Cakes and famine - life in the Warsaw Ghetto

[gebhk]

In ww1, the Germans themselves paid the price for that during the famine called turnip winter.

Though to be fair, many would argue that the Turnip Famine was primarily caused by economic mismanagement - specifically the denuding of the countryside and food transportation system of men and horses to feed the armed forces. This was therefore a famine of their own making.

[michael mills]

Germany did make massive use of Jewish slave labour. By 1944 it was even sending old people and young children to work in the subterranean factories where the new jet fighters were being produced, categories that previously would have been consigned straight to the gas chambers. That engendered a protest from General Milch, who complained that the SS was keeping the best "human material" for itself and sending him the dregs.

[Gorque]

Germany did make massive use of Jewish slave labour. By 1944 it was even sending old people and young children to work in the subterranean factories where the new jet fighters were being produced, categories that previously would have been consigned straight to the gas chambers.

Hi Michael:

Occurring also in 1944, was the deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews to, IIRC, Birkenau. Did the above event that you describe occur after the deportations?

I know you've posted extensively on the Hungarian deportations and that a number of the deportees deemed suitable for labor were sent to toil at, I believe, Mittelbau Dora or am I mistaken? Anyhow, my point is that the majority, including seniors and children, were sent to their immediate doom, despite the labor shortage.

[michael mills]

Yes, the old people and young children sent to Germany for labour on the jet fighter program came from among the 400,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz from Hungary in 1944. We know about them because of a letter of complaint from Erhard Milch, the head of the jet fighter program, saying that the Jews who had been sent to the factories where the jet fighters were being assembled were not fit for labour.

An unknown number of the Jews deported from Hungary were not put through selection on arrival, but were held unregistered as so-called depot prisoners in the area of Birkenau camp nicknamed "Mexiko", pending their transfer to places of labour deployment. An unknown number of the depot prisoners died in the camp before being transferred, another unknown number were put through selection at various times, of which an unknown number were sent to the gas chambers. The number of deport prisoners who were eventually transferred to places of labour deployment is also unknown, but what is known is that there were over 200 such places of labour deployment to which Jews were sent from Auschwitz in 1944. There are also records of prisoners who had been transferred from Auschwitz being sent back there after they were assessed as no longer fit for labour.

It should be borne in mind that over 100,000 deported Jews were recorded as returning to Hungary after the war, presumably including places in Czechoslovakia and Romania which had been part of Hungary in 1944, and an additional unknown number did not rerun to Hungary but went to other places. Given that the death rate of Hungarian Jews sent to places of labour deployment was quite high, the number of deported Hungarian Jews who were kept as depot prisoners in Auschwitz and transferred to places of labour deployment must have been quite high, possibly as high as 200,000, although that can only be a supposition.

[wm]

The Nazis faced a debilitating labor shortage in the last years of the war, so they went easy on the (work-capable) Jews. But it's unlikely the Jews would eventually survive. Himmler would finish them off just from his sense of neatness.
After all, he made Germany free of people "unworthy of life" and anti-social folks (especially the Roma). The (not that many) remaining alive Jews would a blemish on the society. And killing people was so easy after all.

[michael mills]

Before the beginning of the Hungarian deportation, Himmler had already made his offer to trade one million Jews for trucks to be used on the Eastern front and other supplies, which was probably intended by him as an opening gambit in his attempt to start negotiations with the western Allies using Jews as bargaining chips, something he had been trying to do since 1942. Accordingly, he had a motive for keeping some Jews alive.

In fact, of the 430,000 Jews deported from Hungary between May and July 1945, some 30,000 were sent to a camp in Austria where they were treated relatively well and almost all of them survived. These were probably the Jews that Himmler was preserving as bargaining chips.

[michael mills]

In Post 30 on page 2 of this thread, I posted a link to a doctoral dissertation about the Jewish Social Self-Help in the General-Government; here it is again:

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte ... _06_29.pdf

Note 1851 on page 339 gives the text of a draft message from the German Foreign office to its representative with the Governor-General, dated 12 July 1940, dealing with the issue of the legal framework for relations with the American Jewish Distribution Committee in the United States, the main Jewish charitable organisation that had long been involved in sending aid to the Jews in Poland. The message concluded that the German Government had a free hand to set the terms and conditions for relations with the AJDC, since the German-American Trade Treaty of 1934 did not not apply to the General-Government which had not been annexed to the German Reich, and neither did any Polish-American treaties or the Polish legal system, since the former Polish Republic had ceased to exist.

The crucial part of this draft comes in the last two sentences:

Von hier aus gesehen, dürfte ein Entgegenkommen insofern geboten erscheinen, als ein deutsches Interesse an der Hilfstätigkeit des ‚American Joint Distribution Commitee‘ besteht. Durch die Hilfssendungen dieser amerikanischen Hilfsorganisation an die jüdische Bevölkerung im Generalgouvernement wird die Versorgung eines beträchtlichen Teiles der im Generalgouvernement lebenden Bevölkerung erleichtert, was indirekt
auch dem deutschen Volke zugute kommen kann.

My translation:

From this point of view, an agreement would seem to be appropriate to the extent there is a German interest in the charitable activity of the "American Joint distribution Committee". Through the aid deliveries of this American aid organisation to the Jewish population in the General-Government, the provisioning of a substantial part of the population living in the General-Government will be made easier, which can also indirectly be of benefit to the German people.

This message shows that the German Government had no objection to external charitable organisations sending food to the Jewish population of occupied Poland since it would relieve the German authorities of the burden of feeding them, at least partially, which would benefit the German people since more food would be available for them. It is therefore obvious that as of July 1940, the German Government had no intention of eliminating the Jews of Poland through starvation, because if it had had that intention it would not have allowed external organisation to send food aid to those Jews.

That further suggests that it was only after the cessation of that external food aid due to the entry of the United States into the war against Germany that agencies of the German Government made the decision to kill off the Jews of the General-Government assessed as unusable for labour, estimated at 60% of that population in March 1942 according to an entry in Goebbels' diary.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi Michael,

I may have missed something. Has anyone suggested "that as of July 1940, the German Government" did have the "intention of eliminating the Jews of Poland through starvation"?

I would refer you back to my earlier post, which you missed, because, whatever German official intentions in July 1940, the differential deaths of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto had grown alarmingly in 1941, even before Germany declared war on the USA:

"The fact remains that the responsibility of the German government was to keep EVERYONE in its custody alive. It failed to do so by virtue of differential decisions it made in food allocation. It is therefore culpable.

As far as I am aware, there were no mass deaths of Germans due to starvation during the war. However, there are several well attested examples of mass starvation of other peoples in German custody, not just Jews. Again, Germany was culpable.

Yes, timing DOES matter. Jewish deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto were rising sharply BEFORE the US entered the war. In 1941 the death rate of Jews increased dramatically. Compared to 1938, the number of deaths among Poles increased nearly twofold and the number of Jews - nearly TWELVEFOLD. The USA joined the war in December 1941. Thus the exponential growth in Jewish deaths does NOT coincide with the entry of the USA into the war. For whatever reason, it began earlier.

I can't find the monthly figures for Jewish deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto on line any more, just annualised ones. Do you have them? If so, perhaps you could put them up here?"

Cheers,

Sid.

[michael mills]

The excess deaths among the population of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 were not evenly spread among that population, but rather concentrated certain groups, the old, the poor, orphans, beggars. That suggests that one of the main causes of the excess mortality was the unequal distribution of the available food, with parts of the population receiving enough to live quite well, while other less privileged parts going without and suffering extreme malnutrition. That supposition is supported by the data recorded at the time by persons such as Ringelblum, who obviously was one of those who received enough food to survive.

The same phenomenon occurred in Germany during the First World War, when malnutrition resulting from the reduced availability of food was not evenly distributed but was concentrated in particular groups totally reliant on restricted rations, such as civilian prisoners and persons in institutional care. The excess deaths among patients in mental hospitals was estimated at some 70,000, which interestingly is almost exactly the same as the total number of recorded deaths reached in the official T-4 adult euthanasia program by the time of its termination in mid-1941, suggesting that a target had been set based on the excess mortality of institutionalised mental patients in the First World War.

A similar phenomenon occurred in Finland during the Second World War, when there was a marked increase in the mortality rate of civilian prisoners due to malnutrition resulting from drastically reduced rations.

[gebhk]

Hi Michael

The excess deaths among the population of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941 were not evenly spread among that population, but rather concentrated certain groups, the old, the poor, orphans, beggars. That suggests that one of the main causes of the excess mortality was the unequal distribution of the available food, with parts of the population receiving enough to live quite well, while other less privileged parts going without and suffering extreme malnutrition.

I'm not sure that that is a logical conclusion, Michael. I would suggest that an equally reasonable one could be that had it not been for the unequal distribution, everyone would have died. Not to be too boringly biological, but among all social creatures behavioral mechanisms exist to ensure that the fittest individuals/families get the (nomen omen) lion's share of everything, particularly so when resources are inadequate. This entirely makes sense because that is the most effective way of ensuring the success of the genes. Indeed one can even see this at the sub-social level, whithin family, where some siblings are preferred over others. Indeed many birds produce large clutches of eggs with little chance of the weakest individuals surving, simply to provide relatively cheap spares should something happen to the Class A offspring and to profit from any off-chance of an unexpected glut of food. It don't think for one second that that that is your intention, so please dont take this personally, but it needs to be said that it is entirely specious to 'blame' the victims for this essential and natural behaviour as some apologists for the Nazis do. The fact is that this tragedy was entirely of the Nazis making because they chose to start a war, they chose to invade other countries and take control of their populations, they chose to incarcerate certain segments of those populations and failed to provide adequately for them when they did so.

Also, I may be wrong, but I think you are over-egging the impact of the foreign charitable contribution. There is little doubt that impressive contributions were made, particularly in the US to attempt to alleviate the plight of the Jews under German occuparion. The question, however, is how much of this was actually getting to the hungry mouths that needed it most? I suspect the answer is - not a lot. Apologies for this very un-acedemic interjection, but the sources I read, were read a veeery long time ago and it would take a major effort to find them (perhaps WM can help?): it has stuck in my mind that a number of letters were sent by Jewish organisations (I suspect predominantly the left-wing ones) in Poland to the relief organisations abroad, pleading to send aid via the Polish Government clandestine structures rather than the 'official' Government (of country of origin) -German ones. This was because the bulk sent via the former method tended to get where it was needed relatively intact; sent by the latter method it arrived vastly depleted if at all, with everyone along the way taking their cut. I concur with Sid that (what I remember of) the monthly data does not support the concept of excess deaths being elevated by the US entry into the war. On the contrary, the rate was increasing rapidly from the middle of 1940 and the levels it reached it towards the end of 1941 were simply the end-point of this rise. Thereafter, as I recall, they plateu'ed and indeed there appears have been a small drop (probably becuase by then the weakest and fastest-dying strata were to all intents and purposes gone), with December 1941, itself evincing barely a ripple.

Of course a decent set of data of excess deaths per capitum would perhaps be much more meaningful, however I have never seen such a dataset (not that that proves a lot!)

Krzysztof

[wm]

The foreign charitable contribution was exactly 17,699,187.50 zlotys, i.e., ~25,000 zlotys per day, i.e., nothing.
They could help to survive several thousand people (theoretically anyway - objectively, food was only available on the black market) with that, but not millions.
The idea that the contribution was of any value is clearly false.
The food parcels sent by Polish Jews from the Soviet occupation zone were probably more useful.

[wm]

The Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, photo made by Polish photographer Mieczysław Bil-Bilażewski.
The advertising placard says "Ice cream", the other one "[Fountain] pens."

Warsaw Ghetto (1941).jpg