Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (64 page)

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.