Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (65 page)

In Germany there was certainly plenty of luxury feeding in Berlin restaurants. In February 1941 Marie Vassiltchikov, who worked in the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, ‘lunched at Horcher’s and simply gorged. As the best restaurant in town, they scorn the very idea of food coupons.’
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Horcher’s was one of Göring’s favourite restaurants and he is said to have regularly indulged in meals which consumed a week’s worth of an ordinary German’s rations. Since the early days of the regime Goebbels had been trying hard to build up a public sense of the German people as a
Volksgemeinschaft
or a society of equals. Göring’s flamboyant lifestyle, drinking, eating and partying to excess at the various castles and hunting lodges which he built for himself, consistently undermined the propaganda and destroyed the idea of the National Socialists as restrained and upright leaders. While Göring might greet supper guests
at his palatial residence at Carinhall wearing a ‘blue or violet kimono with fur-trimmed bedroom slippers’ and a girdle set with jewels, guests dining at the house of Goebbels would be met by liveried footmen who would collect their ration coupons on silver trays. Goebbels’ guests were frequently disappointed to discover that their coupons had earned them a meagre dinner of herring with boiled potatoes.
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Hitler himself ate a peculiar vegetarian diet and generally served austere and execrable food at his dining table. A typical meal might consist of ‘a horrible grey barley broth – with crackers and some butter with Gervais-cheese as pudding’.
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His weakness was sugar. Hitler loved fancy cakes and chocolate bars and could eat as much as 2 pounds of chocolate in one day.
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In 1943 after Goebbels had announced that Germany must now invest every ounce of energy in waging total war, he was so incensed by Göring’s continued extravagance that he arranged for an angry mob to attack Horcher’s. In defence of his right to luxurious meals Göring posted a contingent from the Luftwaffe to guard the restaurant. He eventually lost this particular battle when the restaurant was forced to close for lack of foodstuffs. (The family and their staff relocated to Madrid.) But to Goebbels’ despair many Nazi potentates followed Göring’s example and sought to capitalize on their positions of power.

The public’s awareness that corruption was entrenched among the ‘upper ten thousand’ of the National Socialist administration undermined Goebbels’ rhetoric about the need for full mobilization and sacrifice. Hitler issued a decree in March 1942, and again in May 1943, calling on those in top positions to set a good example under the present conditions of total war, but this was to little avail as self-serving corruption appears to have been the norm.
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In 1942 a long-standing arrangement between a Berlin delicatessen trader called August Nöthling and an array of members of the Nazi elite to supply rationed goods without taking payment in coupons was exposed. Among his customers were Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Food and Agriculture Walther Darré, the Chief of Police Wilhelm von Grolman, Field Marshals Walther von Brauchitsch and Wilhelm Keitel and the Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, who was listed as having received off the ration, ‘ham (smoked and tinned), tins of corned beef and sausage, venison, butter, fat, poultry, chocolates, tea, cocoa, sugar, oil, sweets, honey and fruit’.
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The report on Nöthling’s activities was written by the Police President
Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorf, who failed to mention that he had himself bought spirits, wines and Cognac from the shopkeeper.
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When the affair came to Goebbels’ attention and he confronted the culprits they came up with an array of what Goebbels dismissed as ‘soggy’ excuses, the most common being that the food shopping was handled entirely by their wives, who had not realized that they were doing anything wrong.
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Goebbels’ determination to make an example of these men at a public trial was frustrated by Nöthling, who, it was claimed, committed suicide in his cell.

It was perhaps the awareness of the prevalence of high-level corruption which made Hitler and Göring (to Goebbels’ annoyance) reluctant to punish small-scale black marketeers who went out from the towns to barter in the countryside for food, a practice endearingly known in German as ‘hamstering’.
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Henry Picker, an adjutant at Hitler’s headquarters, reported that at lunchtime on 23 June 1942 Hitler held forth on the subject of hamstering, arguing that the police should not search people coming into the cities from the countryside for a few eggs. He demonstrated his failure to grasp the economics of agricultural supply by arguing that as long as the farmers filled their quotas this sort of traditional trade did no harm. Goebbels pointed out that ‘the end result is that there are absolutely no fruit or vegetables in the shops’.
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He was put down by Hitler, who argued that too much transportation of vegetables meant that they spoiled and this, in fact, was a more efficient way of ensuring that the towns were fed by their hinterlands. This was not a view which would have been shared by the townspeople who were bartering away their Persian rugs, table linen and children’s toys in exchange for potatoes, a little milk, a few green vegetables or fruit. The growth of a black market of barter in Germany indicated the seriousness of food shortages within the industrial cities. It was a disturbing signal that the ration was failing to ensure all German civilians an adequate diet.

THE GERMAN CITIES – HUNGRY BUT NOT STARVING

In Britain the food situation had stabilized by the end of 1941, and even if meals were monotonous and not particularly tasty, the food
supply remained stable and adequate throughout the rest of the war. In Germany, in contrast, the food situation in the cities progressively worsened until a crisis was reached in the winter and spring of 1941–42. Potato shortages had begun to impact upon urban dwellers in the summer of 1941, but by the time the exceptionally cold winter months set in there were serious problems with the potato supply to the cities and shortages were reported in Cologne, Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. Wilhelm Kiel, a social democrat living in the northern industrial area, described how he had to ‘literally go begging to the farmers, from house to house, in order to obtain, pound by pound, the quantity of potatoes we need, in order to eke out a bare existence until the autumn’.
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Women tried to disguise the lack of meat on the menu by making ‘false meatballs and cutlets’ out of potatoes, lentils, turnips and white cabbage, but with a shortage of potatoes and vegetables it became increasingly difficult to make filling meals.
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Berliners were so starved of greens that nettles and sugar beet leaves sold for high prices in the markets.
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A further depressing development was the progressive decline in the quality of bread, the other mainstay of the diet.
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Over the months and years of the war the milling grade of wheat was continually increased until by April 1942 virtually none of the bran was removed. Gradually, more and more barley, potato and rye flour was mixed in with the wheat flour. This did not necessarily affect the nutritional value of the loaves but food offices began to complain that the bread was causing digestive problems and diarrhoea. In 1942 a report from Regensburg complained, ‘a good bread for labouring people is half the meaning of life and has a tremendous impact on productivity as well as morale’.
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The decline in the quality and quantity of staple foods was accompanied by a Ministry of Food campaign to encourage people to find substitute foods. Teachers were instructed to take their classes out into the fields to gather weeds and grasses such as yarrow, goat’s rue and stinging nettles as replacements for cabbage. Even the roots of carnations were recommended.
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In the autumn of 1942 the Württemberg Milk and Fats Trade Association encouraged people to go out into the woods and collect beechnuts, from which a valuable edible oil could be extracted. For every kilogram delivered to them they promised to
issue a voucher for 200 grams of margarine or oil.
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Unfortunately, the beechnut crop was poor that year and these exhortations to find substitute foods did nothing but remind civilians of the hunger winters of the First World War, when people were so desperate they too went out into the fields to gather wild foods.

In the autumn and winter of 1942 the intensive exploitation of the occupied territories brought temporary relief and rations were raised. But the relief did not last long. The year 1943 brought yet more food shortages to Germany’s cities. In Essen bread and potatoes made up 90 per cent of what most people ate and the industrial towns were once more hard hit by an unsatisfactory potato harvest in the summer.
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The Ministry of Food began to make plans to distribute swedes and turnips, and Italian rice and lentils were brought in to eke out the supplies of staple foods.
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The basic meat and fat ration had to be cut yet again in May.
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Even though military rations were cut by 20 per cent, the army was too large a burden on the system. All this was exacerbated by the 7 million foreign workers in the Reich and the fact that local officials began to distribute generous rations to the homeless in the bombed-out cities.
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In the spring of 1943 Sybil Bannister, an Englishwoman married to a German gynaecologist, discovered how serious the food situation in the towns was in comparison with the comparatively plentiful food supply in the countryside. Sybil spent the first years of the war living in Bromberg, a town in the annexed part of Poland. Here she missed cheese and sauces but felt that she ‘could not grumble. We were always able to buy a winter store of potatoes … in the summer we had ample fruit and vegetables to bottle for the winter months.’
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Then she took her baby son to stay with his grandfather in Wuppertal-Barmen. Here everyday life was much more difficult. ‘Besides the war in general, there were two things which were obviously lowering their vitality; one was the food shortage, and the other the continued air-raids … The food shortage was as yet not desperately acute. There were enough goods in the shops to supply the full complement on the ration cards, but this was just
not
enough. It is easy to go short for a few days or a few weeks without noticing many ill effects, but when it runs into months, the need accumulates until a permanent state of hunger and enervation ensues … in May 1943, coming straight from the country in the East
where we had unlimited supplies of milk, potatoes and vegetables, into a town in an industrial centre in the West, it was remarkable to notice what a difference the deficiency in these foods made to the possibility of varying the menu and still more of satisfying appetites … In Barmen there was not only no full milk for adults, but potatoes were rationed and vegetables in short supply. As it was impossible to “fill up” with these commodities, the bread ration also proved inadequate … It was a constant worry to know how to fill the hungry mouths.’
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It is not necessary to be actually starving in order for food deprivation to cause psychological and physical distress. Women used up a great deal of mental and physical energy thinking up different ways of preparing the same foods and producing something edible out of a few potatoes and lentils, with barely any fat or green vegetables. Long and tiring food queues, anxiety about where the next meal would come from, interspersed with periods of real deprivation, all combined to cause great stress. Then the Allied aerial bombing campaign began to hit the industrial areas in earnest and the inhabitants of the cities were reduced to a state of misery.

Sybil Bannister was unlucky enough to experience the first bombing raid to hit Wuppertal-Barmen while she was visiting her father-in-law. The family’s home was destroyed. They were given chits which allowed them to buy food in the shops. As the air raids in Wuppertal had only just begun, the shops were still stocked but, ‘Later on … there were no goods available in the shops.’
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The bombing raids took their toll on food warehouses and household stores. More and more food had to come out of the regular rationing system to set up emergency kitchens for the homeless.
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In the city of Cologne, the last two years of the war were appalling. Lengthening food queues were matched by long walks to work as the public transport system broke down. Lack of fuel for cooking and heating, combined with frequent air raids, made home life debilitating, and the shabby clothing and worn shoes gave the civilian population a depressing air. There were no work shoes to be had or rubber boots. Washing was difficult with the tiny piece of in-ferior soap which was allocated on the monthly ration.
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The deaths of friends and neighbours from the bombing campaign, and the increasing loss of men at the front to death and injury and military defeats – first at Stalingrad, then North Africa, Italy, on the Atlantic in the
submarine war, and over and over again on the eastern front – all wore down civilian morale.
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