Surviving Stalingrad

[shamirnewell]

According to: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/Germany/HB/HB-6.html

(1) A butchery platoon can process the following number of animals per day.

40 beef cattle equal to 40,000 meat rations.
80 pigs equal to 24,000 meat rations.
240 sheep equal to 19,000 meat rations.

Sorry, but I disbelieve this data. Not only the claim that one Schlächtereizug/butchery platoon was able to process all those animals on a single day but also the claimed meat rations.
I found another source stating that a butchery platoon was able to process daily:

15 cattle
or
120 pigs
or
240 sheeps and to process up to 3000 kg sausage

.
Source: http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Zus ... nsteID.htm
This data is, IMHO [coming from a village were slaughtering pigs and cows was a common event in the 70/80ies], much more reliable and comprehensible.


1. At the time there were for sure no beef cattle known here, AFAIK. The less in the area of Stalingrad.
2. By a butchers formula it´s impossible to get so many meat portions from cattle or that the meat rations where insufficient.
I´ll show an example with one cow equals 1000 rations.
A Limousin cow from nowadays weights ~ 770kg, that´s her live weight. Minus bowels = 335 kg right after the slaughtering. Due cooling down of the animals body we have another loss of 3% = 324,95kg. That leaves us to the last waste, the bones with again ~25% = 243,71 kg: 1000 = 0,24 kg.
Remember, the example is based on this cow:

and not these speciemn from the Ukraine in 1942:
.

This is interesting information. Isn't the ration allowance of .24kg about twice the standard wehrmacht meat ration?

The source I provided is a us army intelligence digest. The term beef cattle would have been in common usage in the US Army.

Our sources agree on the number of sheep and cattle nut not on the number of cattle.

[history1]

[...] Our sources agree on the number of sheep and cattle...

240 sheeps = 240 sheeps
but
40 beef cattle ≠ 15 cattle

... but not on the number of cattle.

You missed the most important point, namely the "OR" in my quote.

[shamirnewell]

History1,

Sorry about that. I still believe that your .24 kg of meat is about twice the actual wehrmacht ration. This throws you butchers formula off in terms of the total number of rations obtained from one animal.

Also based on my own personal experience slaughtering deer, goats, and beef cattle every year and having slaughtered pigs before that the general numbers of animals are probably somewhere around the ratio of 1 head of cattle = 2 or 3 pigs=6 or 7 sheep.