Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (8 page)

By the time the Allies finally entered western Holland in May 1945 between 100,000 and 150,000 Dutch people were suffering from hunger oedema (‘dropsy’ ).
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The country was spared a catastrophe on the scale of the Greek famine only because the war ended, and huge quantities of relief were finally allowed in. But for thousands it was already too late. Journalists entering Amsterdam described the city as ‘a vast concentration camp’ displaying ‘horrors comparable to those of Belsen and Buchenwald’.
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Over 5,000 people had died of starvation or related illnesses in that city alone. The famine death toll for the country as a whole was between 16,000 and 20,000.
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The Nazis did not starve Holland out of pure malice. Compared with other nationalities, the Nazis actually felt well disposed towards the Dutch, whom they regarded as essentially ‘Germanic’ people who needed to be led ‘back to the Germanic community’.
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The problem was that Germany had her own food problems to worry about. Even before the war the German leadership had believed national food production to be in crisis.
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By the beginning of 1942 grain stocks were all but exhausted, the national swine herd had been reduced by 25 per cent for lack of feed, and rations of both bread and meat had been cut.
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Even the bumper German harvest in 1943 did not stave off crisis, and while rations were raised temporarily, they soon resumed their decline.

To give some idea of the problem Germany faced, one must consider the calorific needs of the population. The average adult requires about 2,500 calories per day to keep themselves healthy, and more if they are doing heavy work. Crucially, this amount cannot be made up of carbohydrates alone if they are to avoid hunger-related illnesses like oedema – it must also contain vitamins supplied by fresh vegetables, proteins and fat. At the beginning of the war German civilians were consuming a healthy average of 2,570 calories per day. This fell to 2,445 the following year, to 2,078 calories in 1943, and to 1,412 calories by the end of the war.
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‘Hunger knocks on every door,’ wrote one German housewife in February 1945. ‘New ration cards are to last for five weeks instead of four, and no one knows if they will be issued at all. We count out potatoes every day, five small ones each, and bread is becoming more scarce. We are growing thinner and thinner, colder and colder and more and more ravenous.’
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In order to prevent their own people from starving, the Nazis plundered their occupied territories. As early as 1941 they reduced the official ration for ‘normal consumers’ in Norway and Czechoslovakia to around 1,600 calories per day, and in Belgium and France to only 1,300 calories per day.
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The local populations in these countries only prevented themselves from being slowly starved to death by resorting to the black market. The situation in Holland was not substantially different from that in Belgium or France: the main difference was that Holland was not liberated until nine months later. The famine occurred because by that time even the black market had been exhausted, and the Wehrmacht’s scorched earth policy had destroyed more than 20 per cent of the nation’s farmland through flooding. By the end of the war, the official daily food ration in occupied Holland had dropped to just 400 calories – that is, half the amount received by the inmates of the Belsen concentration camp. In Rotterdam, the food ran out altogether.
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As with all aspects of the war, the way the Reich treated its eastern dominions during the war was incomparably harsher than its treatment of occupied territories in the west. When a young American living in Athens questioned German soldiers about the dire food situation in Greece, he received the answer, ‘Oh, you have not seen anything yet; in Poland 600 people die every day from starvation.’
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If food shortages in Holland and Greece were merely a symptom of war, in eastern Europe they were one of Germany’s principal weapons. The Nazis had no intention of trying to feed Europe’s Slavic population. Almost from the outset they intended to deliberately starve them to death.

The whole purpose of invading Poland and the USSR was to free up living space for German settlers, and to provide farm land to supply the rest of the Reich, and Germany in particular, with food. According to their original plan for the eastern territories,
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Ost, more than 80 per cent of the Polish population was to be expelled from their lands, followed by 64 per cent of Ukrainians and 75 per cent of Belarusians. But by the end of 1942 some amongst the Nazi hierarchy were pressing for the ‘physical annihilation’ of the entire population – not only Jews, but Poles and Ukrainians as well.
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The main weapon of this proposed genocide, which dwarfed the Holocaust in the scale of its ambition, was to be hunger.

The starvation of eastern Europe began in Poland. Early in 1940 the ration for Poland’s major cities was set at just over 600 calories, although this increased later in the war after the Nazis realized they needed Polish labour.
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As the conflict spread eastwards, the starvation of civilians became worse. After the invasion of the USSR, Nazi planners insisted that the army should feed itself by requisitioning all local foodstuffs, and completely shutting off Ukrainian cities from supply. Any surplus food gathered in this way was to be sent home to Germany – Kiev, Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk in the meantime should be left to starve. In the formulation of this plan, army officials openly talked of 20 to 30 million likely deaths through famine.
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In desperation, the entire population was forced to turn to the black market for food, and often had to trek for hundreds of miles to find it.
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People in the countryside were generally better off than those in the towns. For example, in Kharkov alone some 70-80,000 people are thought to have starved to death.
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In the end, the Nazi plan to starve its eastern territories stopped, or at least slowed, because it made no economic sense to allow so many able-bodied workers to die when the Reich was short of labour. And in any case, it was an impossible plan to implement. Food supplies to Ukrainian cities could not simply be cut off, city dwellers could not be prevented from fleeing to the countryside, and the black market – which kept literally tens of millions of people alive across Europe – was impossible to police. However, for those who were unable to travel to where the food was, starvation was tragically unavoidable. In the winter of 1941 the German army succeeded in starving between 1.3 and 1.65 million Soviet prisoners of war to death.
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In the ghettos tens of thousands of Jews are thought to have starved, even before the wholesale killing began. During the 900-day siege of Leningrad, approximately 641,000 of the city’s inhabitants lost their lives to hunger and hunger-related diseases. In this one city alone almost twice as many people starved as in Greece during the whole of that country’s famine.
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One might have expected the food situation in Europe to ease once the war was over, but in many places it actually got worse. In the months immediately following the declaration of peace, the Allies struggled desperately and unsuccessfully to feed Europe’s starving millions. As I have mentioned, the normal daily ration in Germany fell to just over 1,400 calories by the end of the war; by September 1945 this had fallen still further to 1,224 calories in the British zone of Germany, and by the following March it was only 1,014 calories. In the French zone the official ration fell below 1,000 calories at the end of 1945, and stayed there for the next six months.
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Conditions in the rest of Europe were not much better, and in many cases worse. A year after the south of Italy was liberated, and after $100 million of aid had flowed into the country, housewives were still rioting over food prices in Rome, and a ‘hunger march’ was held in December 1944 in protest over shortages.
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At the end of the war, according to an UNRRA report, food riots were continuing throughout the country.
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The official ration in Vienna hovered around 800 calories for most of 1945. In Budapest the ration for December fell to just 556 calories per day.
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People in the former East Prussia resorted to eating dead dogs they found by the roadside.
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In Berlin children were seen gathering grass from the parks to eat, and in Naples all the tropical fish from the aquarium were stolen for food.
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As a consequence of profound and widespread malnutrition there were outbreaks of disease across the continent. Malaria staged a comeback in southern Europe, as did tuberculosis almost everywhere. In Romania cases of pellagra, another disease associated with deprivation, increased by 250 per cent.
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The problem was not only that there was a world-wide shortage of food, but also that what food there was could not be distributed properly. After six years of war, Europe’s transport infrastructure was shattered. Before food could travel efficiently into Europe’s cities the railway network had to be rebuilt, the roads patched up, and merchant shipping restored. Just as crucially, law and order had to be restored. In some parts of Europe food supplies were looted almost as soon as they arrived, leaving aid agencies unable to distribute vital supplies to the places where they were needed most.

Many British and American troops were appalled by what they saw when they arrived in Europe in the aftermath of the liberation. They had expected to see destruction, and perhaps a certain amount of disorganization caused by the war, but few of them were prepared for the levels of deprivation that they encountered.

Ray Hunting was an officer with a British army signals unit when he arrived in liberated Italy in the autumn of 1944. He was used to seeing beggars in the Middle East, but he was utterly unprepared for the mobs that crowded round the train in which he was travelling. At one junction he was unable to bear the sound of their wailing any longer, and so he reached into his bags to throw the crowd some of his spare rations. What happened next shocked him to the core.

It is a cruel error to throw foodstuffs indiscriminately into the midst of hungry people. They turned instantly into a mass of struggling bodies fighting for the falling gifts. Men, brutish in their determination, punched and kicked each other to gain possession of the tins; women tore food from each other’s mouths to push into the hands of children who were in peril of being trampled underfoot in the violence.

As the train finally pulled away from the junction the crowd were still fighting over the few scraps he had thrown them. Hunting continued to watch them from the open window until his thoughts were interrupted by an officer leaning out of the next compartment. ‘What a waste – chucking all that grub away,’ said the officer. ‘Don’t you know that you could have had the best looking woman down there for just a couple of those tins?’
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Starvation was one of the most difficult and urgent problems in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Allied governments understood this as early as 1943, and made the distribution of food their first priority. But even the most enlightened politicians and administrators tended to regard food as a purely physical need. It was left to those in the front line, who had direct contact with starving people, to recognize that food also had a spiritual dimension.

Kathryn Hulme, the deputy director of one of Bavaria’s many displaced persons camps, understood this. At the end of 1945 she wrote with great sadness about the scramble for Red Cross packages at the Wildflecken camp.

It is hard to believe that some shiny little tins of meat paste and sardines could almost start a riot in the camp, that bags of Lipton’s tea and tins of Varrington House coffee and bars of vitaminized chocolate could drive men almost insane with desire. But this is so. This is as much a part of the destruction of Europe as are those gaunt ruins of Frankfurt. Only this is the ruin of the human soul. It is a thousand times more painful to see.
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It is to this ruination of the human soul that we shall turn in the next chapter.

5

Moral Destruction

At the beginning of October 1943, shortly after the liberation of Naples, Norman Lewis of the British 91 Field Security Section found himself driving into a square somewhere in the outskirts of the city. Dominating the square was a large, semi-destroyed public building, with several army trucks parked in front of it. One of these trucks appeared to be full of American supplies, and crowds of Allied soldiers were helping themselves to tins of rations. These soldiers were then streaming into the municipal building, clutching their tins before them.

Curious to find out what was going on, Lewis and his fellow soldiers followed them inside and made their way to the front of the crowd. He recorded in his diary what he found:

Here a row of ladies sat at intervals of about a yard with their backs to the wall. These women were dressed in their street clothes, and had the ordinary well-washed respectable shopping and gossiping faces of working-class housewives. By the side of each woman stood a small pile of tins, and it soon became clear that it was possible to make love to any one of them in this very public place by adding another tin to the pile. The women kept absolutely still, they said nothing, and their faces were as empty of expression as graven images. They might have been selling fish, except that this place lacked the excitement of a fish market. There was no soliciting, no suggestion, no enticement, not even the discreetest and most accidental display of flesh. The boldest of the soldiers had pushed themselves, tins in hand, to the front, but now, faced with these matter-of-fact family-providers driven here by empty larders, they seemed to flag. Once again reality had betrayed the dream, and the air fell limp. There was some sheepish laughter, jokes that fell flat, and a visible tendency to slip quietly away. One soldier, a little tipsy, and egged on constantly by his friends, finally put down his tin of rations at a woman’s side, unbuttoned and lowered himself on her. A perfunctory jogging of the haunches began and came quickly to an end. A moment later he was on his feet and buttoning up again. It had been something to get over as soon as possible. He might have been submitting to field punishment rather than the act of love.