Food as a Weapon

Abstract

Food played a crucial role in the Nazis' vision of a new European order under German control. More food had to be produced and markets had to be reorganized. Agricultural sciences under the Nazi regime worked to increase productivity, breed new plants and to improve existing species. In the war against the Soviet Union, food was explicitly used as a weapon to defeat the enemy. This paper focuses on Richard Walther Darré and Herbert Backe, who were in charge of agriculture and food throughout the twelve years of the Third Reich. The two men stood at the crossroads of agricultural sciences and politics, and the continuity between their ideas and policies illustrates the relation between agricultural sciences and the Nazi state.

Keywords:

• Herbert Backe
• Richard Walther Darré
• Kaiser Wilhelm Society
• agricultural research
• Nazi food policy
• Soviet Union

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gesine Gerhard

Gesine Gerhard is an associate professor of history at the University of the Pacific in California. She completed her dissertation “Peasants into farmers. Agriculture and democracy in modern Germany” at the University of Iowa in 2000. She earned an MA degree from Technical University Berlin. Her research focuses on German agrarian history. She is currently working on a political biography of the Nazi Minister of Food and Agriculture, Herbert Backe. Her article “Food and genocide: Nazi agrarian food policy in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union” was published in Contemporary European History (2009). University of the Pacific, 3601 Pacific Avenue, Stockton, CA 95211, USA ([email protected]).