Hungry Children: Negotiating Food for Children in Postwar Germany

M. Mouton, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

When the Second World War ended, German children faced a shattered world: ruined cities, divided families, lost family members, and an ideological worldview that was no longer acceptable. One of the most dire problems facing all German children after the Second World War was food. Despite a unanimous plan to act in “children’s best interest,” efforts to feed children encountered geographical, political, ideological, and personal complications. First, much of Germany’s productive pre-war agricultural land now lay under Polish control such that a significant amount of agricultural land was gone. The loss of agricultural manpower (a result of war casualties, German men held as POWs, and the loss of foreign POWs) further exacerbated this problem. Second, the Allies disagreed about how to feed German children. The Soviets insisted that each zone was responsible for its own food -- a decision that disadvantaged the western zones. Only the Soviet Zone of Berlin received official distributions of food stuffs, including fruits and vegetables, from the agricultural areas surrounding Berlin. Third, ideologically the Allies argued that calories reflected “a person’s ‘value’ to the system.” This meant that Germans, who bore the guilt of the war, should not receive more calories than people in other innocent countries of Europe. Finally, the personal experiences of children with food and hunger after the war. For some schoolchildren meals were made possible by foreign aid at least in the Western zones. But what about children too young to go to school? The paper I propose will draw on archival sources as well as oral histories to explore the contradictions between plans to feed children and the realities of feeding them.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 130. Children's Health and the State