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

by Lizzie Collingham

  The German Women’s Enterprise (Deutsches Frauenwerk) was another enthusiastic promoter of autarkic foods and they ran cookery classes which taught women how to make filling meals using fewer calories.35 The promotion of quark was possibly their greatest success. Invented in the 1920s, quark was a cross between yoghurt and cream cheese. It was made from the sour milk which was a by-product of butter production and which had previously been fed to animals. Quark was the perfect food in the quest for autarky. It diverted food from animals to humans, it was nutritious – containing fats, calcium and protein – and it was a substitute for scarce foodstuffs as it could be used to replace butter or cream. The German Women’s Enterprise held demonstrations on how to use quark and lobbied grocers to stock it in their stores. Quark consumption rose dramatically in the 1930s, possibly by as much as 60 per cent, and it is still popular in Germany today.36

  But the ultimate Nazi food was the Eintopf or casserole. The Eintopf rendered poor-quality cuts of meat tasty through slow cooking, while eking out small quantities of (preferably left-over) meat with vegetables. Cooked, as its name implies, in one pot, it used less cooking fuel. It was thus the epitome of a thrifty and virtuous meal. Sarah Collins, an Englishwoman living in Berlin in 1938, recalled how ‘the first Sunday of the month was designated as “Eintopf” Sunday’.37 Every family was supposed to make a hot-pot and ‘the amounts saved by this frugality contributed to the Winter Help Fund’.38 Goebbels, as propaganda minister, was aware that the ordinary people’s trust in the regime rested upon a belief in the probity of the leadership. As early as 1935 he began to create an image of the National Socialist leaders as men with simple tastes, and officials in his ministry were instructed not to publish pictures of the NS leadership seated at groaning dining tables littered with bottles of wine.39 On Eintopf Sundays ‘field kitchens appeared … at midday on Unter den Linden, and photographs were taken of the Party hierarchy eating their Eintopf alfresco’.40 The dish ‘was served in all restaurants, whilst uniformed jack-booted collectors rattled collecting tins in the faces of the guests’.41 This transformed the drive for autarky into a social ritual which was supposed to unite and strengthen the Volksgemeinschaft through sacrifice.42

  Changes in eating habits were less the result of the internalization of National Socialist propaganda about the racial health benefits of German-grown food, than the product of necessity and lack of choice. One of the first foods to disappear as a result of the National Socialists’ attempt to reduce food imports was cheap margarine, a staple of the poorer sections of society. Alfred Hugenberg, Hitler’s first Minister of Agriculture, decided to stimulate German butter production by making it compulsory to mix a certain amount of butter into margarine. The result was to make margarine more expensive, and an increasing number of consumers were forced to switch to cheaper, lower-grade margarine.43 However, margarine production was dependent on falling imports of whale and vegetable oils, and there was simply not enough to go around. Shopkeepers reported that they could only cover about two-thirds of the demand for cheap margarine.44 In Brandenburg the state police reported ugly scenes among frustrated customers, and women fainted, exhausted from standing for hours in queues waiting to buy tiny quantities of fat. ‘The question of food is at the moment the most pressing,’ the police warned. ‘A general tendency toward price rises is noticeable. Some goods have risen by 40 per cent in price. Especially threatened is fat, meat, potatoes and textiles. In conjunction with this, hoarding has begun which creates a war-psychosis. Margarine as the people’s fat cost 24 Pf in 1932, today [1934] about 98 Pf is normal.’45

  Reductions in fodder imports led to pork, bacon and beef shortages.46 The number of domestic pigs and cattle fell by over a million, while the number of live cattle being imported into the coastal regions in the north-west also dropped significantly.47 Coastal areas and the northern industrial towns began to run out of meat. In 1935 and 1936 butchers in the Ruhr area were forced to close from time to time for lack of meat to sell.48 Eggs, an alternative source of animal protein, also became scarce and Sarah Collins noted that one had to ‘go from one shop to another buying all sorts of things which were unnecessary, in order to be given two eggs.’49

  The living standards of workers declined. Official government statistics show workers’ wages rising back to their pre-Depression levels by 1937 and the regime argued that this was because it had managed to prevent excessive price rises in food. In fact, food prices rose by much more than government figures suggest and the cost of food was also adversely affected by the emergence of a black market. National Socialist statistics did not take into account the impact of food shortages, the decline in the quality of food, the new and hefty deductions from workers wages for social insurance, the Labour Front and Winter Relief, and the impact of the housing shortage, all of which bit deep into the living standards of the workers.50 By 1936 German working-class families were spending somewhere between 43 and 50 per cent of their income on food, in comparison to only 30 per cent in British working-class families.51 The United States Ministry of Agriculture calculated that in the decade ending in 1937 the meat consumption of German workers fell by 17 per cent, milk by 21 per cent and eggs by 46 per cent.52 These figures are probably slightly inflated, but the general effect of the National Socialists’ militarism was to suppress consumption and deny many Germans the foods they would have preferred.53

  Throughout the 1930s the National Socialists redefined their policy of denying Germans meat, butter, white bread and coffee as a drive to achieve racial fitness. The frugal diet of autarky was supposed to create a revitalized nation of fertile, vigorous workers and soldiers. While the government prepared for war by building tanks, aeroplanes and weapons, the German people must prepare by readying their bodies to withstand the demands of war as soldiers, workers or mothers of the future generation. The state intruded deep into the private space of German citizens. Propaganda reminded the members of the Hitler Youth, ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’ The German citizen was the property of the state, embodied in the person of the Führer. It did not seem strange in this context to assert, ‘Your body belongs to the Führer!’54 It was the duty of every good German to comply with the diet of autarky. An embittered German émigré in 1939 observed that ‘Germans today … consider hunger almost as a moral duty.’55 Anyone who grumbled about the regime was accused of missing superfluous luxuries such as butter or coffee. As a result, more honourable complaints tended to be suppressed ‘for rather than be thought to be complaining out of mere greed, most Germans prefer to suffer in silence’.56

  Research into the biological standard of living in 1930s Germany indicates that the populations of the large cities were the worst affected by food shortages. The mortality rate in large cities was 18 per cent higher than in small towns. In particular, the cities saw a rise in the incidence of diphtheria, which is associated with a lack of protein in the diet. The worst hit were children between five and fifteen, whose mortality rate rose by 13 per cent.57 This would seem to suggest that the children of the German working classes were suffering from the micronutrient deficiencies associated with a lack of animal protein in the diet which the German occupation was later to inflict upon the children of occupied Holland. Although the autarkic diet based on wholemeal bread and reduced quantities of meat and fat could credibly be presented as a healthy diet, in fact it denied the poorer sections of German society protective foods – meat, butter, milk – in sufficient quantities to ensure health. A by no means unbiased émigré doctor writing in 1939 argued that ‘there is not today in Germany a definite, specific state of hunger such as reigned in the days of the World War blockade. But there does reign, instead, the much more treacherous and incomplete state of hunger which is a continuous and chronic state of under nourishment – the result of a self-blockade arising from the idea of agricultural autarky.’58

  Food deficiencies in Germany in the 1930s should not be blamed on the policy of food autarky alone. At least in part they were al
so attributable to class-based inequalities which skewed the distribution of foods in all European societies. Given the National Socialists’ dislike of criticism, independent investigators did not challenge the official statistics by surveying the nutritional standards of the German poor and underprivileged.59 However, Germany, like Britain, certainly had urban slums, and a stubborn sector of long-term unemployed existed at least until 1936. Ethnologists who went into the rural districts in search of healthy settlers for the conquered eastern territories also uncovered depressing levels of poverty. The policy of food autarky will have done nothing to alleviate the class-based problem of poverty and malnutrition.

  THE POLITICS OF RATIONING

  Once the war began, the British and German governments both aimed to feed their populations as well as possible and thus fend off the problems of low morale and discontent which they anticipated as a result of wartime food shortages. Both governments sought to distribute their limited food resources efficiently, and at the same time be seen to do so fairly. They took different routes in order to achieve these common goals.

  The National Socialists had no intention of repeating the mistake of the First World War, when rationing was introduced too late and disillusion with the government and its ability to feed its people was already widespread. There was to be no delay this time. Rationing was introduced in Germany in August 1939 even before the Wehrmacht had marched into Poland. The German ration was both comprehensive, covering foodstuffs such as bread, and highly differentiated. The nutritionist Heinrich Kraut from the Institute for the Physiology of Work worked out a system which allocated those undertaking heavy and ultra-heavy work substantially more food (3,600 and 4,200 calories respectively) than a ‘normal user’, who received a basic ration which amounted to 2,400 calories.60 Children and young adults were allocated smaller quantities of food but pregnant women and nursing mothers were given supplementary rations.61 The aim was to distribute a limited supply of food across the population as efficiently and fairly as possible, while at the same time securing the loyalty of the working classes.62

  What made the German food system distinctive was that while the entitlement of every ‘good’ German citizen to a decent ration was held as sacrosanct, the non-productive and racially undesirable were not accorded the same right to food. Below the normal rationing system, there operated a second tier of food allocation for non-Aryans. From August 1939 Jews were allowed to shop only at designated stores, which often charged them an extra 10 per cent. The time when they could go shopping was limited to one hour each day, after four o’clock, by which time many stores had run out of most goods.63 Lucia Seidel, who ran a grocery store in Kassel, took pity on her Jewish customers and would often package up their shopping before the day’s supplies ran out and send her young son to deliver it to their houses.64 When food shortages began to occur in the towns, signs went up in shop windows warning that scarce foods would not be sold to Jews. Those Jews who were forced into heavy labour were able to obtain a tiny quantity of meat, but by 1941 meat, fruit and butter were virtually unobtainable for most Jewish shoppers, who were also forbidden to buy tinned food, coffee and most vegetables.65 Only those with tiny children were able to buy milk. Their neighbours sometimes policed the restrictions. When one Jewish woman sent her small son to buy milk, the other shoppers protested so loudly that the shopkeepers stopped serving him. The neighbour of another little Jewish girl would stand in front of her to prevent her from going out into the street with her shopping bag until the clock struck four.66

  Refugees in their own country, forced to move house continually, shunned in the bomb shelters, unable to buy clothes or shoes, and banned from public laundries, many Jews worried most that they might starve to death.67 Even if they were able to obtain food on the black market the frequent Gestapo raids on Jewish homes meant that it was dangerous to store illegally acquired foodstuffs. By 1942 the deportations to the east were well under way. In the autumn of that year, just as the food situation in Germany was improving, a new rule ominously announced that those Jews still living in the Reich were no longer allowed to buy meat, eggs or milk, and that Jewish children were no longer entitled to special supplements.68 As the Jews were loaded on to the trains which took them to the extermination camps many were already gaunt with hunger.

  The mentally ill and disabled, defined as a burden on society, were also victims of this starvation policy. In 1940 the director of a large mental hospital, Dr Valentin Falthauser, came up with the idea that his young charges could be fed a diet of potatoes, turnips and boiled cabbage, which was devoid of fats and very low in protein. After about three months they starved to death. He argued that this was a practical solution to the problem of disposing of these unproductive members of German society, as it allowed the doctors to feel that they were simply allowing their charges to die rather than actually murdering them.69 Nevertheless, the asylum prohibited the ringing of church bells at the funerals of the six or seven people buried each day so that the local inhabitants would not become aware of the suspicious death-rate in the asylum.70 The Falthauser diet spread to other institutions and ‘deliberate starvation based upon differential diets was practised in asylums throughout the length and breadth of Germany’.71 Hermann Pfannmüller introduced two special ‘hunger houses’ into his asylum at Eglfing-Haar where 429 patients died between 1943 and 1945. Pfannmüller would frequently visit the kitchens to taste the food and check that it was devoid of protein, while the cook did her best to subvert his efforts and slip nourishing ingredients into the gruel.72 It is unclear how many of the 200,000 people commonly labelled as victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme in fact starved slowly to death.73

  The British government, unlike the National Socialists, did not spring into action on the food front as soon as the war began. Lulled into a false sense of security by the first few months of phoney war, the cabinet was surprisingly reluctant to introduce rationing. Plans were in place, which the Ministry of Food was keen to implement, but Churchill* was reluctant to restrict the liberty of British citizens and he especially disliked placing limitations on people’s eating habits.74 Butter, bacon and sugar were eventually rationed in January 1940 and meat followed in March.75 Unlike the German ration, the initial British ration was worked out without any reference to nutritional advisers. It was very similar to the one that had been in place during the First World War and it reflected the limitations imposed by British agricultural production and the fall of imports due to the shipping crisis. There was no pretence that this would necessarily provide a nutritionally balanced diet.76

  The system worked according to two principles. Firstly, the amount of food stated on the coupons represented a minimum amount of food which the government guaranteed to distribute to each person. Secondly, everyone, from miners and steel-workers, engaged in the heaviest work, to the sedentary office worker and housewife, received the same 4 ounces of bacon or ham, 4 ounces of butter, 2 or 3 ounces of margarine, 1 ounce of cheese, 12 ounces of sugar, one shilling’s worth of meat (or 14–16 ounces), 2 pints of milk and 2 ounces of tea a week.77 Children were allocated less food, but among adults there was no differentiation according to gender, class or the contribution of one’s work to the war effort. Even those members of the military who were stationed in Britain with a desk job, and who could hardly justify a bigger ration on the grounds of physical exertion, were given the same rations as the rest of the civilian population. Food Minister Lord Woolton commented in his memoirs: ‘This was not only right and just, but it was good for the morale of the civilian population, who otherwise would have been critical and justifiably envious of the armed forces.’78

  The British government was aware that in a planned economy every transaction took on an aura of purpose and thus social inequalities, which in peacetime appeared to be the ‘neutral’ result of an impersonal market, would, if reinforced by rationing, take on the appearance of having been consciously created by government.79 The British working classes were deeply
suspicious and believed that if there were sacrifices to be made they would end up making them while the rich sidestepped the rules.80 The British food rationing system was designed to avoid deepening social rifts, and instead to foster social consensus. Lord Woolton explained: ‘I believed that if food control were to be readily accepted by British people it had to remain essentially simple and have the appearance of justice.’81 By allocating everyone the same amount of food it emphasized its purpose as the equitable distribution of food and scarce goods across the entire population. This distribution of food resources, which apparently privileged no section of civilian society, is one of the characteristics of government wartime policy which earned it the title of ‘war socialism’.

  In fact, while giving the ration the appearance of equity, this principle made it deeply inequitable. In the first two years of the war the British underwent a painful period of adjustment to wartime conditions. Food prices rose and the poorest families and those in low-priority occupations were worst affected. Christopher Tomlin, a stationery salesman whose family’s weekly income amounted to £3 15 s., declared himself ‘white hot with fury at recent price increases … We can’t afford to pay the extras on milk and eggs. It’s a good thing for munitions workers who earn £5 a week … it’s a bloody disgrace for families in circumstances like mine.’82 Pam Ashford in Glasgow recorded shortages of eggs, fish, onions and milk in the city. It was working-class women who initially bore the brunt of rationing. They tended to sacrifice a large share of their meals to their husbands or children. Those families with adolescents struggled the hardest as the young adult ration was often too small for a growing teenager. Families with small children did better, as the children’s ration was generous and could be shared out among the rest of the family.83 In 1941 the sugar ration was cut by 4 ounces. This was felt hardest by the poorer families, who relied on sugar as a primary source of energy. Air raids during the Battle of Britain made matters worse, as women often did not bother to cook an evening meal, instead taking sandwiches and cocoa into the shelters. Government surveys in 1940 and 1941 found that the energy level of the British diet had fallen by 7 to 10 per cent, and the diet of the poorest third of the population remained deficient in vitamins and calcium.84 In particular, the government was concerned the population was not eating enough to sustain the longer and harder working hours which were called for by wartime mobilization.