Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II Tatjana Tönsmeyer · Peter Haslinger Agnes Laba Editors Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II Editors Tatjana Tönsmeyer Agnes Laba University of Wuppertal University of Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany Wuppertal, Germany Peter Haslinger Herder Institute Marburg, Germany ISBN 978-3-319-77466-4 ISBN 978-3-319-77467-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77467-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018937867 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover illustration: © Herder Institute, Marburg, image archive Photograph: August Custodis Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland CONTENTS Part I Introduction Supply Situations: National Socialist Policies of Exploitation and Economies of Shortage in Occupied Societies During World War II 3 Tatjana Tönsmeyer Part II Economies of Scarcity and “Ersatz” Sites Black Market in the General Government 1939–1945: Survival Strategy or (Un)Offcial Economy? 27 Jerzy Kochanowski Economies of Scarcity in Belarusian Villages During World War II: How New Findings from Oral History Projects Put a Perpetrator-Centred Historiography in Perspective 49 Aliaksandr Smalianchuk and Tatsiana Kasataya Supplies Under Pressure: Survival in a Fully Rationed Society: Experiences, Cases and Innovation in Rural and Urban Regions in Occupied Norway 61 Guri Hjeltnes v vi CONTENTS ‘The Black Market Is a Crime Against Community’: The Failure of the Vichy Government to Bring About an Egalitarian System of Distribution and the Growth of the Black Market in France During the German Occupation (1940–1944) 83 Fabrice Grenard The Black Market in Occupied Italy and the Approach of Italian and German Authorities (1943–1945) 99 Jacopo Calussi and Alessandro Salvador Bones of Contention: The Nazi Recycling Project in Germany and France During World War II 119 Chad B. Denton and Heike Weber Part III Coping Strategies and Creating Privileges Between Employer and Self-Organisation: Belgian Workers and Miners Coping with Food Shortages Under German Occupation (1940–1944) 143 Dirk Luyten ‘Dem tschechischen Arbeiter das Fressen geben’: Factory Canteens in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia 167 Jaromír Balcar ‘In the Hope of a Piece of Sausage or a Mug of Beer’: Writing a History of Survival Sex in Occupied Europe 183 Maren Röger Part IV Vulnerabilities: At the Bottom of the Supply Pyramid ‘Choosing’ Between Children and the Elderly in the Greek Famine (1941–1944) 203 Violetta Hionidou Contents vii Food, Money and Barter in the Lvov Ghetto, Eastern Galicia 223 Natalia Aleksiun The North Caucasus and German Exploitation Policies in World War II: Everyday Life Experience of Children Under the Occupation 249 Irina Rebrova and Elena Strekalova ‘… Have Not Received Any Deliveries of Potatoes for Quite Some Time …’: Food Supply and Acquisition in the Ghettos of Vilnius and Kaunas 275 Joachim Tauber Fighting Vulnerability: Child-Feeding Initiatives During the Dutch Hunger Winter 293 Ingrid J. J. de Zwarte Index 311 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Natalia Aleksiun is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies, New York, USA. Her research focusses on Polish Jewish history in the twentieth cen- tury, Jewish historiography and the history of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe. She is currently working on a project dealing with the daily lives of Jews in hiding in Galicia during the Holocaust. Jaromír Balcar is senior researcher in the research program ‘History of the Max Planck Society’ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin, Germany), since 2014. Before that he held teach- ing and research positions at the Institute for Contemporary History Munich, Germany (1992–1999), the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany (1999–2003 and 2005–2007), the University of Bremen, Germany (2003–2004 and 2008–2014) and the Collegium Carolinum in Munich, Germany (2004–2005). His research interests are mainly directed towards the contemporary history of Germany and East Central Europe. Jacopo Calussi is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Roma 3, Italy, with a project on Italian fascist violence during Mussolini’s fnal govern- ment (the Italian Social Republic) and the German occupation of Italy (1943–1945). He obtained his master’s degree in History in 2012. His central research topics are political violence in the frst half of the twenti- eth century and the Nazi occupation of Europe. ix x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Chad B. Denton is an Associate Professor of History at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. His research focusses on the transnational history of World War II in occupied Europe, Japan and the South Pacifc. He is currently revising the book manuscript of his doctoral dissertation ‘Metal to Munitions: Requisitions and Resentment in Wartime France’, com- pleted at the University of California, Berkeley in 2009. Ingrid J. J. de Zwarte recently completed her Ph.D. in History (2018) at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, with a thesis entitled ‘The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944– 45’. Previously she was a visiting scholar at the European Institute and Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University, USA. Since autumn 2018 she has been a Niels Stensen post-doctoral fellow at the History Faculty at the University of Oxford, working on the politics of famine and relief in wartime. Fabrice Grenard is the Historical Director of the Fondation de la Résistance in Paris. His work focusses on the history of French society during the German occupation and on the history of the Resistance. His books (in French) include Black Market in France (2008) and A Legend of the Maquis: Georges Guingouin (2014). He is also the author (in English) of ‘Traitors, traffckers and the confscation of illicit profts in France 1944–1950’ (Historical Journal, 51, 2008) and ‘The French after 1945: Diffculties and Disappointments of an Immediate Post-War Period’, The Legacies of Two World Wars (2011). Peter Haslinger has been Director of the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe, a member institution of the Leibniz Association, since 2007. He holds the Chair in East Central European History at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen and the Giessen Centre for Eastern European Studies. He is also co-editor of the international research and editorial project ‘Societies under German Occupation—Experiences and Everyday Life in World War II’. Violetta Hionidou is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Newcastle University, UK. Her research interest is the history of modern Greece, which she explores in an interdisciplinary perspective including historical demography, the history of the family, the history of medicine and the history of famines. She is the author of Famine and Death in Occupied Greece, 1941–1944, and co-winner of the 2007 Edmund Keely NOTES ON Contributors xi book award, and has published widely in globally renowned academic journals such as the Journal of Contemporary History, Population Studies, Medical History, Journal of Modern Greek Studies and Continuity and Change. Guri Hjeltnes has been the Director of the Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities in Oslo, Norway, since 2012. She has been a professor since 2004 and was Provost at the BI Norwegian Business School from 2008 to 2010. As a historian she has written sev- eral studies on World War II, and her dissertation dealt with the seamen of the Norwegian merchant marine. Her books include Hverdagsliv i krig (1986) and Avisoppgjøret etter 1945 (1990) and, together with Berit Nøkleby, she wrote Barn under krigen (2000). She is a regular columnist book reviewer in the Norwegian media. Tatsiana Kasataya is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Using an oral his- tory approach, she is investigating religious policy towards Evangelical Christian Baptists, as well as their community activities, and the structure and dynamics of their development in Belarus. In her research she also collaborates with the Belarusian Oral History Archive. Jerzy Kochanowski is a Full Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. In 2007 he was a Visiting Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany and since 2013 he is the editor-in-chief of the journal Przegląd Historyczny. His main area of interest is the social history of Poland and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. Agnes Laba is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Modern History at the University of Wuppertal, Germany with a project on gender relations and the history of family in France and Poland after World War II.