Dutch Famine after Market Garden

My Opa gave the food to his children. He passed away at the age of 72, so he did ok. My Aunts and Uncles never mentioned what happened. It was a forbidden subject, too painful. I was only 15 when he passed, so it did not come up on my radar.

 

The withdrawal of food from the Netherlands has often been cited as punishment for cooperation with the Allies during Market Garden - however studies of Nazi food policy indicate that it would have happened even if Market Garden had never occurred in the first place. Hitler and the NSDAP believed that keeping the German population free from hunger was vital in maintaining popular backing for the government and the war, failure to achieve this had cost Germany the First World War. Germans must be fed well even if it meant others starved to death. To achieve this food would be diverted from areas under occupation. Providing food for Germany and Germans always took priority. At the end of 1944 many sources were failing and the easiest way to get extra food into Western Germany was to take it from the Netherlands and transport it Eastwards by rail. Market Garden provided an easy rationale for dong this but it would have happened anyway - The Dutch were doomed to starve until the Allies could find a way to relieve them.



Alice Autumn Weinreb, Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany 1945-1971, PhD thesis, University of Michigan,2009,
Hein A.M. Klemann, & Sergei Kudryashov, Occupied Economies: An Economic History of Nazi-Occupied Europe, 1939-1945, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2016.
Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, Penguin, London,2013

 

Not just food shortage, also wood shortage (fuel shortage). Got one similar to this one in my collection, from my great aunt, used in Rotterdam, for cooking, during the 'Hongerwinter' '44/'45. Will replace this photo by a picture of 'the real one' later...

 

As promised: my family's "Majo kacheltje".

 

354. Hunger Winter

https://podbay.fm/p/we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk/e/1626138000

"SHOW NOTES
Dutch civilians suffered horrifically during the final winter of the war as the Germans sought to punish them for assisting the allied forces attempting to liberate Holland. Al and James are joined by Dutch historian Hans Onderwater to discuss the Hunger Winter."