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By Root 1415 0

Bernice Schmidt was nine when her parents got divorced. As a newly single man, her thirty-two-year-old father, Arthur, thus became eligible to be drafted. He was given leave from training camp before embarkation and took his three children to a Los Angeles amusement park. He told them how homesick he was, and gave each a little parting present: Bernice’s was a pin in the shape of two hearts held together with an arrow, inscribed “Bernice, love daddy.” Private Schmidt was killed in action with the 317th Infantry on 15 November 1944. His daughter never forgot the day that news came, because it was her twelfth birthday. One day in October 1942, Nella Last was gazing at a neighbour’s children. Their mother touched her arm and asked, “What are you thinking about?” Mrs. Last said, “Oh, I don’t know. Always be glad that your Ian is only seven.” The woman said simply, “I am.”

Until 1943, when Stalingrad and bombing began to change everything, most German civilians save those who lost loved ones found the conflict a numbing presence rather than a trauma. “Is it possible that one can get used to war?” mused Mathilde Wolff-Monckeburg, the elderly wife of an academic living in Hamburg, in 1941. “This question tantalises me and I am afraid of a positive reply. All that was unbearable at first, all that was impossible to fathom, has by now become somehow ‘settled,’ and one lives from day to day in frightening apathy … We still have our comforts and warmth, we have enough to eat, we occasionally have hot water, we do not exert ourselves apart from daily shopping expeditions and small household duties.” Like all Germans save National Socialist functionaries, who enjoyed privileges in food as everything else, she complained chiefly about the dreariness of rations: “One grows ever more sensitive to the emptiness inside and greed for the unobtainable becomes ever more intense,” Wolff-Monckeburg wrote in June 1942. “Glowing fantasies multiply in tantalising colours when one thinks of large juicy beefsteaks, new potatoes and long asparagus with lumps of golden butter. It is all so degrading and miserable—and there are people who call this a ‘heroic’ period.” But if Germans complained of privation, this was slight by global standards: whereas British output of consumer goods fell by 45 percent between 1939 and 1944, Germany’s declined only by 15 percent. If its people disliked what they were obliged to eat—their annual consumption of potatoes rose from 12 to 32 million tons—they experienced severe hunger only when the war ended in May 1945; the Nazis starved the conquered nations to keep their own citizens fed.

More than any other aspect of the war, food or lack of it emphasised the relativity of suffering. Globally, far more people suffered serious hunger, or indeed died of starvation, than in any previous conflict, including World War I, because an unprecedented range of countries became battlefields, with consequent loss of agricultural production. Even the citizens of those countries which escaped famine found their diets severely restricted. Britain’s rationing system ensured that no one starved and the poor were better nourished than in peacetime, but few found anything to enjoy about their fare. A land girl, Joan Ibbertson, wrote: “Food was our obsession … In my first digs the landlady never cooked a second vegetable, except on a Sunday; we had cold meat on Monday, and sausage for the rest of the week. Sometimes she cooked potatoes with the sausage, but often she left us a slice of bread each. The two sausages on a large, cold, green glass plate greeted us on our return from a day on leeks or sprouts, and a three-mile cycle ride each way … A neighbour once brought round a sack of carrots, which he said were for the rabbits, but we benefited from this act of kindness … We had dried eggs once a week for breakfast, but the good lady in charge liked to cook it overnight, so it resembled, and tasted like, sawdust on toast. We had fishpaste on toast, too, some mornings … One Christmas we were allowed to buy a chicken. My bird was so old and