The regime was divided over the matter of eastern workers’ rations. Speer and the Wehrmacht wanted the rations to be improved. They were motivated by practical, not humanitarian concerns. The German armament industry was by then reliant on Soviet forced labour and Speer was struggling to rescue the failing war effort. However, he came up against the Foreign Department of the Reich Security Head Office (RSHA) which represented the interests of the ideologues in the party. For them the sizeable population of eastern workers within the Reich represented an unsavoury pool of contamination.128 It would be politically unthinkable to improve the diet of these sub-humans until the civilian ration, which had been cut in the spring, was again raised. They insisted that, rather than following a ‘goal-rational’ logic, the feeding policy for eastern foreign workers follow a ‘value-rational’ logic.129
In the autumn the plunder of the food supplies of the occupied territories eased the food situation within the Reich, and the civilian ration was raised. Even then the forced labourers’ diet was only improved by a 10 per cent increase in calories and it was rare for eastern workers to receive their full food allocation. Often much of the food that arrived at the camps was rotten and had to be thrown away.130 Olga Fjodorowna Sch., a Pole who worked for IG Farben, recalled that she and her fellow workers supplemented their diet with ‘grasses and leaves … but they gave us cramps and pains in the heart. When the Americans freed us I could not even drink a glass of milk. I was eighteen years old and weighed thirty-one kilos.’131
In 1942 the manpower shortage led the pragmatic wing of the National Socialist regime to look to the concentration camps as a possible source of labour. Until this crisis point in the war the hard labour of concentration camp inmates was regarded merely as a form of punishment and was not supposed to be productive. In fact, according to Himmler, ‘the more physically exhausting and senseless the work was, the more successful the measure’.132 For the political opponents of the regime, the Polish and eastern European intelligentsia, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, Catholics, members of the resistance, common criminals and Jews in the concentration camps, hunger was so overwhelming that all other desires faded away, leaving only an obsession with food. ‘Sigi is seventeen years old and is hungrier than everybody,’ wrote Primo Levi in a description of his time in the work camp of Buna (a sub-camp of Auschwitz). ‘[Sigi] slipped on to the subject of food and now he talks endlessly about some marriage luncheon … everyone tells him to keep quiet but within ten minutes Béla is describing … a recipe to make meat-pies with corncobs and lard and spices … and he is cursed, sworn at and a third one begins to describe …’133 In Auschwitz these conversations were known as ‘stomach masturbation’.134
In 1942 concentration camp prisoners were transferred to undertake productive work in the aircraft and rocket industries. The most notori-ous of such projects was Dora Mittelbau in the Harz mountains, where concentration camp inmates constructed an underground factory for the production of the V2 rockets which were to menace Londoners in the final months of the war. They had to sleep inside the tunnels amid the noise and dust of the work, and saw daylight only once a week. The sanitation was rudimentary and they never had enough water to drink. One third (20,000) of the workers died. The tunnels were littered with the dead bodies of prisoners who had collapsed from overwork and malnutrition, and corpses swung from the ceilings overhead, placed there to remind the workers of the fate of recalcitrants. When Speer and his staff visited on a tour of inspection some of his team were so distressed by what they saw that they ‘had to take extra leave’.135
Himmler began to look for cheap ways of feeding the concentration camp prisoners so that they would have enough energy to work like ‘Egyptian slaves’ for the regime.136 The SS Brigadier Walter Schieber of the Armaments Supply Office invented a sausage made from the waste products of cellulose production. It was flavoured with a liver aroma and looked and smelt like liver sausage, and was christened ‘eastern food’. Himmler was delighted with the sausage and described it as an ‘unbelievably nourishing, tasty, sausage-like paste, that made an excellent foodstuff’.137 It was given to inmates at Mauthausen and the guards described the prisoners as enthusiastically spreading it on their bread. But Ernst Martin, an inmate who worked as a clerk in the clinic there, secretly examined the paste under a microscope and found it was crawling with bacteria. He recalled that even the guard dogs would not touch it. Soon after its distribution the incidence of stomach and intestinal disorders increased and killed 116 of the prisoners. Nevertheless, a production centre for the sausage was set up and 100,000 of the prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen were fed the revolting paste with unknown consequences for their health and mortality.138
Although the National Socialists did acknowledge that western Allied prisoners of war were protected by the rules of the Geneva Convention, and officers were exempted from labour, the ordinary soldiers were also put to work for the regime on a minimal diet. R. P. Evans, captured in France in 1940, was sent to Stalag VIII B in Upper Silesia, where he worked alongside Poles, Czechs, Bulgarians, Italians and Jews. The British prisoners cleared tree stumps and constructed roads on a site which was destined to become a plant for extracting petrol from coal. ‘After a twelve hour working day, we were absolutely exhausted when we returned to camp. After a wash with ersatz soap … we were then issued with our food. This consisted of about a pint of watery vegetable soup, usually mangold or sauerkraut … three potatoes boiled in their jackets, and a loaf of black bread between twelve men, and sometimes a minute piece of ersatz margarine.’139 Often the men could not resist eating the bread, intended for their breakfast, which meant that, apart from an early morning cup of ersatz coffee, they frequently had to wait another twenty-four hours for their next meal. Comradeship among the men weakened in the face of hunger: ‘it became a case of each man for himself, and devil take the hindmost’.140
It was only when Red Cross parcels began to arrive in the camp about eighteen months after their imprisonment that the food situation improved. From then on they received a steady supply until just before the end of the war. The survival of British, French, Canadian and American prisoners of the Germans was good, only 4 per cent dying in captivity. R. P. Evans was convinced that the Red Cross parcels were the key to their survival. When the first parcels arrived ‘we carried them back to our rooms and sat and gloated over them … The first cup of tea was like drinking nectar … Some chaps started eating, and kept right on until it was all gone. True to my nature, I rationed mine, and had a little each day to supplement the German rations.’141
THE BLACK MARKET
The level of black market activity in any country during the war can be read as an indicator of the level of acceptance of the food rationing system among the population. It also acts as an indicator of whether rationing was providing people with sufficient food. By its very nature black market activity is difficult to measure, but what evidence there is suggests that although the German and British black markets did not approach the size of those in occupied Europe, there was a black sector in both countries.
Farmers, food processors and food retailers acted as the main generative source of black market dealings. In Germany, small farmers had resisted government controls since the Reich Food Corporation was founded in 1934. In particular, they disliked the centralized collection of milk which denied them the ability to make good profits selling home-made butter in the local urban markets.142 Evasion of centralized controls continued into the war when they became particularly common in the meat market. There was a variety of tricks that could be employed, such as simply failing to register livestock, sending healthy animals to the knacker’s yard, and failing to weigh the carcasses with the heads so that the equivalent of the weight of the heads could be kept back in good meat for illegal sale.143 In Britain and Germany farmers and slaughterhouses used all these ploys. However, the amount of black market meat emerging from the slaughterhouses in Britain appears to have
consisted of a tiny proportion of the legal total, while in Germany, perhaps because of the greater number of smallholders, it seems to have been more prevalent. In Germany, the special courts set up to prosecute black marketeering dealt most often with charges of illegal slaughter.
In 1942 the mayor of the commune of Rottweil, near Stuttgart, his son, two clerks and an official from the Reich Food Corporation were tried for a scam which they had been operating with the farmers since 1939. Slaughtered pigs were weighed without their heads or trotters and the equivalent weight in meat was withheld. The conspirators were accused of removing 5,080 kilograms of pork (equivalent to 2,500 weekly basic ration portions) from the system. The mayor and the Food Corporation official were lucky to escape the death penalty and received a prison sentence instead.144 The magistrate argued that use of the death sentence would create an undesirable atmosphere of conflict with the farmers in the region. This tendency towards leniency in the courts, and the National Socialists’ reluctance to prosecute prominent officials for fear of publicizing the disreputable behaviour of party members, meant that the threat of the death penalty did little to discourage this kind of activity. Besides, the state lacked the manpower to monitor the actions of every official and it seems that many took the risk, calculating that the chances that they would be found out were relatively low.145
In wartime Britain the term black market conjured up images of an underworld of organized crime run by suspiciously well-dressed men known as spivs. It was seen as having little to do with ordinary, respectable people.146 In fact, most black market transactions were petty infringements, like the exchange which took place between Vere Hodgson and her grocer in February 1941. ‘Went for my bacon ration and while he was cutting it had a word with the man about the Cubic Inch of Cheese. He got rid of the other customers and then whispered, “Wait a mo.” I found half a pound of cheese being thrust into my bag with great secrecy and speed!’147 Shopkeepers would process their wares carefully and build up a surplus of under-the-counter stock which they could slip into the shopping baskets of their favoured customers. In Germany, Inge Deutschkron, a Jew living underground with a couple who ran a bookshop, recalled that the husband expected his wife Grete to put meals on the table that were just as in normal times. In her effort to provide sumptuous meals Grete was sucked into a complicated, network of transactions. Her parents ran a food shop and she got as much butter as she wanted from them. Then there was Frau Marsch, who worked in a butcher’s. She would smuggle meat out and swap it for real coffee, or swap butter for coffee, coffee for meat, meat for soap. In the end, ‘Grete was so wrapped up in her black marketing that she could hardly think about anything else.’148
Too much has probably been made of the idea that the British pulled together during the war, but the Ministry of Food did manage to cultivate a sense of social justice which seems to have been shared by the population at large. Those who admitted to a Mass Observation survey conducted after the war that they had dabbled in black marketeering looked back on their behaviour with a mixture of guilt or self-justification.149 The great majority of black market users were conscious that they were taking more than they were entitled to and thus disrupting a system which they accepted did a relatively good job of equitably sharing out the hardships of war.150 The greatest danger to the Ministry of Food’s carefully constructed image of fairness was the ‘luxury feeding’ of the rich. A Home Intelligence report from March 1942 warned that a sense of inequality of sacrifice was being fuelled by ‘the resort of the rich to expensive restaurants’.151 Even after the regulation of restaurant meals in June, chefs were still able to commandeer plentiful supplies of unrationed meats such as fish, lobster, chicken and rabbit, and there was no denying that the rich could still eat well if they paid for it. However, aristocratic indulgence does not seem to have thoroughly undermined the sense of common sacrifice which developed within British society during the war years. George Orwell, who in the 1930s refused to believe that Britain’s ‘bitterly class-ridden society’ would be able to unite over a war, was as early as December 1940 surprised to find that ‘patriotism is finally stronger than class-hatred’.152 The British working classes expected the British aristocracy to indulge, and it seems that the general consensus was that despite their fine dining habits they were held sufficiently in check, while at the same time the government did enough to protect the interests of the working people.
In Germany there was certainly plenty of luxury feeding in Berlin restaurants. In February 1941 Marie Vassiltchikov, who worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, ‘lunched at Horcher’s and simply gorged. As the best restaurant in town, they scorn the very idea of food coupons.’153 Horcher’s was one of Göring’s favourite restaurants and he is said to have regularly indulged in meals which consumed a week’s worth of an ordinary German’s rations. Since the early days of the regime Goebbels had been trying hard to build up a public sense of the German people as a Volksgemeinschaft or a society of equals. Göring’s flamboyant lifestyle, drinking, eating and partying to excess at the various castles and hunting lodges which he built for himself, consistently undermined the propaganda and destroyed the idea of the National Socialists as restrained and upright leaders. While Göring might greet supper guests at his palatial residence at Carinhall wearing a ‘blue or violet kimono with fur-trimmed bedroom slippers’ and a girdle set with jewels, guests dining at the house of Goebbels would be met by liveried footmen who would collect their ration coupons on silver trays. Goebbels’ guests were frequently disappointed to discover that their coupons had earned them a meagre dinner of herring with boiled potatoes.154 Hitler himself ate a peculiar vegetarian diet and generally served austere and execrable food at his dining table. A typical meal might consist of ‘a horrible grey barley broth – with crackers and some butter with Gervais-cheese as pudding’.155 His weakness was sugar. Hitler loved fancy cakes and chocolate bars and could eat as much as 2 pounds of chocolate in one day.156 In 1943 after Goebbels had announced that Germany must now invest every ounce of energy in waging total war, he was so incensed by Göring’s continued extravagance that he arranged for an angry mob to attack Horcher’s. In defence of his right to luxurious meals Göring posted a contingent from the Luftwaffe to guard the restaurant. He eventually lost this particular battle when the restaurant was forced to close for lack of foodstuffs. (The family and their staff relocated to Madrid.) But to Goebbels’ despair many Nazi potentates followed Göring’s example and sought to capitalize on their positions of power.
The public’s awareness that corruption was entrenched among the ‘upper ten thousand’ of the National Socialist administration undermined Goebbels’ rhetoric about the need for full mobilization and sacrifice. Hitler issued a decree in March 1942, and again in May 1943, calling on those in top positions to set a good example under the present conditions of total war, but this was to little avail as self-serving corruption appears to have been the norm.157 In 1942 a long-standing arrangement between a Berlin delicatessen trader called August Nöthling and an array of members of the Nazi elite to supply rationed goods without taking payment in coupons was exposed. Among his customers were Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Food and Agriculture Walther Darré, the Chief of Police Wilhelm von Grolman, Field Marshals Walther von Brauchitsch and Wilhelm Keitel and the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, who was listed as having received off the ration, ‘ham (smoked and tinned), tins of corned beef and sausage, venison, butter, fat, poultry, chocolates, tea, cocoa, sugar, oil, sweets, honey and fruit’.158 The report on Nöthling’s activities was written by the Police President Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, who failed to mention that he had himself bought spirits, wines and Cognac from the shopkeeper.159 When the affair came to Goebbels’ attention and he confronted the culprits they came up with an array of what Goebbels dismissed as ‘soggy’ excuses, the most common being that the food shopping was handled entirely by their wives, who had not realized that they were doing an
ything wrong.160 Goebbels’ determination to make an example of these men at a public trial was frustrated by Nöthling, who, it was claimed, committed suicide in his cell.
It was perhaps the awareness of the prevalence of high-level corruption which made Hitler and Göring (to Goebbels’ annoyance) reluctant to punish small-scale black marketeers who went out from the towns to barter in the countryside for food, a practice endearingly known in German as ‘hamstering’.161 Henry Picker, an adjutant at Hitler’s headquarters, reported that at lunchtime on 23 June 1942 Hitler held forth on the subject of hamstering, arguing that the police should not search people coming into the cities from the countryside for a few eggs. He demonstrated his failure to grasp the economics of agricultural supply by arguing that as long as the farmers filled their quotas this sort of traditional trade did no harm. Goebbels pointed out that ‘the end result is that there are absolutely no fruit or vegetables in the shops’.162 He was put down by Hitler, who argued that too much transportation of vegetables meant that they spoiled and this, in fact, was a more efficient way of ensuring that the towns were fed by their hinterlands. This was not a view which would have been shared by the townspeople who were bartering away their Persian rugs, table linen and children’s toys in exchange for potatoes, a little milk, a few green vegetables or fruit. The growth of a black market of barter in Germany indicated the seriousness of food shortages within the industrial cities. It was a disturbing signal that the ration was failing to ensure all German civilians an adequate diet.
The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food Page 46
