butter and fish. Even bananas and oranges were rejected as decadent fruits and shunned in favour of the German apple.45 However, Skalweit warned that if Germany was really to become self-sufficient, and free of the need to spend precious foreign exchange on food, then its farmers would have to increase fodder production in order to feed the animals which would produce the protein and fat which Germany presently relied on imports to provide. He argued that this could only be achieved if a new, central organizational body was set up to co-ordinate the drive for self-sufficiency or autarky.46

  The agronomists in the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) would probably have known Skalweit’s work and they implemented many changes which resembled his recommendations. But their agenda was not simply to create a self-sufficient food economy which would secure the food supply for the German people but also to create a food economy which would provide the basis for military action.47 As soon as the National Socialists came to power Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Food and Agriculture from June 1933, set up a new organizational body to co-ordinate the battle for self-sufficiency. Germany’s woefully backward agricultural sector was completely removed from the market system and put under the control of the Reich Food Corporation (Reichsnährstand). Every farmer, agricultural labourer, trader or food processor was expected to join. This vast power complex administered all aspects of the food system from production to distribution, from the plants which farmers were instructed to cultivate to the price of essential foodstuffs in the shops.48 German agriculture was cut off from international markets by protectionist tariffs. The prices farmers were paid for their products were often double what they were worth on the global market. Consequently, farm incomes rose and farm debt was reduced.49 But the ideology of protection had shifted. It was no longer for the benefit of a small and powerful aristocratic Junker elite. National Socialist ideology maintained that farmers were working for the good of the German race. Their primary motivation in cultivating the land was supposed to be not profit but feeding the nation.50

  Darré idealized farmers as the backbone of the Aryan race and advocated a return to the soil as a way of reversing the dangerous racial deterioration brought about by urban life. A regenerated countryside would, he argued, benefit the entire Volk (people) by strengthening the ‘life-source’ of society. During the 1933 election campaign he was extremely successful at winning the farming vote for th
e NSDAP.51 However, once the National Socialists had come to power he gradually fell from favour with Hitler and the rest of the National Socialist leader-ship. Darré’s problem was that once power had been achieved Hitler quickly lost interest in the problems of farmers. Indeed, Hitler demonstrated just how much Darré’s plans for internal agricultural restructuring bored him at a meeting in July 1934: while Darré was talking he picked up and began reading a newspaper.52

  After 1933 agricultural reform was a low priority for the majority of the National Socialist leadership as they focused on preparing for war. But it is a mistake, which many historians have made, to conclude that issues of agriculture, farming and food supply were of little importance in determining wider National Socialist policy.53 Food was a constant worry for Hitler. Darré’s campaign for food self-sufficiency was modestly successful. The yield of key crops such as potatoes, sugar beet, cabbage and rye increased and in 1939 Germany was 83 per cent self-sufficient in the most important foodstuffs such as bread grains, potatoes, sugar and meat. However, this only represented a 3 per cent increase in self-sufficiency since the National Socialists had come to power.54 The best efforts of the Reich Food Corporation could not solve the problem of the need for imported fodder. This brought Darré into conflict with Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister for Economics. While Darré wanted foreign currency for the purchase of oilseeds and food, Schacht wanted to prioritize raw materials for the armaments industry.55 In 1936 food shortages and rising food prices combined with fears of inflation and a rise in unemployment to revive the spectre of November 1918. Hitler demanded that a brake should be put on food prices.56 Two years later he warned that unless sufficient foreign exchange was made available to overcome food shortages the regime would face a crisis. It was by now clear to Hitler and his leadership that, as the German standard of living rose, the country would face a food disaster unless large quantities of food could be imported.57 This would, of course, slow down rearmament. In February 1939 he told a meeting of troop commanders that the food question was the most urgent problem facing Germany.58