The official daily food ration in the camps was around 1,200 to 1,500 calories. The actual ration delivered, after theft by the kitchen and supply chain, was lower, often half that. Heavy labour required around 3,000 to 4,000 calories per day. The mathematics killed prisoners systematically. The starvation was not a mistake or a consequence of wartime shortage. It was the planned mechanism by which the regime intended large parts of its prisoner population to die.
The official ration
The standard SS-issued food allocation for a labour prisoner was a piece of bread of around 300 grams, a watery soup at midday made from cabbage, turnip or similar root vegetable, and a hot drink of ersatz coffee or herbal tea morning and evening. Margarine, jam or sausage in tiny quantities appeared occasionally. The ration calorie value was set, by SS calculation, at the minimum thought necessary to keep a prisoner working for a few months before they died and were replaced from the next deportation transport.
The ration also varied by prisoner category. Jewish prisoners got the lowest ration. Soviet prisoners of war got a ration so low that they were essentially being starved on purpose. Skilled labour prisoners working in factories got a slightly better ration, although still far below survival level. The differential reinforced the camp hierarchy and made the daily competition for food assignments part of the camp regime.
The actual ration
Theft along the supply chain reduced the ration delivered to the prisoner barracks well below the official figure. The kitchen workers, the kapos and the SS supply staff each took a share. The bread on the prisoner table was often a smaller piece than the official allocation, and the soup was thinner than it should have been, and the margarine was usually missing. The cumulative shortfall could be 30 or 40 per cent. By the end of 1944 in some camps the prisoner ration had collapsed to around 600 calories per day, a level at which a non-working adult would die within weeks.
The hunger
The hunger was the dominant physical and mental experience of camp life. Survivor accounts describe it consistently. Hunger that did not subside between meals because the meals did not contain enough food to satisfy. Hunger that woke the prisoner at three in the morning. Hunger that occupied the entire conscious mind: thinking about food, dreaming about food, talking about food. Primo Levi describes prisoners reciting recipes to each other in the camp at night, fantasising in detail about meals they had eaten before the war. The fantasies were not a comfort. They were a condition.
The prisoners lost weight rapidly. A man who entered the camp at 75 kilograms could be at 45 kilograms within three months. The weight loss reduced muscle mass first, then organ function. The prisoner became increasingly tired, increasingly cold, increasingly slow. Cognitive functions deteriorated; memory became unreliable; the prisoner forgot the names of family members. The endpoint of this process is described on the page on the Muselmann.
The trade in food
Inside the camp, food was the only currency that mattered. Prisoners with access to extra food, by virtue of working in the kitchen, the warehouse, the office, or by being kapos, were the privileged class. They could trade food for sex, for protection, for medical care, for assignment to better work columns. The ordinary prisoner had nothing to trade except parts of their daily ration, and trading their bread meant accelerating their own death. The few prisoners who managed to find a steady supply of additional food, usually through smuggling from a labour assignment outside the camp wire, were the ones with the best chance of surviving.
The Soviet prisoners
Soviet prisoners of war were treated worse than any other category. They were not, in German law, prisoners of war at all, because the Soviet Union had not signed the Geneva Convention. They were classified as racial enemies and held in conditions designed to kill them through starvation and exposure. The death rate among Soviet prisoners in the first winter of their captivity, 1941 to 1942, reached around one per cent per day across the network of holding camps. Out of 5.7 million Soviet prisoners taken by Germany, around 3.3 million died, and most of those deaths were the result of deliberate starvation. The Soviet POW death toll is, after the murder of European Jewry, the largest single category of Holocaust-era death.
The hunger in the ghettos
The same logic was applied in the ghettos before the deportations to the death camps began. The Warsaw ghetto food ration was around 180 calories per day at its lowest. Around 100,000 Warsaw ghetto inhabitants died of starvation and disease in the two years before the deportations to Treblinka. Photographs taken in the ghetto by SS propaganda units, intended to show the supposed degeneracy of the Jewish population, in fact show the visible end stage of starvation in adults and children. They are some of the most disturbing images in the Holocaust record.
Why this matters
The Holocaust killed by gas chambers and by shooting; it also killed, in numbers comparable to either, by hunger. Around two million people, taking the camp deaths and the ghetto deaths together, died of starvation in the years 1939 to 1945, in conditions deliberately designed to bring about that outcome. The starvation was not an inadequate response to a war emergency. It was the policy. The regime that built Auschwitz also calculated, to the last calorie, how slowly it could feed a prisoner before the prisoner died, and it set its rations to that line.
See also
Sources
- Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1978
- Gotz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, Metropolitan Books, 2007
- Alex Bein, The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, Herzl Press, 1990
- USHMM: Daily Life in the Camps