Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (6 page)

Despondency and fatigue overwhelmed the nation. If the lack of food contributed to the German defeat it was not because the Germans were dying in vast numbers but because the grinding misery of never having quite enough to eat wore down the morale of the people. New recruits and soldiers returning from leave brought news of the misery to the front line, where the troops themselves were hungry and ill. They stole the barley feed meant for the horses and ground it in their coffee mills to make flour for pancakes.
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The horses died; the soldiers’ will to fight dissipated. The German request for an armistice in October was the result of failure on the battlefield. But to many of those who witnessed these events, it appeared as though hunger was the victor, and that it was starvation among the army and civilians which had brought about a humiliating defeat.
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Even after Germany had signed the armistice the British continued to impose an economic blockade. This was supposed to help suppress a communist revolution and pressurize the Germans into accepting the unfavourable terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
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The winter of 1918–19 was the hungriest and most miserable for the German population. From the regimental barracks in Munich the twenty-nine-year old Adolf Hitler, who had served in the German army as a dispatch runner
at the rank of corporal, watched how the city came under the rule of, first, a Jewish radical Social Democrat, and then of a number of Soviet-style councils, until it was eventually brought under control by the troops of the newly formed Weimar Republic.
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These events, which demonstrated the vulnerability of a hungry and defeated Germany to the threat of communist revolution, ensured that Hitler (and many others who would later take up positions of power under the National Socialists) developed an acute awareness of the dangers of civilian hunger. Indeed, Hitler developed an obsession with the need to secure the German food supply, especially at a time of war. This would later provide him with one of the reasons for the attack on the Soviet Union, and add fuel to the fire of progressive radicalization which characterized the National Socialist regime during the Second World War. On 8 March 1919, Lloyd George warned the Supreme War Council and the Allies that ‘the memories of starvation might one day turn against them … [T]he Allies were sowing hatred for the future: they were piling up agony, not for the Germans, but for themselves.’
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Lloyd George’s comments were alarmingly prescient. The hatred the Allies had sowed came back to haunt the British in 1940–42 during the height of the U-boat blockade. But it was the inhabitants of eastern Europe who experienced the worst of the agony that Lloyd George had foreseen. During the Second World War the National Socialists would argue that the need to secure a minimum food ration of 2,300 calories per day for ordinary Germans justified the extermination of 30 million urban Soviets, over 1 million Soviet prisoners of war, and at least as many Polish Jews.

AUTARKY AND
LEBENSRAUM

The First World War intensified Germany’s problems with regard to its position in the world food economy. The most critical problem was the country’s lack of foreign exchange. Germany’s manufacturing industry did not produce enough exports to earn sufficient foreign exchange to pay for all its import requirements. Food and fodder for livestock made up half of all Germany’s imports, but it also needed raw materials to generate industrial growth and the war reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles swallowed up yet more foreign exchange. In 1927
the prominent agronomist Friedrich Aereboe published a study of the influence of the First World War on agricultural production and concluded that Germany would have been better off if it had followed the liberal course of integrating into the world economy in the nineteenth century. Agriculture should have been scaled down, freeing up workers for industry to produce manufactured goods for export which would then, in turn, have paid for increasing imports of food and consumer goods.
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By not following this course Germany had burdened itself with an agricultural sector which was too large for a modern economy and farms which were too small, inefficient, and wallowing in debt.
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In the inter-war years it was not too late for Germany to choose to follow the liberal course mapped out by Aereboe, and fully (and peacefully) integrate itself into the global market economy. However, even Britain and America were moving towards protectionism in the 1930s. When the First World War came to an end a sudden drop in the demand for food left Europe and the United States with a surplus of foodstuffs. The interests of the farmer and the working man now converged. Both favoured a secure food supply and stable, if higher, prices. The economic impact of the Great Depression intensified the problem and in response the United States increased tariffs on both imports and exports. The days of British free trade came to an end with the Ottawa agreements of 1932, which gave favoured access to foodstuffs entering Britain from the Dominions in return for special privileges for British manufactured goods in the Dominions’ home markets. France and Italy defended their low-productivity farms as the site of national identity and set up walls of protective tariffs, while injecting money into farming in an attempt to increase agricultural productivity.
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August Skalweit, another prominent agriculturalist, who published his analysis of the German food economy during the First World War in the same year as Aereboe, drew the opposite conclusion to his colleague. He argued that it was imperative that Germany should become less dependent on this hostile world market.
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In conservative circles, which favoured this alternative course of action, food preferences were transformed into a political statement. German housewives’ associations, with strong links to centre-right political parties, campaigned for patriotic consumption choices.
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Germans preferred
to eat crusty white rolls but two-thirds of the wheat to make them had to be imported. ‘Good’ German women were encouraged to support the German farmer and preserve the traditional social hierarchy and lifestyle, by purchasing rye bread made from home-grown grain. Housewives’ associations also promoted German-produced potatoes, butter and fish. Even bananas and oranges were rejected as decadent fruits and shunned in favour of the German apple.
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However, Skalweit warned that if Germany was really to become self-sufficient, and free of the need to spend precious foreign exchange on food, then its farmers would have to increase fodder production in order to feed the animals which would produce the protein and fat which Germany presently relied on imports to provide. He argued that this could only be achieved if a new, central organizational body was set up to co-ordinate the drive for self-sufficiency or autarky.
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The agronomists in the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party) would probably have known Skalweit’s work and they implemented many changes which resembled his recommendations. But their agenda was not simply to create a self-sufficient food economy which would secure the food supply for the German people but also to create a food economy which would provide the basis for military action.
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As soon as the National Socialists came to power Walther Darré, Hitler’s Minister for Food and Agriculture from June 1933, set up a new organizational body to co-ordinate the battle for self-sufficiency. Germany’s woefully backward agricultural sector was completely removed from the market system and put under the control of the Reich Food Corporation (
Reichsnährstand
). Every farmer, agricultural labourer, trader or food processor was expected to join. This vast power complex administered all aspects of the food system from production to distribution, from the plants which farmers were instructed to cultivate to the price of essential foodstuffs in the shops.
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German agriculture was cut off from international markets by protectionist tariffs. The prices farmers were paid for their products were often double what they were worth on the global market. Consequently, farm incomes rose and farm debt was reduced.
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But the ideology of protection had shifted. It was no longer for the benefit of a small and powerful aristocratic Junker elite. National Socialist ideology maintained that farmers were working for the good of the German race.
Their primary motivation in cultivating the land was supposed to be not profit but feeding the nation.
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Darré idealized farmers as the backbone of the Aryan race and advocated a return to the soil as a way of reversing the dangerous racial deterioration brought about by urban life. A regenerated countryside would, he argued, benefit the entire
Volk
(people) by strengthening the ‘life-source’ of society. During the 1933 election campaign he was extremely successful at winning the farming vote for the NSDAP.
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However, once the National Socialists had come to power he gradually fell from favour with Hitler and the rest of the National Socialist leader-ship. Darré’s problem was that once power had been achieved Hitler quickly lost interest in the problems of farmers. Indeed, Hitler demonstrated just how much Darré’s plans for internal agricultural restructuring bored him at a meeting in July 1934: while Darré was talking he picked up and began reading a newspaper.
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After 1933 agricultural reform was a low priority for the majority of the National Socialist leadership as they focused on preparing for war. But it is a mistake, which many historians have made, to conclude that issues of agriculture, farming and food supply were of little importance in determining wider National Socialist policy.
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Food was a constant worry for Hitler. Darré’s campaign for food self-sufficiency was modestly successful. The yield of key crops such as potatoes, sugar beet, cabbage and rye increased and in 1939 Germany was 83 per cent self-sufficient in the most important foodstuffs such as bread grains, potatoes, sugar and meat. However, this only represented a 3 per cent increase in self-sufficiency since the National Socialists had come to power.
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The best efforts of the Reich Food Corporation could not solve the problem of the need for imported fodder. This brought Darré into conflict with Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister for Economics. While Darré wanted foreign currency for the purchase of oilseeds and food, Schacht wanted to prioritize raw materials for the armaments industry.
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In 1936 food shortages and rising food prices combined with fears of inflation and a rise in unemployment to revive the spectre of November 1918. Hitler demanded that a brake should be put on food prices.
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Two years later he warned that unless sufficient foreign exchange was made available to overcome food shortages the regime would face a crisis. It was by now clear to Hitler and his leadership
that, as the German standard of living rose, the country would face a food disaster unless large quantities of food could be imported.
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This would, of course, slow down rearmament. In February 1939 he told a meeting of troop commanders that the food question was the most urgent problem facing Germany.
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The solution lay, in Hitler’s mind, in the conquest of
Lebensraum
(living space). In his never published ‘Second Book’, written in 1928, Hitler had already formulated the argument that in order to achieve the same level of wealth and prosperity as the United States, Germany needed its own version of the American west.
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The Reich Food Corporation confirmed this belief in the need for expansion. It calculated that Germany needed another 7–8 million hectares of farmland.
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If farms in the Reich were consolidated and rationalized many farmers would have to be evicted from their tiny farms. The plan was to send them east where they could settle new farms and supply the foodstuffs which Germany currently needed to import.
Lebensraum
would make Germany truly self-sufficient and immune to blockade and this would eventually enable Germany to challenge British and American hegemony.
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This vision of
Lebensraum
in the east was shared by many National Socialists, not least by Heinrich Himmler, head of the Gestapo (Secret State Police) and SS (
Schutzstaffel
or Protection Squad). His Race and Resettlement office was intended as the vehicle by which greater Germany would be settled by a racially healthy German People.
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Darré, who in the early years was a friend of Himmler and director of the Race and Resettlement office, shared this vision, and as early as the summer of 1932 he can be found at a secret NSDAP leadership conference detailing plans for large eastern agricultural estates run by an aristocracy of SS members and worked by enslaved former inhabitants.
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This perceived need to expand eastwards made conflict inevitable. In a secret speech to young military officers in May 1942, Hitler explained why Germany had gone to war. While it was the duty of the German people to multiply, they lacked the space to do so. If they failed to multiply they faced racial decline and therefore needed to capture living space. ‘It is a
battle for food
, a battle for the basis for life, for
the raw materials
the earth offers,
the
natural resources
that lie under the soil and
the fruits
that it offers to the one who cultivates
it.’
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The entire future of the
Volksgemeinschaft
(the classless People’s Community which the National Socialists claimed they were striving to create) depended upon the creation of a new agrarian system throughout the Greater Reich.
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