Food has been a vital part of war since time immemorial, from early biblical sieges to the Hunger Blockade of November 1918 and the later Soviet and Chinese mass starvation of millions. Decades ago, the noted historian C. Paul Vincent, in Politics of Hunger (CH, May'86), concluded that the withholding or interruption of the availability of foodstuffs had become a basic political weapon of modern warfare, against both foreign enemies and vulnerable internal minorities. By WW II, food policy in Germany was as important as the manufacture of arms and fell to the hard-liner Herbert Backe, a failed academic who ingratiated himself in R. Walther Darré’s Reich Ministry for Food and Agriculture. As a wartime intimate of Hitler and Goering, Backe played a major role in the allocation of food rations to the public, the mass murder of Soviet soldiers and civilians, and the use of food shortages as a justification for genocide. Indeed, in the very capable hands of historian Gerhard, this excellent volume, based on original diaries, interviews, and outstanding research, examines the use and misuse of food, which may indeed have been Nazi Germany’s justification for the war itself.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All academic levels/libraries.
