Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe—An Introduction
Tatjana Tönsmeyer Dirk Luyten Karl Christian Lammers Irina Sherbakova
"Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe—An Introduction" published on 12 Aug 2021 by Brill.
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1 War and Occupation

War and occupation are closely connected, but they are not the same thing. Rather, to state the obvious, the former is the precondition for the latter: occupation follows war. Historians agree that National Socialist Germany began planning for war at an early stage, and Hitler himself was obsessed by the belief that, after the First World War – those four years which he described in “Mein Kampf” as “the greatest and most unforgettable time” of his life1 –, the bitter defeat and the imposition of peace terms he regarded as shameful, a new conflict was needed in order to restore Germany to its former greatness. In this, he shared the views of a considerable section of German society.2

Although the focus of foreign policy initially seemed to be on “revision”, Hitler committed his leading military figures to war from the start of his rule. As early as February 1933 he left them in no doubt as to his aims: it was necessary to build up a formidable Wehrmacht and, with their help, to “pursue an active foreign policy” in order to eradicate “Marxism, root and branch”. He spoke openly about the “expansion of the Lebensraum of the German Volk … with an armed fist if necessary”. In order to achieve this, he would have “ruthlessly to expel several million people” – above all in Eastern Europe.3

The leadership of the German Reich finally abandoned any notion of traditional great power politics, at the latest, with the invasion of Austria in 1938. This event signalled the final transition to a policy of aggression. This aimed not only at the conquest of territory, but also at the construction of a political and territorial “new order” for the continent, under German leadership. The goal was the acquisition of “Lebensraum”, the Germanisation of this territory, and the resultant restructuring of the continent according to racial principles.4 In rapid succession there followed the incorporation of Austria, then the Munich Agreement and shortly thereafter the German attacks on Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Poland in September 1939, Denmark and Norway in April 1940, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France in May 1940, Yugoslavia and Greece in April 1941 and, finally, the Soviet Union at the end of June 1941. Following the capitulation of Italy, German troops occupied the northern and central parts of the country in September 1943, followed by Hungary and Slovakia in 1944. At the turn of 1941/1942, therefore, at the highpoint of German dominion, large swathes of the European continent and around 235 million people found themselves under German occupation.

In terms of institutions and instances, the German occupation during the Second World War was baffling in its variety. Nevertheless, it is possible to differentiate between several types of occupation. These were – first – militarily administrated territories, including Belgium, Northern France, parts of the Soviet Union, Serbia, Greece and the occupied areas of Italy. The military administrations cooperated with the National Socialist leadership, which can be seen both in the extremely brutal treatment of the civilian population in the Soviet areas of occupation and in their seamless participation and cooperation in the genocide of the Jews. Secondly, a particularly National Socialist form of occupation can be identified, that of civilian administration. This includes the Reich Commissariats in Ukraine, Ostland, Norway, and the Netherlands, as well as the General Government in Poland. It should be emphasised, however, that the differences between the military and civilian forms of administration were less pronounced than those between occupation practices in Eastern and Western Europe. Whereas the Second World War in Western and Northern Europe was generally conducted as a conventional war, the German Reich inflicted an ideologically-motivated and racist war of annihilation upon Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, perpetrating state-legitimated war crimes there on a previously unprecedented scale.5

The areas annexed to the German Reich experienced a third form of occupation. These included the Sudetenland, Upper Silesia, Posen, West Prussia and Danzig, but also Alsace-Lorraine, Eupen-Malmedy, Luxembourg and the Slovenian territories in Lower Carinthia and Lower Styria, as well as, in formal terms, Austria (although this differed from the others in the much higher degree of local consent to annexation). The primary aim of this form of occupation lay in the “Germanisation” of these territories which, ultimately, meant the expulsion of the non-German population (which is not to say, however, that Germanisation was not also carried out in other occupied regions). Annexation also went hand in hand with a much higher degree of regulatory alignment, which can be seen in the number of laws and decrees from the German Reich adopted in these territories. In the interests of comprehensiveness, two further forms of occupation should also be added to this list, namely – fourthly – the Protectorate, which can be seen as a sort of hybrid of annexation and civilian administration, and – fifth – the Aufsichtsverwaltung (supervisory administration) in Denmark (up to August 1943) and the Auftragsverwaltungen (delegated administrations) in Greece and Hungary after 1944.6

Furthermore, in all occupied territories, representatives of the SS and the police apparatus were installed alongside these structures. At the same time, the Wehrmacht also played a decisive role in all questions of security, even in civilian administrated areas. Additionally, economic agencies and departments also had broad competences and responsibilities. With all this diversity, it is nevertheless important to emphasise that, while there was no central controlling institution or authority for the occupied territories, the high degree of ideological consensus within the Nazi leadership in Berlin and in the various occupation authorities on the ground did ensure that all of these administrations did operate, fundamentally, in the pursuit of German interests. Confrontations were not ideological in nature, but rather represented struggles over disputed areas of competence or were simply grounded in basic jealousies.7

What is clear, furthermore, is that occupation – regardless of the form it takes – is to be understood as a form of foreign rule resulting from war.8 There are rare exceptions to this rule, the most important one being the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (which is why our earliest sources stem from there). On the part of the occupied, occupation was (and is) accompanied by disempowerment.9 Furthermore, occupation always means – and the Second World War was no exception here – the physical and/or regulatory presence of the occupier. Consequently, a dynamic, and therefore not static, relationship develops between the occupiers and the members of the occupied society, which is almost without exception asymmetrical in nature, since the instruments of power were concentrated in the hands of the various occupation authorities and instances and these, particularly in Eastern Europe, deployed these instruments without constraint in order to achieve their goals.10

The numbers speak for themselves here: by the time the German Reich capitulated on 8 May 1945, Europe had suffered 36.5 million deaths, more than half of which, at least 19 million, were civilian casualties, among them the six million victims of the Shoah. In the Soviet Union, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, the number of civilian fatalities exceeded the number of military ones. It was in large part for this reason that Tony Judt wrote that the Second World War “was primarily a civilian experience” and stated that “this was a war of occupation”.11

As civilian casualties, many of these people died not only as a result of direct military operations, but also because the German Reich sought to maintain its ability to wage war at any price. At an early stage, the NSDAP leadership had already characterised this conflict as a fight over life and death, to which, in the words of Adolf Hitler, there were only two possible outcomes: Germany, he stressed, “will either become a world power or it will cease to exist”.12 The formative experience underlying this was the defeat in the First World War. Accordingly, Nazi policy and military planning strove to avoid defeat at all costs, and to do everything which could be understood as “kriegsnotwendig” (“necessary for the war”).13 In concrete terms, this meant that the provisioning of the population of the Reich and of the fighting troops had to be upheld at all costs, the output of the armaments production maintained at the requisite level, and the occupied territories “secured”. The close interrelationship between exploitation and violence therefore had its roots in the preservation of the capability to wage war, which constituted the highest priority of occupation practice, and which was also always charged with a high degree of racist and anti-Semitic ideology since, in the view of the National Socialists, “the Jews” represented the arch-enemy of the German nation. According to Hitler’s convictions: “If there were to be no more Jews in Europe, the unity of the European states would no longer be destroyed.”14

As a consequence, all occupied countries were subjected to exploitation. Generally-speaking, as a result of German demands, national economies were transformed into a war-oriented system of autarky.15 However, this took different forms in Western and Northern Europe compared to the occupied territories in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. In the former, as well as in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, German occupation focused on output, but did not tend to seize the infrastructure necessary for production.16 In France, this policy was only partially successful, and the country therefore lost much of its manpower and agricultural output.17 Nevertheless, massive intervention in the industrial sector remained rather rare, with exceptions here being the sequestration of individual plants in the iron and steel industry in Lorraine, the aluminium industry and electricity generation in Norway, and the chemicals industry in the Netherlands.18 A set of regulations ensured that German demands were met at the factory level.19 Requisitioning was a further instrument deployed by the Germans in the pursuit of their demands but, unlike in Eastern Europe, there was often a fair chance of compensation here.20

By contrast, exploitation in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe took on different forms. Put in simple terms, Hein Klemann and Sergei Kudryashov argued that after occupying almost all of Europe the Nazis “had the choice between slaughtering the cow and milking her”. Whereas in Western Europe they opted for the second option they took to slaughtering her in the eastern half of the continent. Here, Germany also developed an interest in raw materials, foodstuffs and manpower. As a consequence, exploitation usually took the form of plundering. The quantities of raw materials and foodstuffs taken from the General Government, for example, were so huge as to severely undermine local light industry. However, without wishing to belittle the impact of these policies, it was the policy of hunting for manpower in the occupied territories of Eastern Europe which, in the opinion of Klemann and Kudryashov, was “the most destructive element of the Germans’ exploitation policy”.21 Furthermore, it is also important to bear in mind that, on the territories of the Soviet Union, even at the outset of fighting, the withdrawing Red Army and the NKVD forces in particular (i.e. the troops of the Soviet Ministry of the Interior) were ordered to destroy anything which might prove of use or sustenance to the occupier. This scorched-earth policy hit the civilian population particularly hard, severely diminishing its resources from an early stage.22 Not only did exploitation take on different forms in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, therefore, but it also hit local populations who were far from well-off in the first place.

From a European-wide perspective, therefore, the exploitation carried out by the German occupiers took on a variety of forms – it related to the labour force, raw materials, industrial production, and foodstuffs, but also to the reserves of the national banks, fuel supplies and transportation. At the same time, the occupiers also made use of a wide range of instruments in order to pass down the costs of the war. Alongside actual theft, “more traditional” economic and financial-policy instruments were also deployed, stretching from the instrumentalisation of existing trade agreements, via the fixing of unfavourable exchange rates, through to the undervaluation of the respective national currencies23 and the procurement of “withdrawals” via so-called clearing accounts – in effect interest-free loans greatly weighted to the benefit of the Reich. In total, the war costs imposed upon the occupied countries amounted to around 90 billion Reichsmark, with France, at around 32 billion, carrying the heaviest burden. By the end of the war therefore, adding all these assets together, the Reich was in debt to the extent of at least 450 billion Reichsmark.24 Although international humanitarian law, in principle, permitted an occupying power to provide for its troops in occupied territories, through these measures the Reich made it clear that it did not consider itself bound by this.25

Within this framework of the overriding priority of securing the German capability to wage war, particular importance was given to the supply of the Reich population and the troops with adequate foodstuffs. Never again should hunger afflict the German people and undermine their morale, as it had in the First World War, thus “damaging” the following generation. After all, as early as 1921 medical experts had already warned that childhood malnutrition resulting from the blockade of the country during the First World War had led to “an intensive racial worsening of the growing generation”.26 Therefore, Hitler himself advised Wehrmacht officers in February 1939 that “the food question [is] … the most vital problem … that demands resolution by expansion”.27

It is not only this quote which shows that violence was already calculated into German food-provisioning plans at an early stage. Preparations prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union also demonstrate this clearly. The person in charge here was Herbert Backe, who had been made State Secretary (Staatssekretär) to Richard Walther Darré when Darré took office as Minister of Agriculture and who later became Head of the Food Commission in the Four-Year-Plan administration.28 He was convinced that a campaign against the Soviet Union could only prove successful if German troops were fed from the Soviet soil, rather than having to bring in supplies from Germany. At the same time, since the German population was to be spared hardships, ‘surpluses’ should be requisitioned for the home front. In order to requisition foodstuffs in the most ruthless manner possible, the breakdown of the Soviet state was considered to be a prerequisite.29 This was clear even before the commencement of the German assault on the Soviet Union, since both military and civilian personnel were well aware that their policies meant that ‘many millions’ would be starved, with some sources even speaking explicitly of ‘30 million’ in this regard.30

Recent historiographical research has seen in this one of two monstrous plans for mass murder, both developed in the first half of 1941. One was the extermination of the Soviet elites, including the larger part of the Jewish male population, to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a state. The second was the hunger plan mentioned above, which included the immediate seizure of the Soviet harvest in 1941 and the intentional starving to death of about 30 million Soviet citizens.31 For several reasons32 German authorities in Berlin as well as those in the occupied Eastern territories were afraid that their plans might not be realized as intended and therefore turned to measures that a perpetrator-centred historiography has addressed as “viable” or “feasible”.33

Independently of the modifications in German planning, the consequences of these policies were already evident in the cities of the occupied Soviet Union in the late summer and autumn of 1941: death rates skyrocketed. Kyiv, Minsk and Kharkiv were particularly hard-hit – with the municipal authorities in the latter calculating 11,185 deaths from hunger between January and August 1942 alone – but hundreds of thousands of people also died from shortages and hunger in Rzhev, Suny, Poltava, northwest Russia and the Crimea. The besieged Leningrad constituted an exceptional case – on the frontline, but not occupied – with over 1 million lives lost.34 In fact, in detailing the temporal distribution of peaks of destruction of various victim groups, Christian Gerlach lists famine victims second in chronological terms.35 With reference to the Soviet Union in particular, it can be seen that the measures aimed at the starvation of the local population were implemented with a degree of brutality which was not seen in other occupied regions. Furthermore, they were inflicted upon a population which, less than ten years previously, in 1932–33, had already fallen victim to state-initiated famine, with recent estimations calculating up to four million deaths in Ukraine alone.36

True to their plans and, in particular, their underlying ideological convictions, the elites of the Third Reich did not care about this. In 1942, Göring formulated this more clearly to representatives of the occupation administrations: he was “not concerned” whether “your people drop dead from hunger. Let them, if that means that no German drops dead from hunger.”37 To the population of the Reich, on the other hand, he promised “special allocations” for Christmas in the same year. “From today on”, he boasted, “things will continually get better, since we are in possession of regions with the most fertile soil. Eggs, butter and flour exist there in amounts which you could not imagine.”38

However, these violent occupation policies paralysed infrastructure and disrupted settled administrative procedure, leading above all to a reluctance of farming communities to meet delivery quotas and inciting resistance, the result of which was that actual deliveries to the Reich fell below Berlin’s expectations. This made importations from the Western and Northern European countries all the more important. Belgium alone sent 40 carriages loaded with foodstuffs to Germany every day. From Denmark came vegetables, dairy products and meat, and Norway exported so much fish that this became scarce at home.39

The shopping expeditions of German soldiers also contributed to shortages. They could be encountered in shops and markets everywhere in occupied Europe. The later German novelist Heinrich Böll, by no means a Nazi, wrote to his parents about his shopping trips: “If you continue to organise the supply [of money] the way you have lately, I will not have to let the riches of the black market pass…. I will be really happy if I can send you something”. And he did: coffee, butter, onions, cosmetics and stockings for his fiancé, and several pieces of “good” soap for his mother, to name just a few articles.40 Böll was definitely not the only one. In fact, German authorities intended that their soldiers, especially those coming from the Eastern Front, should have a good time in France, and therefore offered to convert unspent Russian roubles into Francs on highly favourable terms.41 The same was true for Belgium, where the Wehrmachintendantur acknowledged that allowing the German soldiers to spend like they did had “led to a high degree to the sell-out of the country.”42

The possibility of conducting such shopping expeditions, which were remembered long after the end of the war by the soldiers’ families, since husbands and fathers had brought wonderful items home, therefore contributed to sweetening the experience of the war for the German population in the truest sense of the term. In occupied Europe, by contrast, they contributed to severe shortages; shortages which affected millions of people who had to eke out an existence under German occupation, from Norway to the Greek islands in the Mediterranean, and from France to regions deep in the interior of the Soviet Union: How they responded to such shortages is the subject of this publication.

2 State of Research

During the Second World War, shortage took on a variety of forms, and concerned numerous commodities. Regardless of any differences, however, the following was universally true: it made itself felt rather quickly throughout occupied Europe, and it was particularly hard to bear when it came to foodstuffs. In occupied Soviet cities, as mentioned above, the situation by the late summer and autumn of 1941 was already one of the utmost destitution and despair. However, mortality rates were also very high in Greece. Taking Piraeus and Athens as examples, the figures here were 5 to 7 times higher in the winter of 1941/42 than they had been the previous year, with hunger being the direct cause of between one-third and one-half of all these deaths, according to medical reports. Hunger also played an indirect role here, since malnutrition increased people’s exposure to tuberculosis, influenza and other diseases.43 Most countries in Western Europe were better off, comparatively speaking. Nevertheless, the gnawing sensation of hunger and the general scarcity of food was at the forefront of many people’s minds – and became a recurrent topic in personal diaries. On 3 July 1944, the wealthy French banker Charles Rist noted: “People everywhere talk of nothing but provisions and supply.”44 This was not just a feeling; shortage was real: E.g. in October 1941, the prefect of Paris warned of diseases that might be transmitted by eating stewed cat.45 Schoolchildren in rural Aude made a list in June 1941 of what they had already eaten, and this included a hedgehog, grass snakes, a fox, frogs, a squirrel, a cat, a falcon and a badger.46 In Amsterdam, in 1943, people told each other bitter jokes about scarcity, such as: “Someone wanted to commit suicide by hanging himself but the rope was of such poor quality that it tore. Next, he wanted to inhale gas, but it was not available due to restrictions in supply. Then he decided to live only on his rations and quickly succeeded.”47

The scarcity of everyday goods, above all foodstuffs, was without doubt one of the central experiences which occupied societies had in common during the Second World War,48 as was the need to develop strategies to deal with it. Nevertheless, research has thus far focused more on policies of exploitation than on coping strategies. Put in more precise terms, this history of exploitation has predominantly been written about through one of three approaches: First, the focus has often been on macro-economic history, with an interest in assessing the contributions of various countries to the German war effort, in particular the highly-industrialised countries of Western Europe such as France, without which Germany could not have continued the war for six long years. In this context we can also mention the research preoccupied with the question of agriculture under the conditions of war and occupation which49 – with the exceptions of the Netherlands and Denmark – demonstrated a decline in agricultural productivity, and was characterized by the absence of manpower, tools and fertilisers. On top of this came the further disruptions caused by fighting and the fragmentation of markets.50

The second approach has been perpetrator-centred, focusing its attention closely on those who enacted these starvation policies. As a result, we know how different German institutions organised their exploitative practices and that these hunger policies were deeply rooted in anti-Semitism and racism, resulting in mass starvation in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, especially in the cities.51 Finally, a third strand of research focusses on the exploitation of forced labour, investigating in particular the management of forced labour by the German authorities, as well as living and working conditions in the Reich (much less in the occupied territories) and, especially, Jewish slave labour.52 By contrast we know a good deal less about how people coped with shortages and scarcities or how they sought to survive in a time when starvation afflicted entire societies.

In this regard, research has thus far described the supply situation in general, and focussed its attention primarily on hunger regions.53 One response to the catastrophic state of supplies throughout occupied Europe was the rationing of foodstuffs, sanitary products and fuel, but it was only in Denmark that this policy was to lead to something approaching a satisfactory situation.54 Another finding which emerged across all countries was that the rationing system ultimately led to a categorisation of and hierarchisation among members of the occupied societies grounded in the racist and utilitarian conceptions of the occupiers, as a result of which, in the final analysis, they were attributed greater or smaller chances of survival. Those who particularly suffered from this were Jewish people, prisoners of war, and patients of (psychiatric) clinics, who found themselves at the bottom of the pile in these hierarchies of allocation.55

In light of the prevalence of shortages throughout the continent, people were also forced to rely both on substitute products of all kinds56 and on the black market, where prices quickly shot up over a short period of time.57 In the German soldiers, the local populations were also forced to compete with wealthier rivals on the markets and in the shops.58 In the context of the growing literature researching childhoods in wartime, numerous discussions can be found of the particular situations faced by children and young people, particularly Jewish ones, and their central role as family providers, especially on the black market.59 The situation confronting elderly people, by contrast, still represents a gap in the literature. Furthermore, the fact that questions of supply played a not insignificant role when local women entered into relationships with occupying German soldiers is discussed, among others, by Maren Röger and Jennifer L. Foray.60

The social impact which the worsening supply situation had on the occupied societies is also worthy of discussion. Among other causes, this can be traced back to the fact that the shortage of supplies did not impact upon all members of society to the same extent, if only because, for example, members of differing social groups participated in the black market in different ways. What is more, the shortage of supplies also initiated new processes of societal stratification (e.g. in the betterment of the position of heavy labourers, who received higher rations than white-collar workers). Against this backdrop “standing together” became the buzzword of the day. Among those held accountable for this were housewives. The propaganda of the day made it their task to prepare traditional national meals, in order both to provide for “the nation”, in their families, and to provide a contribution to national self-affirmation.61

Jewish members of the occupied societies suffered under shortage to a unique extent. They were seen by the occupiers as “idle eaters” (“nutzloser Esser”) and were therefore allocated rations which were well below the level necessary for survival. Whilst this has long been recognised as one of the perpetrators’ guiding principles, in the context of Jewish Studies there has been a recent move towards an increased interest in the agency of the victims and, drawing increasingly on ego-documents, further aspects of everyday life before the genocide have moved into the centre of attention. These include, for example, the restrictions placed upon Jews when it came to purchasing supplies, or the fact that they were in a much more vulnerable position in their participation in the black market or in barter trade than other “market participants”, since particularly high prices were demanded of them whilst, at the same time, they consistently had to reckon with denunciation. It remains the case, however, that little is known about interactions between ghettoised Jews and other members of occupied societies when, for example, they sought to initiate contact with non-Jews within the context of their forced labour deployments, in the hope of securing the additional foodstuffs which could prove decisive for their very existence.

Finally, in the light of the general supply situation and the control of foodstuffs, those who aided and concealed the persecuted were also confronted with particular problems in their own provisioning.62 Regardless of these results, research in this field is still at a fairly early stage, and will have to remain “patchy” for those regions, such as the Soviet Union, where the genocide of the Jewish population was carried out within a very short period of time – often within a matter of weeks.

It is clear, therefore, that a great number of questions have thus far only been answered in part, if at all. Among these are not only the question of what it meant to live under German occupation, but also: How did occupation impact upon the daily lives of countless people in the form of shortages? How was their daily existence transformed, particularly in the context of the violence which the perpetrators often inflicted? This requires us to address a variety of issues, such as: How did shortage present itself in concrete terms? Which daily necessities, in particular foodstuffs, were affected by this? What strategies were developed to cope with these shortages in the various occupied societies? What was the impact of the rationing systems? What forms of substitute products could people fall back upon? How did the makeshift adaptations and economising solutions differ between city and countryside, East and West, North and South? What developments is it possible to trace in this respect over the course of the war? What practices were developed in relation to the black market, what significance was given to the barter trade, or to alternative currencies, for example in the form of cigarettes or alcohol? What evidence can be found pointing towards poverty-induced prostitution, which is only rarely discussed explicitly in the sources?

And finally, it is important to consider the extent to which Jewish people, but also Sinti and Roma, found themselves in a particular situation, subjected as they were to unique persecution whilst also suffering under the more general measures implemented by the occupation authorities. Taking into account not only these findings, but also the fact that the Second World War – and in particular the occupation – continues to be assigned a huge importance in terms of memory politics (and in some places a growing one, in light of the current arguments surrounding for example the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk or the Jewish Museum Polin in Warsaw),63 it is necessary to emphasise that relevant source editions in this respect remain few and far between and, where they do exist, demonstrate a very specific set of priorities.

In the German context, it is necessary here to mention, first and foremost, the relevant volumes of the “Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik” (“Documents on German Foreign Policy”), as well as the ego-documents of leading National Socialists and so-called “perpetrator documents”, among them the edition of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, the diaries of Joseph Goebbels, or Heinrich Himmler’s appointments diary. Alongside this there are also further anthologies such as the “Dokumente des Verbrechens” (“Documents of Crime”) or the still important documentation of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. More recently, the ongoing edition “Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland” (“The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany”) or the US Holocaust Memorial Museum series “Documenting Life and Destruction: Holocaust Sources in Context” also deserve mention. These anthologies are characterised for the most part by a documentary interest in diplomatic history or a concentration on the excesses of the German crimes of violence, in particular the Shoah. Therefore, it is overwhelmingly the German actors who are at the centre of editorial interest here, especially German perpetrators. It is only recently that newer publications have started to draw upon the perspectives of those who were impacted upon, directly and indirectly, by their actions.64

In contrast to Germany, the vast majority of neighbouring European countries do not enjoy a strong tradition of publishing academic source editions. Comprehensive source collections can only be found in the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia and Poland. What they have in common is that they focus largely on German crimes and domestic resistance. A number of source editions have been published since the late 1960s on the “Great Patriotic War”, many of them based in parts on German files (captured documents) in the State Archives in Kyiv and Moscow. A few source editions on the war also appeared at a regional level, and these have followed similar documentary interests. In these, everyday life under occupation remained almost completely suppressed, almost to the point of being taboo, which is a result of the fact that, ultimately, even in the historiography, any form of local dealing with or accommodation to the German occupiers suffered from association with “collaboration”, and therefore treason.65

In Poland, four volumes of the Documenta Occupationis Teutonicae were published as early as 1945–49 by the Instytut Zachodni (West-Institute) in Poznań. This series continued in 1952 as Documenta Occupationis. Since then, at various intervals, a further twelve volumes have been published. Also worthy of mention in the context of editions on resistance are the situation reports of the Biuro Wschodnie Delegatury Rządu na Kraj, a leading organ of the Polish underground state. Furthermore, larger collections of sources also exist for the former Yugoslavia. In the editions produced by the Military Historical Institute, among others, it is once again partisan actions and, as in the other examples above, the crimes of the occupiers which constitute the centre of attention.66

In the other previously occupied countries which – as already mentioned – do not have their own traditions of the academic-led publication of annotated sources, only a small amount of sources of German origin have been published thus far, for example the reports, translated into Italian, of the (German) Militärkommandantur in Tuscany, a selection of documents from the Foreign Ministry on the Holocaust in Greece, situation reports of the Sicherheitspolizei and the SD in Norway or Werner Best’s correspondence with the Foreign Ministry. The relevant German Historical Institutes participated in the compilation of some of these editions. Thus, several years ago, the GHI in Paris already edited selected documents on the Nazi terror in France, as well as situation reports of the Militärbefehlshaber in France and the summaries of the reports of the French prefects from 1940–44. The GHI in Paris has also produced two inventories of the sources at the National Archives in Pierrefitte and at the Military Archive in Freiburg related to France and Belgium, thus alleviating in part the lack of systematic source editions. Since 2011, an academic project has also been running at the GHI in Moscow, focused on the digitalisation of the German documents located in Russia (the so-called “captured documents”), and which goes back to an initiative of the administration of the President of the Russian Federation. This concerns the online presentation of sources from the archives, without annotation or a categorisation beyond the narrow history of their provenance.67

It is clear therefore that, in general, there is an evident lack of edited sources on everyday life under German occupation: In the majority of European countries, such editions do not exist; in those places where they do, they remain grounded in a strictly national approach, or sought to play a particular function in the context of state-socialist nation building (particularly in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia).68 In the final analysis, what is common to all of these editions is that the dimension of the everyday experiences of the members of the occupied societies is largely absent.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly surprising that the historical dimensions of shortage and supply under occupation in the Second World War, and their relation to everyday experience, have not yet been compiled editorially; all we have are smaller-scale collections of ego-documents or situational reports, in which the issue of supply constitutes one subject among many at best. Where sources on these everyday experiences have been edited at all they have only been partially accessible to the international research community due to their language of publication,69 even though some of them appeared already only a few years after the end of the war.70 Several years ago, Hagen Fleischer also presented a small selection of relevant sources, presenting the supply situation in occupied Greece.71 On the other hand, though, a younger, regionally-oriented historiography in Ukraine and Poland has started to integrate questions of supply in an exemplary manner.72

3 Archival Situation

In contrast to how it might first appear, the range of sources available in numerous archives is actually fairly good. The wide array of various sources available throughout Europe provide interesting possibilities for further research into the supply situation. Without going into detail for all occupied countries and for all groups of archives – a task which would burst the boundaries of this introduction – it is nevertheless possible to identify certain fundamental features here.

A first type of source which can reveal much about experiences of daily life from the bottom up are ego-documents, among them diaries and letters. Material of this kind, which has a private character, are often held in private or specialized institutions focussing on the Second World War. A pioneer in this field is the NIOD, created in 1945 as the RIOD (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie), with a mission to collect documentation on the Second World War in the Netherlands. Alongside archives from German administrations and police forces in the Netherlands, the NIOD has also collected countless documents from Dutch individuals and private organisations. The gathering of these documents began in the second half of the 1940s, and their diary collection is of particular interest. The Belgian Centre for Historical Research and Documentation on War and Contemporary Society (Navorsings – en Studiecentrum voor de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, now CegeSoma, part of the State Archives) was created two decades later, with a similar mission and a comparable type of documentation.73

In countries which do not have any specialized institutions for research into World War II, collections of ego-documents and related material are nevertheless available for researchers. For example, the National Library in Luxembourg has numerous sources of relevance for research into daily life. The city archives in Luxembourg and Belgrade have collected diaries, as has the Estonian Literary Museum which also holds memoires. The regional branches of the Italian state archives keep documents from private persons and, furthermore, the Italian Archivio Diaristico Nazionale, established in 1984, also maintains an extensive collection of ego-documents. The Dom Spotkań z Historią in Warsaw has an oral history collection which provides useful insights into shortage and supply, while the archives of the police and the judiciary are kept in the Institute for National Remembrance, which documents both the Nazi and the communist periods in Polish history.

Letters also constitute an important part of personal archives. This is true both for private correspondence with friends and family and for letters of a more formal character, e.g. letters of complaint. These types of letters demonstrate how people negotiated with the authorities and which aspects of coping with shortage frustrated them most. As such, they are also often filed in the archives of administrations, the police, the judiciary or, in the Italian case, the prefectures, the administrative heads of provinces. Here we can clearly see, for example, how the frustrations generated by the shortages triggered denunciations and complaints (Doc. 216, Doc. 257).

Sometimes, personal archives can also unearth a rare treasure box, as is the case with the simple record book written by a French-speaking middle-class woman from Belgium. She used this record book to note down her daily expenses for basic products bought both on the official and the black market, covering the entire occupation period. This source not only shows how the sharp rise in prices impacted upon daily life and illustrates the intimate interrelationship between the official and the black markets. Since the writer also added short comments expressing her joy or amazement when long looked-for items were suddenly available again, or explaining the unusual measures she had to follow in order to obtain a particular product, it also provides us with a first-hand impression of what it actually meant to hunt for everyday goods (Doc. 44).

Ego documents and personal archives therefore constitute an indispensable source for documenting the experience of shortage and the coping strategies which were developed, but they do have their limitations. The first of these is social bias, since writing and keeping paperwork is more common among the (educated) middle- and upper classes than among other societal groups. Furthermore, national specificities may also impact upon writing habits, such as the stage at which obligatory schooling was introduced. The context of occupation itself, and the fear of repression, may also have led many people to refrain from keeping a journal, and to impose self-censorship on themselves, only referring to certain issues indirectly, if at all.

Having said that, reference has already been made to administrative institutions and bureaucracies. Since occupation led to a situation of permanent shortages for members of the occupied societies, public institutions and bureaucracies of all kinds played a vital role, since it was these bodies who reacted to this, often responding to the situation by implementing a rationing system and a command economy. As a result, German and local bureaucracies set the framework within which “ordinary people” throughout occupied Europe had to deal with scarcity.

In this regard, roughly speaking, three types of administration are of relevance: Firstly, there were domestic administrations such as mayor’s offices, councils or regional administrations which had been in place before the occupation, and who now sought both to maintain the functioning of a “normal” administration and to preserve “peace and order” so as to minimize conflicts with the occupying powers and, thus, potentially the spilling of blood. Secondly, bureaucracies of the so-called “New Order” were also established in the occupied territories in order to regulate economic and social life. These were ideologically charged, often headed by members of collaborationist parties, and also commonly stepped in as an alternative to market mechanisms. The Belgian National Corporation for Agriculture and Food, which regularly updated special “Rationing codexes” with which consumers and producers in Belgium were obliged to comply, is just one example in this regard.74 Thirdly, there were also German institutions, who stepped in whenever German interests – which tended to be defined very extensively – were seen to be at stake. In Belarus, for example, it was the local German authorities who issued rules on a wide variety of issues, among them market regulations stipulating which products could be bought or sold, and stating that such sales were only legal if conducted in officially-accepted market places (but not in the streets leading to them, (Doc. 172)). These types of institutions could operate on their own on a day-to-day basis, but they did also cooperate with each other in many contexts, for example when a newly established institution for price controls relied on police forces to enforce their regulations or when defendants had to be handed over to German institutions in matters in which, for example, the Wehrmacht was involved.

Even if many institutional documents have a primarily administrative character or are related to policy making, they can also often help us to understand the individual level, and reports were regularly compiled monitoring the effects of shortages on the population. This was especially true with regards to the black market, which was a product of structural shortages and price regulation. Here an extensive range of control and policing services was established in order to implement the numerous regulations, whether by communicating them to the population through posters or the censored press, or by enforcing the population’s compliance with them. Since transgressions were common-place, police, control and judicial services generated large numbers of personal files which are accessible in many archives across Europe today. These case files provide an insight into the people who were subjected to the regulations: The ‘perpetrators’ were interrogated and sought to justify their behaviour, and explain it. Such interrogations therefore not only explain the context of what happened, but can also often reveal a ‘moral economy’ component. For instance, farmers who had not complied with the fixed prices often hint that there was a certain ‘margin’ which was accepted locally, and which was not regarded by the community as being in breach of the rules.75 However, as mentioned before, and as is the case with other types of sources, these sources can also be biased, since they tend only to give voice to those who have broken the rules, or who made the effort or had the skills to complain.

Generally speaking, the sources referred to here tended to be produced by domestic administrations (including those of ‘self-governments’ under German control, or of collaborationist governments). Aside from the departments responsible for policing and control, the branches of town and regional administrations responsible for social issues are also of particular significance in this respect, since their files show how people in need responded to the shortages, to take the national Estonian people’s relief organisation or the Central Welfare Council in Kraków as just two examples.

Alongside such individual cases, both domestic and German authorities sought to gain a general impression of the mood of the population. Shortage, after all, was a highly political issue, given the great impact it had both on maintaining labour productivity and on social harmony and law and order. As a result, public opinion was systematically surveyed, often through the use of informants. Internal administrative instructions, reports drawn up by these institutions and circular letters based on their findings therefore indicate what went wrong, identify sore points, and reveal how the populations opposed and circumvented the regulations, as well as helping us to understand how mechanisms of fraud operated. Since German institutions were also active in this regard, useful information can also be found in the archives of German economic administrations in the occupied countries; the archives of the Generalkommissariat für Finanzen und Wirtschaft (General Commissariat for Finance and the Economy) in the Netherlands constitutes just one good example in this respect, covering as they do not only economic and financial policies, but also agricultural and food-related ones.

Generally speaking, the archives mentioned thus far can be found, at least in part, for most occupied countries, and are typically kept in the (regional branches) of the national archives of the various (successor) states, both for the domestic administrations and, in some cases, for the German institutions, with the files of the latter also available in archives in Germany. Alongside these central archives, regional and local archives also often contain valuable collections from the Second World War, since it was local and domestic administrations who were often responsible for the day-to-day management of shortages, and who served both as an entry point into the rationing system and as the instances who tended to have to deal with those in difficult social circumstances. Such institutions, like the Tallinn city archives, sometimes keep reports on the living conditions of specific groups of the population, such as schoolchildren or refugees, but they also hold various appeals from, and correspondence with, citizens. With regards to research on Greece, local and regional archives – and in particular the Historical Archive of Crete – also contain this kind of material (alongside relevant German sources), and are therefore of great importance. Furthermore, such archives, or national research libraries, host newspaper collections, which are also important sources since, under occupation, it was often the press which communicated concrete details about the rationing system to the populace (as well as sometimes answering questions sent in by readers concerning issues they were unsure about (Doc. 558)). They also help us to understand what language was used in order to communicate such regulations to the public.

Alongside the source genres outlined above, it is also necessary to address further rich collections which, again, can roughly be classified as originating from the intent either to monitor or to assist the population. Among others, the following can be named here: The resistance movements across occupied Europe, trade unions and businesses, the social sciences and, last but not least, charities and humanitarian agencies. Resistance movements monitored shortage and black market profiteering, in many cases very closely, partially in order to identify, blame and punish ‘collaborators’, but also in order to call people to arms by highlighting the catastrophic consequences of occupation. The archives of the resistance movements therefore often contain sources on shortage and supply, as do local and regional war museums. Such institutions can be found in Italy, where there is a network of such institutions, as well as in Luxembourg and Norway. The archives of the Polish underground state also contain useful information on issues related to shortage and supply, as do those of the partisan movement in Belarus. In countries which had a government in exile, such as Latvia, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Poland, these exiled governments also commissioned and received reports on the social situation back home, which often discussed shortages, and these were often compiled by refugees, churches or the resistance movement.

Since, for many people, questions of shortage and supply were so closely linked to the workplace – a job was not only a source of monetary income, but employers often provided extra food or other scarce products – the collections of certain businesses and trade unions also shed light on the interrelationship between labour productivity and (the threat of) undernourishment. Individual businesses not only documented the effect of shortages on their workforce, but also sought to support their workers (Doc. 380, Doc. 400). Where they still existed, for example in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the archives of trade unions also reveal workers’ perspectives. Furthermore, sources produced by trade unions are also particularly useful in the study of strikes, which were often rooted in food shortages and offered a way for workers to voice their discontent with the situation created by the occupation (Doc. 58, Doc. 108, Doc. 257). In some countries, like Belgium, new radical and clandestine trade unions formed a part of the resistance movement. Organised at the factory level, they tackled the issue of shortages directly, and in some countries, such as Norway or Belgium, used them as a starting point for actions which aimed at improving the purchasing power of their members (Doc. 179). Consumer cooperatives, which in some cases were part of the (socialist) labour movement, also documented the dramatic drop in supply, and reports on the meetings of female clients show how consumer habits changed, and what kind of coping strategies were developed. They also inform us about conflicts over distribution, which arose when people who were not members of the cooperatives sought to obtain from them products which were not available from their local shop keeper (Doc. 41).

Since shortages led to serious health problems, archives related to care – not only those of public health authorities, but also those of hospitals and psychiatric asylums etc. run by the church or religious or philanthropic institutions – can also be useful in documenting the individual impact of the shortages on the most vulnerable. Taking Greece as an example, the International Red Cross, the Orthodox Church and various other charities here developed initiatives aimed at helping the poorest members of society or at preserving the population from starvation. As well as providing important material support, foreign delegates in the Red Cross and other aid organisations also drew up reports on the shortages and their effects, thus offering an external and international perspective on the ways in which the Greeks sought to survive which make their material particularly valuable (Doc. 452).

Supply and shortage were also monitored by the social sciences at the time. This was partially for academic reasons but, more often than not, such investigations were commissioned by charities, social organisations or businesses. This type of source, often labelled as ‘grey literature’ (for example the thesis of a prospective social worker), offers particularly interesting insights, since they take the perspectives of individuals (or small groups of people) as their starting point, and focus on other social groups than only those low-income ones who were particularly affected by shortages (Doc. 496).

Finally, the experiences of the Jewish populations also need to be discussed. Generally speaking, as a result of the racial policies of the Third Reich, they were particularly hard hit by the shortages. Documentation on this can be found in numerous special collections, e.g. in the Ringelblum archive in Poland or the Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto, edited in German. Other institutions deserving of mention in this regard are the Jewish Museum in Prague, where personal archives from Jews in the city as well as from the Terezin ghetto are kept, or the Centre for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, which maintains private collections documenting the lives of the Jews in Norway. The same is true for the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw which hosts the records of Jewish institutions.

A particular type of source, somewhere on the border between archival and published materials, is the underground press. This type of militant press was widespread in occupied Europe and sought to conduct an ideological struggle against the occupier and those deemed ‘collaborationist’. It gave voice to the discontent felt by (segments of) the population at the shortages and identified those it deemed to be responsible for them (Doc. 68, Doc. 534, Doc. 541, Doc. 552). Nor should the official press, working under censorship, be overlooked: this was used as a channel of communication for explaining the rationing policies to the population at large and thus helps us to understand how the system worked at an individual level, as well as shedding light on the everyday problems which consumers were confronted with. These newspapers also provide information on alternative food arrangements, ranging from wartime recipes to interesting classified ads sent in by individuals and advertisements from companies promoting their “Ersatz” products (Doc. 23, Doc. 123, Doc. 160, Doc. 183).

Finally, a word on accessibility: generally speaking, archives now tend to be open for research. Nevertheless, privacy regulations or regulations governing access to judicial archives may impose certain restrictions – as, in the light of debates over the politics of history, may future changes to archival laws. Practical problems may also complicate the use of certain collections, such as those linked to the geographical location of an institute or the dispersion of the archival system in one country. Some collections may also still be closed completely, or access to them might be very restricted. One example worth mentioning here is the church archives in Poland. Accessibility might be restricted not only for organisational or political reasons, but also as a result of the lack of finding aids. Furthermore, archival collections might be incomplete due to the impact of the war (or later events) or might be dispersed over several countries. This is the case with some collections concerning Belarus, or with the archives of the German administration in Belgium, which are kept in Paris and in Freiburg in Germany. Finally, modalities of access to archives are not always uniform within one country, and a special authorization is still required by some private collections in order to make copies. Nevertheless, and as difficult as it might be to generalize on a topic as broad as this: there is a multitude of collections available throughout Europe which can help us to understand how members of occupied societies sought to survive by combatting shortage and hunger.

4 Findings

As stated earlier, the history of World War II and the occupation of the European countries has predominantly been written within the narrative framework of the nation state. This is unsurprising, since the German occupiers withdrew the sovereignty of the afflicted regions, threatening their economic and societal order and, in some places, even the very existence of the occupied societies.76 At the same time, however, the established research has gradually come to a recognition of the fact that there were certain commonalities which existed across the affected countries. This, in turn, also specifically calls for us to examine the differences between them. This presupposes a tertium comparationis which allows for an examination which goes beyond the boundaries of the established narratives. Here we can draw upon the concept of “occupied societies”.

As Tony Judt states in his aforementioned defining work “Postwar”, the Second World War was a “war of occupation”.77 According to recent estimations, this affected 235 million people living under German occupation during the war,78 between Northern Norway and Greece, Russia and Western France including the Channel Islands. One of the central defining characteristics of occupation is always – and therefore also during the Second World War – the fact that it is understood as a form of foreign rule resulting from war.79 As such, it goes hand in hand with the physical and/or regulatory presence of the occupiers, leading to the development of an asymmetrical, relational dynamic between the occupiers and the occupied societies. The concept of occupied societies therefore illuminates, in all their respective national or regional variants, the specific experiences which were connected to “being-occupied”, and the social, cultural, political and economic processes of transformation this entailed. At the same time, this concept also serves to open up the research to comparative and transnational examination.80

Among the most notable transformations for people in the occupied societies was the impact which war and occupation had on the gender and generational composition of society. Men, above all those of fighting age, were called up to the army, stationed on distant fronts, killed or captured and interned as prisoners of war, or were conscripted into forced labour assignments: those who remained at home were the women, children, youths and the elderly, and it was precisely these groups who had to shoulder the increasing burdens of everyday life.81

This daily life was often characterised by violence. Indeed, violence constituted such a central feature of the German occupation that it “changed the face of Europe”.82 This was particularly true for Eastern Europe since, here, the terrorisation of the local population, and above all the persecution and murder of the Jewish population and other groups such as the Sinti and Roma, was omnipresent, and also brought local actors into play. The concept of “bystanding” has therefore come to be seen as increasingly “obsolete”.83 Now, particularly with reference to Eastern Europe, discussion rather surrounds the idea of “communal genocide” which, particularly in the area of cross-over between old and new empires, often took on the character of every person for themselves.84 Among these experiences of violence were also countless cases of expulsion and deportation to the camps. In particular, the experience of being carried away to a sealed-off camp marked, at the same time, a transition into a Lagergesellschaft (Camp Society) which, in its conditions and character, was generally quite distinct from those prevailing in the broader occupied society, and which therefore constitutes its own subject area.85

But it is clear as well that violence was not restricted to camps and homicidal crimes. Rather, the existence of those under occupation was characterised by assaults and abuses of all kinds, accompanied by violations, threats, humiliations and the demonstration of armed superiority. These various forms of violence were often intertwined, as these volumes show: the occupiers implemented forms of structural violence, for example in the racially-organised and utilitarian grading of foodstuff allocations, and in the criminalisation of infringements against these and their prosecution as “economic crimes” or “acts of sabotage”, leading to executions, confiscations or occasionally, and very rarely, to the unfortunates being allowed to go free.86

In light of this ubiquity of violence, Doris Bergen stated that there was “no option of non-involvement”.87 Thus, regardless of all necessary differentiation according to region or the phase of the war, the constant sense of threat, which often took on an existential nature, represented a real crisis for those affected:88 assumed norms were called into question, expectations of behaviour and routines became unclear, what was previously seen as reliable began to corrode, and the feeling of lawlessness and defencelessness became widespread.89

The occupied societies of the Second World War were societies, therefore, whose very order was severely threatened, and who were placed under an enormous amount of stress.90 Like other societies under conditions of violence, they seemed to collapse into an anomic state, as if the habits, customs and rules regulating social behaviour had been suspended. In fact, trust and mistrust were recast since, according to Jan Philipp Reemtsma, they constituted “strategies of settling in to the obscure”.91 Under these conditions, survival was practically impossible for anyone who was not deeply embedded in familial structures and interrelationships; groups of friends and neighbours also played a significant role.92 Jewish people were often shut out of these close social relationships from the outset of occupation, whether as a result of people turning a blind eye and demonstrating indifference in times which were already difficult enough, or whether through denunciations or openly taking part in German measures of persecution.

Depending on place, time, and membership of particular social, ethnic or other groups, occupation set out the framework within which people could act. It is clear, therefore, that, in the autumn of 1940, an older Belgian armaments worker, rooted in a socialist milieu, had different options open to him than a Jewish mother of several small children in the winter of 1941/42, seeking to survive in an open ghetto in eastern Poland, did. Their choices and options differed, furthermore, from those of a female French large-scale farmer at the beginning of 1944 who still sympathised with the Vichy regime, or those of a young Ukrainian militiaman in 1943, who saw himself increasingly confronted by attacks from pro-Soviet partisans, whilst his hopes for his own state had long-since disappeared.

This list is clearly incomplete, but it does hint at how varied the room for manoeuvre was under occupation. Nevertheless, regardless of all the variety of forms of action and patterns of behaviour: in all their deliberations and actions, people always had to take into consideration the local conditions of occupation. Jan T. Gross has therefore stated that, in manifold ways, members of occupied societies were “occupier-driven”.93 This was also and particularly true with regards to questions of supply. As has already been discussed, in the occupied societies (with the exception of Denmark), foodstuffs, but also other everyday items such as clothing, shoes or medication, became scarce very quickly. For those living under occupation this meant that many of them, hungry and – in winter – freezing, had to cover increasingly long distances on foot (since public transport was also impacted by fuel shortages and only ran on a limited schedule). Furthermore, undernourished, they had to carry out ever-longer hours of physically-demanding labour. Many of them also had to stand in line time and again at night for food. On top of this, new rationing cards had to be acquired, usually every 14 days, and their last remaining valuables often exchanged on the black market, simply in order to make ends meet. In all this, those affected were tracked and persecuted not only by the occupiers, but often enough by the domestic authorities as well, and threatened with sometimes draconian punishments.94

Occupation therefore set the framework, for example with regards to uses of (individual or collective) supply. However, the sources also convincingly demonstrate that “occupier-driven” is not the same as “occupier-determined”, since: people sought in manifold ways to adapt to the occupation in general, and to the often terrible supply situation in particular. This was especially true for the Jewish population of Europe, and the concept of occupied societies therefore incorporates Jewish people up to their physical exclusion through the deportations and genocide.95 This meets the demands of more recent Holocaust research, which insists that Jews not be categorised exclusively as “victims”, but should also be more deeply integrated through an increased consideration of the courses of action which were open to them.96 Following on from this, a growing number of regionally or locally-focussed Holocaust studies, which address Poland and other regions of Eastern Europe in particular, place the dynamics of interaction between occupiers and the occupied and, within this latter group, between non-Jews and Jews, at the centre of attention.97

Occupation therefore constituted its own experiential world, with the shortage of supply one of its central elements. People in occupied societies were certainly aware that their inadequate provisioning was the result of German occupation, and that the authorities “on the ground”, whether local or German, played a significant role in the allocation of the scarce goods. This was particularly true for Denmark and Norway where, at the beginning of September and October 1939 respectively, that is even before the outbreak of conflict, the governments had already passed laws and regulations concerning the market, prices, and the regulation of consumption. In Denmark, these drew upon practices which had been tried and tested in the First World War. Rationing was therefore the measure of choice for the distribution of scarce goods, and accordingly, relevant legislation was gradually introduced throughout all of occupied Europe. Alongside price controls, market supervision and the prosecution of infringements, these measures sought to secure an adequate provisioning of the population. The rationing system therefore developed into a sort of “hinge” between the administrations and the members of the occupied societies.

Looking across all of occupied Europe, the introduction of rationing systems can be seen to be an important commonality, even if the various arrangements might differ. Often, if not necessarily always, such systems were introduced relatively soon after the start of occupation, when the shortages began to make themselves felt. In some places, only certain foodstuffs were covered initially, such as meat (Doc. 40) or salt (Doc. 476), but in other places a wide range of everyday necessities were soon affected (Doc. 5, Doc. 42, Doc. 50). On the territory of the occupied Soviet Union, the occupying authorities did not bother with the introduction of rations for many foodstuffs, restricting themselves to staple foods, above all bread (Doc. 258). Rations were also adjusted over the course of time, for example as a result of fluctuating harvests, or of the Germans requisitioning varying amounts, or because farmers proved more or less skilful in concealing their produce from the German authorities (Doc. 444). Ration increases, however, were extremely rare.

In wide areas of occupied Europe, rations were also introduced for gas or coal (Doc.107, Doc. 187) and for clothing, shoes (Doc. 69, Doc. 78) or soap (Doc. 501, Doc. 517). Local circumstances could also play a role in the determination of rations. Thus, for example, meat only became rationed in the Southern Bohemian Strakonice in the summer of 1941, and therefore comparatively late (Doc. 100). In the occupied Russian territories, the rationing system also differed from one city to the next (Doc. 165).

The introduction of rations was often accompanied by announcements in the press, such as in the Czech “Lidové noviny” (Doc. 23) or the Norwegian “Aftenposten” (Doc. 55, Doc. 125). In November 1941, against the backdrop of worsening living conditions, the Danish “Politiken” even felt compelled to publish a “Crisis Lexicon” as a handbook for the public (Doc. 160). However, reporting which went beyond merely providing assistance, or was even critical, was not wanted – as the Press Office of the Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen made clear. Therefore, plans or “rumours” about upcoming rationing measures could not be printed (Doc. 337). The Hungarian “Népujság”, in turn, attempted to soothe the public with the information that Jews could only purchase meat – including horse meat – once all “Hungarian” customers had already stocked up (Doc. 530). However, despite all their efforts, the press could not stop the hoarding and panic-buying which, for example, accompanied the introduction of rationing in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Netherlands or Luxembourg (Doc. 30, Doc. 64, Doc. 106).

Common to all the various allocation systems was that the authorities were responsible for handing out so-called rationing cards and stamps, and that this assignment was graded. Thus, those entitled to rations were categorised according to age and occupation, with so-called “heavy” or “extra heavy” labourers entitled to higher rations than the remaining populace (Doc. 532). Accordingly, some local administrations thus sought to ensure that as many fields of activity as possible were recognised as “heavy” or “extra heavy labour” in order to secure a better provisioning for the population; where German institutions were involved, they sought to prohibit this (Doc. 148). Extra allocations were often also envisaged for pregnant women and new mothers (Doc. 192); these were largely composed of milk, from which children and the ill sometimes also benefitted (Doc. 192).

It is therefore possible to state not only that rationing systems were introduced throughout occupied Europe, but also that, in terms of their graded categorisation, even those which were managed by domestic authorities followed German considerations of utility. There was a second additional aspect here: the levels of rationing also corresponded closely with the occupiers’ conceptions of racial hierarchies. In the West and North of the continent this was less evident, but even here Germans received larger rations than the locals – as these were well aware (Doc. 462).

This racial hierarchisation could be seen particularly clearly in Eastern Europe. There were numerous reasons for this, including the fact that there were significant minority German populations in many of these regions, and these were granted better supplies by the occupiers. Particularly in the Baltic countries, this led to complaints to the German authorities from the domestic administrations (Doc. 158, Doc. 348). On top of this came the fact that, in Eastern Europe – in contrast to Western Europe – the percentage of Jews among the general population was much higher. Whereas the French rationing system did not include a separate “Jewish” category, for example, those in the Eastern European regions of occupation certainly did, not least because it was often the German administrations which established the rations here. In March 1942, for example, in the Bezirk [District] of Białystok, the locally-resident Germans from the Reich were allocated 1 kilogram of meat per person per week, and 224 grams of bread, in contrast to only 200 grams of meat (with the disclaimer “if present”) and two kilograms of bread for Poles, and only 100 grams of meat and one-and-a-half kilograms of bread per person per week for the Jewish population. Their meat, furthermore, consisted only of offal, bones, and “meat of the 3rd quality level” (Doc. 252). Gradations of this kind were the rule (Doc. 24, Doc. 223), rather than the exception, and were often accompanied by restrictions on purchasing, enacted by both German and domestic authorities (Doc. 176, Doc. 530). An exception to this were those regions, above all in the West of the occupied Soviet Union, where the genocide of the Jewish population proceeded at a quicker pace than the introduction of rationing systems, meaning that, when these finally were introduced, they did not recognise any separate category for Jewish persons, since these territories were officially “Judenfrei” (“Jew-free”).

Although rations in many places in occupied Europe scarcely provided enough for survival, and periods of hunger were commonplace, especially in spring and early summer, when the stocks from the previous harvest had been used up, the situation in Eastern Europe – and particularly on the territories of the occupied Soviet Union, which was ruthlessly exploited to the benefit of the Wehrmacht and the German Reich population – was nevertheless much worse. Rations here were generally lower than in the West and, despite all variations from region to region, it can be stated that it was primarily those sectors of society able to work who were provided for here. This was not necessarily the case for their relatives and, where it was, this was usually only with the aim of providing an added incentive to work (Doc. 267). Furthermore, for the Jewish population, if they were included in the rationing system at all, allocations were envisaged which would not be enough to assure their survival. Therefore, if one takes into consideration the whole of occupied Europe, it can be seen that the rationing systems established across the continent were arranged hierarchically, according to the occupiers’ calculations of utility and their racial categorisations and that, as a result of these, the members of occupied societies were either assigned better or worse chances of survival, or indeed denied these entirely.98

The racism inherent to the rationing system revealed itself not only in the amounts of foodstuffs allocated, but also in the fact that rationing cards and stamps were used to harass and control the people of Eastern Europe in numerous ways, something which was much less true in the West and North of the continent. Thus, rations were withheld on occasion, or handed out as “rewards”, for example to farmers following the gathering of the harvest, or to punctual workers (Doc. 252, Doc. 268, Doc. 319, Doc. 331). Furthermore, racism could also be seen to underly the use of rationing cards as a substitute for identification papers in the occupied Soviet territories, and their use to record the population (Doc. 165, Doc. 222).

However, even in those places where the system did not primarily serve to control the population, and functioned at least relatively fairly, its operation was still often complicated, laborious and cumbersome. Not only did the ration cards have a limited validity, forcing people to stand in line repeatedly at the issuing locations (Doc. 9), but the coupons could often only be redeemed in particular shops where the customers also had to register beforehand (Doc. 395). Complaints about the incompetence of the authorities issuing these cards and stamps were therefore commonplace (Doc. 330).

Furthermore, it was often clear enough to the authorities themselves that the systems only functioned partially. Where the administration was primarily staffed by local personnel, suggested improvements were therefore formulated. For example, the Lithuanian Self-Administration suggested wage increases to the German General Commissioner as early as October 1941, in order to provide the working population with increased purchasing power (Doc. 136). In a speech of 15 February 1942, the French Minister for Public Supply Paul Charbin explained his ideas for reorganizing his administration and spoke about new measures intended to fight the black market and to facilitate family supply. (Doc. 232). Recommendations of a more technical character were also made by the Belgian administration as late as June 1944, suggesting alterations in the distribution of bread rations (Doc. 540).

However, whatever the specific regulations, or whatever the peculiarities of the individual rationing systems: complaints about the insufficiencies of rationing were raised unanimously throughout occupied Europe (Doc. 43, Doc. 331). This was true even in the case of Denmark, which was comparatively well provisioned during the years of occupation (Doc. 127, Doc. 422). Furthermore, diary entries revealed that the authors were not only concerned with their own situation, but were also prepared to recognise the suffering of others. Therefore a farmer from Luxembourg wrote that the food provisioning situation had gone from bad to worse in the years 1941/42. At the same time, he also stated that the people in Belgium were doing even worse (Doc. 259).

The elderly and children suffered particularly badly from the shortages of supply. Thus, a report from 1943 stated that, since the beginning of the war, and therefore in less than three years, child mortality rates in Estonia had increased fourfold as a consequence of the shortage of foodstuffs (Doc. 502). However, Estonia was not alone in this catastrophic situation. The impact of shortages was also evident in the South of France: breakfasts there now consisted of very bitter substitute coffee made from roasted barley and little pieces of bread. Schoolchildren had not received any milk since August, although there were coupons for this, but the quotas being delivered were too small, and even children under the age of six only received half of the amount to which they were entitled (Doc. 483).

Milk rations were indispensable for new-borns and infants, but in many places they were also particularly hard to procure. This, taken together with a supply system which was not suitable for children in many other respects, led to disastrous situations and higher mortality rates on the territory of the occupied Soviet Union – however much the local personnel in hospitals and homes sought to take care of the children (Doc. 308, Doc. 333). In Norway the authorities sought to appeal to mothers of small children as early as December 1940 through newspaper articles. Under the heading “Good Food for Children in Times of Crisis”, Aftenposten presented fish cakes of dried cod and porridge of beets as healthy food for children and recommended cheese curd as a useful additive because of its high levels of protein (Doc. 56).

A further group targeted by assistance measures in many countries were schoolchildren, for whom school lunches were introduced (Doc. 147, Doc. 400) or for whom extra rations were provided (Doc. 357). In occupied Kharkiv, alongside 200 g of cereals, these consisted of 10 g of fat, which shows how catastrophic the situation had become in the “hunger territories” of Ukraine (Doc. 351). Aid packages from the Swiss or International Red Cross and from other aid organisations benefitted the needy, children in particular, in Greece, as well as in Yugoslavia or the Channel Islands towards the end of the war (Doc. 341, Doc. 452, Doc. 508, Doc. 518, Doc. 579). Alongside children, Jewish people were also particularly reliant on assistance; the Jewish communities’ own welfare institutions sought to provide aid here, often with the very limited means which they still had at their disposal (Doc. 320).

Since rations were too small throughout the whole of occupied Europe – and often enough could not be obtained to their full extent in any event – but also because the assistance measures regularly only benefitted certain groups or could only help to a small degree (Doc. 154), people everywhere in occupied Europe were forced to rely on their own devices and possibilities of providing for themselves. One common practice, evident everywhere in Europe, was to fall back on ersatz products, even when these were often unloved. In France, therefore, a brochure produced by the Ministry responsible for provisioning and entitled “L’alimentation en période de rationnement. Que manger?” [Foodstuffs in times of rationing. What to eat?] not only denounced the waste of foodstuffs, but also appealed for the use of substitute products: “Little known to the public, disparaged by a great number, and suspect to the conservative sensibilities of a people proud of a rich agricultural output, and renowned for its delicacies and variety of traditional, regional dishes, food substitutes have had difficulty finding their place. However, they deserve some credit since, by their inclusion into our diet, they will contribute to fulfilling some essential dietary requirements and, possibly, to keeping us in good spirits.” Among the actual advice included in this brochure was the use of substitute bread products and the recommendation that the shortage of fat should be tackled through an “intensive farming of cultivated or wild-oil seeds which grow in France like nuts, rapeseed, grenadine, or beechnuts, whose fat sources have been used before, or grapeseed, linden seeds, apricot stones and Indian chestnuts, which have been discovered as a result of recent work” (Doc. 198). Similar recommendations were also published or broadcast over the radio in Denmark. These also advised that excessive consumption of coffee and sugar was to be avoided (Doc. 379, Doc. 390, Doc. 500).

Collections of recipes, sometimes appearing in large print runs, probably had a greater impact on people’s daily lives, and were also discussed in the daily press (Doc. 375). Additionally, the preservation of fruit by making jam had already become common in the early years of occupation (and was so intensively practised in some places that sugar became scarce, Doc. 135), as had the gathering of rose hips in order to make tea, or the production of ersatz coffee from roasted barley (Doc. 483), but also the keeping of rabbits in order to improve the meat supply, or the growing of one’s own tobacco (Doc. 455). Gardening in general gained an increasingly large importance (Doc. 373, Doc. 400). This was particularly evident in areas of shortage in the Soviet Union, such as Novhorod-Siverskyi, for example, where the local mayor ordered guards to protect the gardens and decreed that, alongside a wage, these should also receive an allocation of food as payment (Doc. 242).

The sources also demonstrate, furthermore, that the story of shortages was also a story of disparate timings: in places where shortage was not yet existential, this opened up new markets for the local production of ersatz products, among them saccharine (Doc. 383), substitute cleaning products or ersatz coffee, for which even advertisements were produced (Doc. 123, Doc. 183). At the same time, in the occupied Reich Commissariat Ostland, Red Army soldiers held captive as prisoners of war – where they were not left completely to their own fate – were provided only with offal or the meat of infected animals (Doc. 178), whilst, towards the end of the war, there were discussions in Italy over whether seed potatoes should be released for consumption (Doc. 526) and recipes appeared in the Netherlands recommending that people eat tulip bulbs (Doc. 585).

A further practice with which the people in the occupied territories reacted to the deterioration of their food circumstances was the sending of letters of complaint (Doc. 464) and petitions, among them to employers. Requests were put forward asking that workers be granted a day’s leave in order to gather food such as berries or mushrooms so as to prepare for the winter (Doc. 326); these requests were not always granted due to the need to maintain production (Doc. 567). Such petitions were also sent to local institutions, mayors especially (Doc. 268, Doc. 406, Doc. 587), leading figures in the German occupying administration (Doc. 74, Doc. 247, Doc. 430) or even to Adolf Hitler himself (Doc. 234).

Where none of this helped, as was often the case, people everywhere in the occupied territories fell back on the barter trade. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, this seems essentially to have become the “normal” form of provisioning. With regards to Bryansk, for example, and with a view to the entire period of occupation, it was written: “There is no general merchandise in shops at all. These goods [i.e. foodstuff with the exception of bread] can be obtained at the market place by way of barter in exchange for bread and other foodstuffs” (Doc. 373, see also Doc. 141). The situation was similar in the autumn of 1942 in the Kursk oblast: “Every Sunday in the cities and myestechki [urban-type villages] of regional significance, markets are held at which the populace conducts the barter of goods for bread and salt, salt for bread and vice versa. Barter of eggs for salt and matches, etc.” (Doc. 343). Where hospitals did not have the necessary equipment, this also had to be procured through barter, for example bandaging. A Smolensk doctor recalled: “The patients obtained the materials from the Germans, or at work, or purchased them in exchange for eggs, milk, and so on” (Doc. 463).

However, the barter trade was not an exclusively Soviet phenomenon, but was evident throughout occupied Europe, whether in France or Belgium, in Luxembourg or on the Channel Islands, in Greece or Poland (Doc. 259, Doc. 341, Doc. 354, Doc. 376, Doc. 486). This, as had been the case in the First World War, was a consequence of the rampant inflation resulting from widespread shortages and a restrictive pricing policy, which did not allow for goods to be priced at their real value. As a result, French farmers refused to sell their produce for money, demanding scarce goods instead, such as clothing, shoes or ironware (Doc. 391), whilst workers in the General Government asked for payment in kind, since they could not purchase anything for money (Doc. 287).

The barter trade was highly varied in its forms. Whilst “going to the countryside” in order to exchange consumer goods for foodstuffs was probably the most widespread of these, bartering also took place in shops – supposedly non-available goods were swapped under the counter for food (Doc. 376) – or through semi-professional chain-swapping among individuals. On a large scale, such networks shifted food over the demarcation line which divided France, or established relationships of exchange, in which owners swapped butter for wool (Doc. 46, Doc. 354). In some places the barter trade was so widespread that queues even formed outside of shops selling goods which were not in short supply. Outraged, a Hungarian public official stated: “This gives the impression that people are trying to get rid of the money they possess and buy left and right, anything that is available, even when they do not need that particular item” (Doc. 580). To these customers, goods which they could potentially exchange seemed much more attractive than money which would soon be devalued.

Dutch public officials were also tough with those who engaged in the barter trade. Thus Stephanus Louwe, the Director of the Dutch National Office of Wartime Provisioning decried the black market as “one of the worst crimes of the present time”, but bartering seemed to him to be “not much better. It is true that it is less disgusting than filling your own wallet by profiting from the dire situation of your fellow citizens, but it remains an annoying form of egotism”. He complained that “it is still true that it excludes the rest of one’s fellow Dutch and puts them into a dire situation, according to the motto, Am I my brother’s keeper?” Even those forms, where “the idea is to help one’s acquaintances and friends, family members or others without having any advantage through this, then this ought to be respected on a general humane level, but ultimately it leads to the same fatal results as any other form of black-market activity” (Doc. 469).

German soldiers were also involved in bartering. The authorities of the Estonian Self-Administration found, to their disgust, that since these were exchanging petrol, tobacco or spirits with farmers in return for foodstuffs, the rural population was now also demanding similar “prices” from the local townspeople (Doc. 402). The situation in Lithuania was not very different. In summer 1943, the Polish underground opposition complained about the raging corruption in the Vilnius area and provided an example of this: “On the out-of-city trains taken by the masses of minor speculants without permits or tickets, the German and Lithuanian conductors have introduced the custom of taking bribes, the size of which depends on the distance to be travelled, starting from 5 RM. This is done almost officially, insofar as the public sometimes cannot gather whether this sum is the actual cost of travel or a bribe. The Lithuanian pagelbinė policija [auxiliary police] and Germans take bribes from minor speculants on the city’s fringes and accept ‘contributions’ in kind along the roads into the city (bacon, eggs, butter)” (Doc. 449). General Government officials also complained that Germans were participating in barter, for example as payment for the services of labourers (Doc. 287).

Whereas punishments for the Germans remained negligible, this was very different for the domestic, non-German population. For example, already soon after the start of the occupation, it was decreed in Vilnius that “Trade can only take place in designated squares (marketplaces) and only within the designated hours. Whoever is found selling or buying food products and sweets in other locations or in ways or times unlike those outlined above shall receive a fine, face arrest, or in special cases, even the death penalty. Trading hours for all markets until revocation of this order: daily from 7 AM to 12 noon” (Doc. 117, similarly see Doc. 172). Ordinances of this kind were commonplace throughout the territories of the occupied Soviet Union. Differences could be found, above all, in the market times which were permitted, so in early summer 1942, for example, in Ukrainian Nizhyn, these were limited to Sunday mornings (Doc. 272), or in relation to the conditions under which a form of “second-hand” sales were permitted – and these were highly regulated (Doc. 200), also with regards to punishments. Since farmers were seen by the occupiers as particularly troublesome, they were to be pressured into following the rules by being “deprived of all their supplies of foodstuffs and animal feed” (Doc. 317).

However, the Germans refused to acknowledge that, behind the barter trade, lay the often desperate attempts of the locals to secure their survival. Rather, they saw in it, above all, transgressions of the laws they had imposed, driven by criminal energy and motivated by a desire for enrichment. Thus, the Ortskommandant [Local Commander] of Navya became agitated by “bartering in an unequal manner – such as: 3–4 kg of bread for one cup of tobacco, a suit for one loaf of bread, etc.”, identifying in it “a clearly speculative intent” (Doc. 219). In this complete misinterpretation of the situation, it is possible to conclude, the racist worldview of the occupiers had once again found its expression.

The black market was closely interrelated with the barter trade, and this was also present everywhere throughout occupied Europe, on the Channel Islands as well as in Belarus, in Belgium as well as in Slovakia (Doc. 368, Doc. 481, Doc. 573, Doc. 597). However, whilst the barter trade often remained largely non-formalised and larger networks only rarely developed, black market deals were often not only conducted on an individual basis but, in the occupied societies, they were particularly despised when organised bands were tolerated by the authorities or worked in cooperation with them, often operating alongside the occupiers, and raking in vast profits (Doc. 85). The organised black market also greatly impacted upon the chances of success for individuals who went out from one farm to the next, searching for food, not least because the bulk buyers among the black marketeers usually paid higher prices (Doc. 342).

It was in large part because of such constellations that a “blame game” developed around the black market. Officials, particularly domestic ones, who wanted to bring as much food as possible into circulation through the rationing system, appealed to the population’s sense of honour, and strongly attacked unauthorised purchases and sales (e.g. Doc. 469, Doc. 562). However, it was also clear to many officials that it was they themselves who would be apportioned the primary blame for this misery. Thus, intelligence reports on the mood in Paris in the summer of 1941 stated that “The material impossibility of ensuring the minimum essential supplies facing working families, employees and civil servants creates unrest which most often manifests itself in harsh words with regard to public and occupying authorities” (Doc. 108).

However, shopkeepers and farmers also quickly became the subject of public anger. Whilst the former were accused of an unequal treatment of customers (again, a phenomenon which could also be seen in the First World War), farmers were massively criticized for enriching themselves upon the misery of the urban population. Voices which attempt to provide a different perspective on things, such as that of a man from Belgrade, are few and far between: “We are complaining because the peasants’ produce is expensive. We are not in the right. We have to take into consideration the circumstances the peasants are living under, then all is clear. There is no personal or material security in the village. They get robbed by everyone … When a peasant takes something to the village, he can’t be sure he’ll even make it. They could take his stuff on the road or at the railroad station, at the dock, or at the excise duty station, etc. And he would have no confirmation of the confiscation, and no word of compensation. The peasants today are the real sufferers. They get robbed and killed and they keep quiet and suffer. They have no one to complain to. It’s clear now why everything is so expensive” (Doc. 515). Even more rare are examples challenging the widespread accusations that Jews were responsible for the black market (Doc. 194) – the rules of what the occupiers permitted to be said made it extremely dangerous to take sides in such a manner, particularly in public.

The worse the supply situation was, the more widespread the protests. Women standing for hours in lengthy queues, often pregnant women or mothers simply looking to provide for and take care of the health of their children, commonly vented their frustration. Another form of female protest were the leaflets of the Comités Féminins, who did not hold back from blaming the Germans as those responsible for the shortages (Doc. 58, Doc. 108, Doc. 257).

This general sense of discontent and “rumblings” among wide sections of the populace in the occupied societies was something which the authorities were well aware of, and it was often enough only a small step from angry invective to the outbreak of violence, with frustration, anger and despair breaking out in assaults on price controllers (Doc. 108, Doc. 391, Doc. 469). The opposition movements also seized upon the miserable supply situation, and campaigned in part by claiming that only armed struggle could bring an end to this catastrophic state of affairs (Doc. 68, Doc. 341, Doc. 534, Doc. 552).

Price and economic controls were therefore put in place in almost all occupied territories (see for example on its description of tasks Doc. 82). Punishments were almost always harsh, not only in Eastern European regions of occupation, and included high monetary and custodial sentences, the confiscation of black market goods as well as other general property, and even the death penalty (Doc. 597, Doc. 474, Doc. 302, Doc. 442). Crimes related to rationing coupons were also prosecuted similarly, for example forgeries, thefts or black market trade using them (Doc. 278, Doc. 389, Doc. 435, Doc. 443, Doc. 509, Doc. 597), leading time and again to confrontations between domestic controllers and German soldiers (Doc. 425). In Italian Doria, it was local women who sent for German soldiers. While these did allow the Italian controllers to pursue the case of illegal milling, they then ensured that the grain in question was not confiscated, returning it instead to the women in question. Indeed, the financial controllers were also forced to accompany the Germans to their barracks, and to hand them over the report they had drafted. “This document was torn to shreds in front of a number of spectators, and straight after our patrol was allowed to go free.” It is no wonder, therefore, that the Guardia di Finanza sought to take up this affair with the local German commander (Doc. 569).

It is episodes such as this which make c