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

by Lizzie Collingham

  In December 1941 the Governor-General Hans Frank returned to the General Government of Poland, having met with Hitler. He announced that plans to deport Polish Jews to the east were no longer viable. Given that they were ‘extremely damaging eaters’ they needed to be removed as quickly as possible. A meeting in January would decide exactly what action should be taken.129 The meeting he referred to was the now infamous Wannsee Conference at which plans were laid for the deportation and extermination of the European Jews. It was at this conference that the decision was taken to target first the Polish Jews in the General Government.130 During the winter and spring of 1941–42 preparations for industrialized murder on a massive scale were made with the construction of the extermination camps at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. These death camps were not extensions of the concentration camp system, but were specifically built in order to kill Jews efficiently. Most of the people who arrived at these camps were dead within twenty-four hours. They were quite different from the concentration camps, which were places of punishment where the inmates often died of hunger and overwork but were not systematically murdered. Although extermination camps were built at the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek, the death camps tended to be separate from the concentration camps and their administrators were drawn not from the camp system but from members of the euthanasia campaign who had conducted the elimination of the mentally ill within Germany.131

  By the winter of 1941–42 the black market in the General Government had grown into a second economy over which the administration had no control. While the shops were empty, their window displays nothing but cartons of vinegar and mustard labelled ‘empty boxes’, the streets were alive with black market traders.132 This was unsurprising as the ration was so inadequate that the only means of survival for the urban population was to buy food illegally. Workers were absent from work for at least two days a week while they went into the countryside to barter for food. As a consequence, factories needed to employ more people and the shortage of food led to a constant state of friction with the occupying forces.133 German officials argued that the Jews were the fuel which kept the fire of the black market burning. Zygmunt Klukowski, the doctor in charge of the hospital in the town of Szczebrzeszyn in the district of Lublin, agreed with the German assessment. ‘In Bilgoraj the Jews are allowed to buy only horsemeat. But the Jews are buying and selling everything possible. They are masters of the black market … Villagers sell to them freely, knowing that they will receive the highest possible price. From my window I can watch the exchanges.’134 Indeed, the Jewish ration of somewhere between 300 and 500 calories a day left them no alternative than the black market.

  In the Warsaw ghetto the black market was run by an assortment of professional racketeers who bribed the guards at the gates. Meat in the ghetto was known as dupniki (from the Polish dupa for arse). From slaughterhouses the black marketeers bought the rectums of cattle which had been discarded as waste. They were smuggled through the gates in barrels hidden under garbage and the Jewish butchers washed and ground them and sold them as minced meat. ‘This was the meat – a delicacy if you could find it – of the ghetto.’135 Another ghetto delicacy was coagulated horse blood, which was spread on bread and seasoned with salt and pepper.136 Every day swarms of children would slip past the guards, climb over the walls or crawl through the sewers to go out and beg in the streets of Warsaw. Others would walk into the surrounding fields and dig up potatoes. They would come home, the lining of their coats bulging with potatoes, a little bread, or maybe some porridge. Those who were caught would be brutally beaten and sometimes they were shot, but if they got past the guards their efforts kept their families alive for one more day.137 The Jews in the ghetto slowly starved to death. In March 1942 alone 290 bodies were found lying in the streets and the ultimate death toll was around 100,000, the vast majority having almost certainly succumbed to nutritional dystrophy and hunger oedema. Already in July 1941 Rolf Höppner of the Sicherheitsdienst in Posen calmly reasoned ‘would [it] not be the more humane solution to deal with those Jews who are incapable of work by some other faster method? In any case this would be more pleasant than leaving them to starve.’138

  In 1942 the administration of the General Government argued that if the Jews could be eliminated from the food chain then this would dampen down the black market, free up more food for the non-Jewish Polish population and improve Polish–German relations and the productivity of industry.139 Orders were given to begin rounding up the Jews. Initially the plan was to eradicate only those incapable of work and ensure that the rest were put to good use in the factories and labouring in the concentration camps.140 The civil administration was extremely anxious to ensure that the campaign was completed before the farmers began to bring in that summer’s harvest. In preparation, no attempt was made to control the black market in Warsaw in the hopes that all the stocks from the previous year would be used up, leaving no life in the system. Then an effective collection of that year’s harvest would prevent a sizeable diversion of grain into the illegal economy. Police chiefs were reminded in June 1942 that ‘the successful collection of the best possible harvest is dependent upon the removal of illicit trading and the elimination of the Jews’.141 Those who organized the murder of the Polish Jews were in no doubt that the campaign was directly linked to the problem of food.

  The programme began in 1942 in the areas where the food situation was worst. It began with the shooting of Jews in Galicia, and then the extermination camps began to open. Belzec became operational in February 1942. On 25 March Klukowski noted in his diary that there were ‘more and more cases of Jews being shot outside their own homes and also at the railroad stations … Now the Germans are transporting entire trainloads, mostly Jews, but we do not know where, maybe closer to the front for hard labour.’142 The next day he reported that the Jews were disturbed about ‘the forced movement of their population. From different areas we received information about actions against the Jews. Entire railroad trains loaded with Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and lately Belgium, passed through, possibly to Belzec, where a new large camp was just organized.’143

  On 8 April Klukowski reported in something of an understatement that ‘the Jews are upset’. Their fate had become clear. He went on to describe somewhat incoherently what people had heard: ‘We know for sure that every day two trains, consisting of twenty cars each, come to Belzec, one from Lublin, the other from Lwow. After being unloaded on separate tracks, all Jews are forced behind the barbed-wire enclosure. Some are killed with electricity, some with poison gases, and the bodies are burned. On the way to Belzec the Jews experience many terrible things. They are aware of what will happen to them. Some try to fight back. At the railroad station in Szczebrzeszyn a young woman gave away a gold ring in exchange for a glass of water for her dying child. In Lublin people witnessed small children being thrown through the windows of speeding trains.’144 There was an atmosphere of panic in the town as news came from nearby Zamosc that 2,500 Jews had been evacuated by train. A few days later a mob assembled outside the Jewish homes in Szczebrzeszyn, waiting to loot them once their inhabitants had been removed. On 8 May the Gestapo began a mass shooting of Jews in the town. ‘They shot people like ducks, killing them not only on the streets but also in their own houses – men, women and children, indiscriminately … I can still see the wagons filled with the dead, one Jewish woman walking along with her dead child in her arms.’145 Some of the Poles responded with laughter, others looted the homes of the dead. ‘The Gestapo ordered the Judenrat to pay 2,000 zloty and 3 lbs. of coffee for the ammunition used to kill the Jews.’146 But no trains arrived at the station at Szczebrzeszyn and the remaining Jewish population continued to wait in fear. Meanwhile, in May Sobibor extermination camp opened and then in July Treblinka began to function. Regular trains from Galicia, Radom and Krakow made their way to these camps. On 23 July the daily transports of at least 5,000 Jews began from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka. At the beginning of A
ugust Hans Frank reported that the programme was being implemented with full force.147 Even as the Warsaw ghetto was being cleared Goebbels travelled to the city to secure deliveries of vegetables for the Berlin population.148

  In the summer of 1942 the Allies were told of the terrible fate of the European and Polish Jews. The information came from Gerhard Riegner, the representative of the World Jewish Congress in Switzerland. His informant was Eduard Schulte, a German industrialist who regarded the National Socialists as gangsters intent on a policy that would lead to Germany’s ruin. He had a variety of unwitting sources of information, many of them high up in the army and National Socialist administration.149 Schulte’s business interests frequently took him to Switzerland and it was on a visit in July 1942 that he told his Jewish contacts that a plan was being discussed at Hitler’s headquarters to deport all Jews in German-controlled territories to the east where they would be exterminated. A large crematorium was said to have been built and Zyklon B had been mentioned as the means of killing them. Riegner later passed on further reports that the plan had originated from Backe, who ‘is said to have based the plan on economic reasons, as the difficult food situation would be eased by the annihilation of about four million persons who otherwise would have to be fed’.150 This was obviously a reference to the extermination of the Polish Jews. In their book on Eduard Schulte, Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman dismiss the idea that Schulte could have passed on the information about Backe, as this was surely wrong. ‘Backe,’ they argued, ‘did not belong to the Nazi old guard and to Hitler’s inner circle; he simply would not have been consulted on matters of high policy. He was solely an agricultural expert.’151

  In fact, Christian Gerlach’s meticulous research has demonstrated that by the summer of 1942, food, and therefore Backe, who had by now officially been appointed as Minister of Food, had come to play a central role in the decision-making process of the National Socialist regime. The ‘critical food situation and its dismal future prospects’ was constantly used as a justification for the course the war followed.152 While Nazi ideology provided the ‘value-rational’ reason for murder, the food situation in Germany and the occupied Soviet Union provided an economic rationale.

  The summer of 1942 brought no relief from the problems of food supply within the German Reich. The newly appointed Fritz Sauckel’s enthusiasm for fulfilling his role as General Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilization caused Backe yet more problems. The increasing numbers of foreign forced labourers Sauckel was bringing in to the Reich pushed the grain requirements up by about 2 million tons, and that year’s harvest had been badly affected by the hard winter. Herbert Backe might well have spent his energies more profitably trying to gain greater control over the produce of German smallholdings, tackling the transport problem which caused so many shortages in the industrial towns, or overhauling the rationing system in order to equalize distribution of food. Instead, he rested all his hopes on an increased harvest in the occupied Soviet Union. Unless the Ukraine could provide more than he expected, he feared he would not be able to raise the rations in the autumn in order to help German civilians through the winter.153 He concluded that Germany was at ‘one of the most critical points in the war as far as food was concerned’.154 In August he held a meeting with Göring and Hitler in order to discuss further reductions in the meat and fat ration. Henry Picker, an aide at Hitler’s headquarters, reported that Hitler seemed unconcerned about the Ukrainian harvest. Indeed, in one of his monologues he pronounced that it was not ‘a matter of whether the yields would be sufficient to provision our troops in the East, but rather whether they would be able to transport the immense surpluses to the old Reich’.155 It was the job of the men on the ground to make sure that Hitler’s wishful thinking was realized. As with so many such meetings there are no documents to record what was said, but Göring left the meeting with Hitler and Backe a nervous man.156 He had obviously been instructed to make sure that Hitler’s hopes for the Ukrainian harvest were fulfilled.

  That summer each new problem brought cries for yet more food to be extracted from the occupied territories, for yet more deaths, more murders, the elimination of yet more ‘useless eaters’. On 5 August Göring met with the Gauleiters of the Reich who complained vociferously about the impact of the April ration reductions on the health and morale of German civilians. The next day at a meeting with the leaders of the occupied countries Göring harangued them to deliver more food. ‘God knows, you are not sent out there [to the occupied territories] to work for the welfare of the people in your charge, but to get the utmost out of them, so that the German people can live.’157 He made it clear that Germany’s policy was to export hunger. The French faced yet another painful ration cut if the demands were to be met; for the General Government it meant that any hope of improving the Polish ration had to be abandoned. Besides providing enough food for the army stationed in the territory, the General Government was ordered to deliver to the Reich 600,000 tons of grain, 150,000 tons of potatoes, 30,000 tons of meat and 5,000 tons of sugar.158 The quartermaster for the General Government found the instructions so explosive that he would only pass them on orally to those under him. But Göring declared: ‘it makes no difference to me in this connection if you say that your people will starve. Let them do so, as long as no German collapses from hunger.’159

  Göring’s policy of exporting hunger sealed the fate of the surviving Jews in the General Government. The page recording the discussion of the fate of the Jews in the occupied territories was removed from the minutes of the 6 August meeting. The only indication of what was said is Hinrich Lohse’s revealing response to a question from Göring: ‘I can respond to that as well. Only a small fraction of the Jews are still alive; many thousands are gone.’160 It seems certain that Göring reiterated that the Jews must be eradicated in order to free up as much food as possible.

  In ten weeks during August and September 1942, 750,000 Jews were killed in Belzec and Treblinka. On 8 August the trains, which had been expected in May, finally arrived in Szczebrzeszyn, and the Jews were rounded up and loaded on to them. The Germans claimed they were being taken to the Ukraine to work. Klukowski retorted that ‘no one believes that the Jews will be moved to the Ukraine. They will all be killed. After today’s events it is difficult to gain control of myself.’161 And on 10 August he noted sadly that the trains had indeed taken the Jews of Szczebrzeszyn to Belzec. ‘They have probably been killed by now.’162 The killing was on such a scale that the gas chambers at Treblinka broke down on 28 August. The waiting deportees were left to suffer and die in the cattle wagons on the trains. In September ten more gas chambers were built at Treblinka, six more in Sobibor. By the end of 1942 another 400,000 Jews had died in the gas chambers of Belzec and Treblinka. Only 297,914 Jews were still alive in the General Government, the number that the Food and Agriculture head office had calculated would be allowed to survive as workers.163

  In the Ukraine there were still about 330,000 Jews living in the area between the rivers Pripjet in the north and Dnjestr in the south.164 Erich Koch returned to his capital, Rowno, after the 6 August meeting with Göring, and gathered his officials together. They were told that ‘the food situation in Germany is serious … The raising of the bread ration is a political necessity, in order to drive the war on to victory. The missing amounts of grain must be obtained from the Ukraine … The feeding of the [Ukrainian] civilian population is irrelevant in view of this situation.’165 The regional commissars were instructed to accelerate the Jewish extermination and given five weeks to complete the process. By the end of October it was over. At least a quarter of a million people had been shot.

  Once areas were cleared of Jews, administrators claimed that the black market had died down. This was wishful thinking. In fact, the black market continued to thrive in Poland for the simple reason that the rations were ridiculously inadequate. As long as the black market continued to be essential for survival it would remain a feature of Polish life. The food which
would have been eaten by the Jews if they had still been alive did not suddenly become available to the German administration. It stayed within the black market and was eaten instead by the starving Poles. However, it is unlikely that even the Poles were desperate enough to take up the consumption of the spare cattle rectums that would have become available after the clearing of the Warsaw ghetto. Incredibly, the General Government was nevertheless able to supply the Reich with the food that Göring had demanded. More than half the rye, oats and potatoes and more than a quarter of the barley eaten that year in Germany came from the General Government.166 This was achieved not by the murder of millions of Jews but through the efforts of the peasantry, who brought in a surprisingly good harvest that year. This at least meant that the urban population were spared any further cuts in their absurdly small rations.167

  FOOD CONFISCATION IN THE UKRAINE

  The acceleration of the extermination of the Jews was accompanied by the reinforcement of the blockade of Ukrainian cities. Determined to prevent the harvest from disappearing into Soviet stomachs the German administration banned peasants and the inhabitants from bringing food into Kiev and Kharkov. In Kiev people had been allowed to bring in from the countryside one chicken, ten eggs or a litre of milk, and ten kilograms of potatoes. If a person was found to be carrying more than this the police confiscated the surplus. In the summer of 1942 they began confiscating everything. No food was allowed into the city. Anatoli Kutsnetsov described how he and his grandfather walked for half a day to Pushcha-Vodytsia, where they bought corn, beans and flour. Only three minutes away from home, staggering along under the weight of their purchases, having lost the feeling in their feet and shoulders, they were stopped by the police. ‘My grandfather was ready to fall on his knees. The police paid no attention to him, but simply took our sacks and put them down by the post where there were several others lying already. They appeared to have set up a new checkpoint here … I dragged Grandpa along by the sleeve … he was quite beside himself.’168 L. Nartova, an unemployed teacher, recorded in her diary the comments of the people around her: ‘First they finished off the Yids, but they … exterminate us every day by the dozens, they’re destroying us in a slow death.’169 The Sicherheitsdienst recorded that people were commenting: ‘We’re supposed to die of starvation, to make place for the Germans.’170 By October 1943 Kiev’s population had fallen by 315,000, many of the dead having been killed by starvation.171 The situation in Kharkov was no better. By February 1943 approximately 70 per cent of the pre-war population had succumbed to hunger.172 People ‘moved like automatons, quietly appearing and disappearing as if waiting for something. They waited for a piece of horseflesh or a cup of blood from the city slaughter-houses. They sat near ovens for hours drinking hot boiled water.’173