Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (35 page)

THE FOOD CRISIS OF 1941–42

The massacre of the Soviet Jews, the deaths of millions of Soviet prisoners and the agonies of the citizens of Leningrad, Kiev and Kharkov as they slowly wasted away from hunger did nothing to alleviate the food crisis which developed on the eastern front that winter. By the autumn of 1941 it was clear that the Red Army was going to put up far greater resistance than the Wehrmacht had expected and that Germany was facing a long and immensely tough battle in the east, which would require large amounts of equipment, men and food. The
German army was now fighting on an ever lengthening front (it grew from around 1,200 kilometres to about 2,400 kilometres) with supply lines which stretched back over more than 1,500 kilometres of mainly unpaved roads.
⁹⁵

As the winter of 1941 approached, the Wehrmacht supply officers became increasingly anxious that they had been unable to build up sufficient stocks to feed the men at the front over the cold months to follow. Army Groups North and Centre were still requesting supplementary food supplies from the Reich. Even the SS were complaining about the food their men were receiving. What was more, the German administration’s grip over the areas it occupied was threatened by increasingly effective partisan action behind the lines. But the main problem was transport. The supply troops simply could not get the food through to the men at the front. When the autumn rains set in the roads turned into muddy quagmires. Most of the divisions at the front relied on horse-drawn wagons to bring up food and weapons. The commander of the 16th Army’s II Corps reported that ‘from my own experience I know that while walking on the roads one sinks to one’s knees in the mud, and the water pours into one’s boots from above … [Horse-drawn] panje-wagons could not get through and the number of food-carriers [on foot] did not suffice.’
⁹⁶

A couple of weeks in November brought some relief as the rains stopped and the frost set in and ‘solidified the monstrous ruts leading to the east’.
⁹⁷
Then the winter snows arrived and in that first unbearable winter the temperatures fell to minus 40 degrees Celsius. The motorized Panzer divisions experienced a process of demodernization as those tanks not wiped out by the Russians broke down. Wolfgang Reinhard of the 18th Panzer Division recalled that if the complicated spare parts could not be obtained then ‘nothing could be done’.
⁹⁸
Leo Mattowitz despaired as ‘everything mechanical came to a dead halt. Nothing worked at all. Not like the Russians. They were used to it, they took proper precautions. Their machine guns worked, their motors kept running. We didn’t even have anti-freeze. Just imagine it: before we left the vehicles we had to let the water run out because it would freeze overnight … we were totally unprepared for winter. Totally.’
⁹⁹
The Germans found that even their railway locomotives were inferior. The Soviets insulated the boilers on their engines in order to prevent
the heat escaping into the frosty air. The German trains, without insulation, used excessive quantities of fuel. To make matters worse, they would not run unless the low-quality coal which had been captured in the Donbas region was mixed with higher quality German coal or oil, which had to be imported.
¹⁰⁰

The modern war of ‘quick marches and decisive encounters’, which the German troops had been expecting, suddenly descended into trench warfare horrifyingly reminiscent of the First World War.
¹⁰¹
Having marched nearly 1,000 kilometres in five weeks the men of the 16th Army found themselves halted in a swamp east of the River Lovat. They dug in and stayed there for fourteen months.
¹⁰²
Karl Meding, aged nineteen, found himself living with a comrade in a hole near Vitebsk in central Russia. ‘There were wooden poles over it and on that lay hay and on top of that, snow … One of us always had to stand outside this hole and see if the enemy was coming. We were always looking towards the east and the wind came from the east. Even the fear of death … wasn’t as terrible as this. It was undoubtedly my very worst experience in Russia. Everything froze. We used to huddle there with our feet wrapped in straw … You couldn’t make a fire and all we had to warm up our coffee was some little candles’
¹⁰³
Guy Sajer claimed that ‘the punishment we suffered, not at the hands of the Russian Army … but from the cold, is almost beyond the powers of description’.
¹⁰⁴
If the men in their fox-holes were lucky enough to be sent hot stew from the field kitchens it often arrived stone cold, sometimes frozen solid.
¹⁰⁵

The soldiers were a ‘pitiful sight’. The Wehrmacht had not prepared for a winter war and there were not enough warm clothes. Many wore ‘light coats, rags wrapped around feet or shoes’ in temperatures of minus 40 degrees.
¹⁰⁶
Frostbite claimed many victims. There were barely any washing facilities, there was nowhere that was dry, clean clothes were an unknown luxury and the soldiers became infested with lice. The tiring noise and anxiety of being hit by the artillery barrage and the disturbing nature of hand-to-hand combat combined with fatigue to induce some level of battle exhaustion in virtually every soldier. ‘Now I have barely any appetite,’ noted one depressed German.
¹⁰⁷
Illness was rife. Weakened by exhaustion and malnourishment the troops fell victim to typhus, spotted fever, skin and bladder infections.
Guy Sajer began the war thinking himself ‘invulnerable, filled with pride we all felt’, but in the trenches on the banks of the Don river, ‘we seemed like nothing, like bundles of rags which each sheltered a small, trembling creature. We were underfed and unbelievably filthy. The immensity of Russia seemed to have absorbed us.’
¹⁰⁸

The doctor for the 12th Infantry Division complained that there was not enough meat, potatoes or pulses, and the supply of sugar, which the men needed to provide sufficient energy to withstand the cold, was too small.
¹⁰⁹
Transport problems were mainly responsible for the food shortages but this was exacerbated by the irresponsible plunder of the troops themselves. Along the eastern front there stretched a desolate barren zone which the Germans referred to as the
Kahlfraß
, or defoliated zone, where the villages had been stripped of food. The devastation was at its worst closest to the front line but in some places it stretched back hundreds of kilometres.
¹¹⁰
In December the 18th Panzer Division’s quartermaster warned that any further requisition orders were unlikely to be fulfilled because the inhabitants had nothing left. Their food stores were bare, and their winter equipment – sledges, snowshoes and felt boots – had all been taken. One field commander in the south complained that the Hungarian and Romanian troops were the worst offenders, taking ‘everything that was not nailed down’.
¹¹¹
Their depredations around the Black Sea and Donets Basin in the autumn of 1941 left the Wehrmacht without sufficient supplies for the winter.
¹¹²
Underfed front-line troops resorted to further ‘wild’ actions. Lacking fodder for their horses, the soldiers fed them straw from the thatched roofs of the village houses.
¹¹³
They paid for their violence with their own hunger. In February 1942 the 18th Panzer Division’s bread ration was cut in half, down to 300 grams a day.
¹¹⁴

At the end of 1941 Herbert Froböse was flown in to Kaluga, about 80 kilometres from Moscow. He went to join a division which had taken shelter in an old factory. His new comrades’ first reaction was to think, ‘Oh no, not more people to feed.’ But the welcome was warm when it was discovered that they had brought food. Froböse spent his time at the factory frozen, filthy and itchy with lice. Within two weeks half of his fellow replacements had been sent back with frostbite. They were sent bread, sometimes a little margarine, but no jam. At night the field kitchen was sometimes able to drive some soup over
to them but it arrived cold. Then the supplies of food stopped coming. ‘The road was just snow and mud and you could not get through any more. Even the oil was frozen.’ Their one motorbike had to be pulled on skis by a horse. In February 1942 they began to retreat through an area of burned-out villages. It was chaotic, everything was frozen, there were no food supplies, and they survived for two months on horsemeat.
¹¹⁵

If the civilian and military occupational administrations were unable to requisition sufficient food supplies for the soldiers on the eastern front, the Reich was not in a position to alleviate their position by sending in large quantities of German supplies. The winter was bitterly cold and collections of clothing for soldiers at the front were met with resentment by the people of Cologne, who were themselves extremely short of warm underwear and sweaters.
¹¹⁶
Food shortages had become commonplace in German cities. Potatoes periodically disappeared from the shops and fruit and vegetables were rarities. Nutritionists were concerned that industrial workers were still losing weight, especially miners in the Ruhr area, who were thought to have lost up to 6 kilograms.
¹¹⁷
It was thought that this would significantly reduce productivity, as the labour force had used up its fat reserves and was now making inroads into its muscle tissue.
¹¹⁸
In the spring of 1942 bread consumption began to eat into the country’s grain reserves and Backe realized that he was failing in his aim to ensure that all German civilians received at least 2,300 calories a day. Conti warned that at 1,358 calories per day, the basic ration – received by non-workers – had fallen well below the minimum 1,700 calories essential for an adequate diet.
¹¹⁹
But grain, meat and fat shortages meant that the rations would have to be cut again. The
Sicherheitsdienst
inflamed the situation by warning that the workers and urban population were in a mood reminiscent of 1918, pessimistic about the outcome of the war and critical of the regime.
¹²⁰
The National Socialist leadership was determined to distance itself from the incompetence and indecision of the German government during the First World War and decided that it was time for radical action to be taken. The occupied territories must be made to release their food stocks with no regard for the consequences for the indi-genous population. It was now that the mantra that other peoples
should starve before the Germans was taken up by the National Socialists. The Reich Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, made a note in his diary to this effect.
¹²¹

In March Hitler attempted to promote the exploitation of the occupied territories by ordering that all soldiers on leave or travelling to the Reich for duty should return with packages containing as much food as they could carry. These food parcels became known as ‘
Führer-pakete
’. It was hoped that in this way Germany would tap the food which was being siphoned off into the black markets of the occupied territories.
¹²²
In her diary in April 1942 Maranja Mellin recorded the return of her father from Paris with a
Führerpaket
. ‘He brought lots of things with him. Clothes, stockings, dried beans, writing paper, liver sausage, carrots in meat sauce, gloves, soap, belts, shoes, washing powder … Four pears and almonds, cinnamon and pepper. The table was full … wherever the men are they buy things.’
¹²³
Another young girl, astonished by the ‘mountains of booty’ that her father brought home, said, ‘if everyone is sending this much home, then there is nothing left in France’.
¹²⁴

Meanwhile, not disheartened by the disappointing results of the Hunger Plan, Backe and Göring returned to its logic. In order to free up more food yet more people needed to be exterminated. Attention was now turned to the Polish Jews and the Hunger Plan was reshaped into a more targeted instrument of racial genocide.
¹²⁵

THE HOLOCAUST in poland

At the end of 1941 a line of demarcation existed along the old Soviet–Polish border of 1939. To the east the policy was one of total extermination, to the west only about 10 to 20 per cent of the Jews had been murdered.
¹²⁶
The National Socialist precaution of keeping written documentation of inflammatory policies to a minimum means that there is still a question mark over the exact timing of the decision to murder the Polish Jews. Hitler’s regime did not begin the war with a clear plan. There were various outlandish ideas floating about, including the notion that it might be possible to deport all European Jews to the island of Madagascar. Most officials seem to have expected that
after the conquest of the Soviet Union the Jews in Poland and western Europe would be deported into the Siberian wasteland where they would be worked or starved to death.

The Holocaust was not just the product of an irrational ideology but the conclusion of a series of crises in the German conduct of the war. The failure to conquer the Soviet Union, the rise of partisans in the occupied zones, a dwindling food supply in the Reich – which was diminishing the productivity of workers and might provoke resistance to the regime – all created an atmosphere of crisis and the belief that extreme action was necessary to remedy the situation. This came together with the unfortunate circumstance that the organizational and military means to commit murder on a vast scale were being put into place. The appetite of the SS had been whetted by the ease with which the Soviet Jews had been eradicated. An extermination camp at Chelmo had already been built as an experimental pilot project and the systematic gassing of Jews from the Warthegau had been carried out there. It had always been the intention of Hitler and a section of the National Socialist leadership to eradicate the Jews from Europe. The food crisis of 1941–42 provided an ostensibly rational reason as to why the crime of murder should be committed. The Jews could not be allowed to continue eating the precious food which the German workers deserved: they must die in order to free up desperately needed food supplies.
¹²⁷
Thus food worries gave added impetus to the Holocaust. The historian Christian Gerlach argues that without the food panic that winter, many more Jews might have survived, albeit under terrible conditions as forced workers.
¹²⁸