Best historical materials: Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe

Best historical materials: Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe

Datum: 3. April 2023
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The source edition „Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortages“ is on the winners‘ list of the „Best historical materials published in 2021/2022“ of the American Libraries Association.

Edited by Tatjana Tönsmeyer, Peter Haslinger, Włodzimierz Borodziej, Stefan Martens, and Irina Sherbakova.  Boston: Brill, 2021. 2 vols. 1374 pp.

While the Second World War in Europe was a time of horrific bloodshed in both military and genocidal contexts, it was also a massive undertaking of resource extraction by the German occupiers.  Under German rule, food, textiles, and other supplies were diverted from civilian supply chains to the Wehrmacht and the German homeland.  The experience of war for most Europeans was one of constant deprivation.

Fighting Hunger, Dealing with Shortage. Everyday Life under Occupation in World War II Europe

This collection of primary sources offers a very thorough selection of materials regarding rationing, speculation, confiscation, and the search for food and medicine substitutes.  The sources are almost all from national archives, previously unpublished, and newly translated into English from dozens of languages.

The two-volume set contains 600 documents from 20 countries, translated from 17 languages. Entries include personal letters and diary entries, but also official dicta by governing bodies regarding policies such as rations and quarantines (the limited availability of medicine and sanitary supplies restricted the ability of doctors to treat infectious diseases), internal government reports on food supplies, and published advice on using ersatz goods for tasks such as household cleaning, and court proceedings against defendants accused of fraudulent abuse of ration books. The editors have provided translations that try to reflect the nature of the original documents; that is, quite formal in government documents, and more casual in personal communications. The documents are copiously annotated to provide context about the parties that generated the documents, clarify references to events elsewhere, and note difficulties in the original text such as missing or illegible words.

As the editors write in their introduction, smaller compilations of source material about privation in World War II have been published (usually focused on a single country), but this appears to be the first such compendium that covers the entire continent and draws from such a diverse set of archives. It is likely to be an essential source for those studying the civilian experience of foreign occupation during wartime.

Steven A. Knowlton, Princeton University

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