Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (61 page)

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.
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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, infertility, stomach and digestive disorders … heart and vascular disease’.
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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.
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One reformer came up with the slogan: ‘Anaemic bread causes anaemic blood.’
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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.
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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.
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By 1939 consumption of the patriotic loaf had risen by 50 per cent.
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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Every family was supposed to make a hot-pot and ‘the amounts saved by this frugality contributed to the Winter Help Fund’.
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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.
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On
Eintopf
Sundays ‘field kitchens appeared … at midday on Unter den Linden, and photographs were taken of the Party hierarchy eating their Eintopf alfresco’.
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The dish ‘was served in all restaurants, whilst uniformed jack-booted collectors rattled collecting tins in the faces of the guests’.
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This transformed the drive for autarky into a social ritual which was supposed to unite and strengthen the
Volksgemeinschaft
through sacrifice.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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Reductions in fodder imports led to pork, bacon and beef shortages.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!’
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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.’
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Food deficiencies in Germany in the 1930s should not be blamed on the policy of food autarky alone. At least in part they were also 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.
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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.
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Children and young adults were allocated smaller quantities of food but pregnant women and nursing mothers were given supplementary rations.
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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.
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