Coping with Hunger and Shortage under German Occupation in World War II [Hardcover]

This volume demonstrates how German expansion in the Second World War II led to shortages, of food and other necessities including medicine, for the occupied populations, causing many to die from severe hunger or starvation. While the various chapters look at a range of topics, the main focus is on the experiences of ordinary people under occupation; their everyday life, and how this quickly became dominated by the search for supplies and different strategies to fight scarcity. The book discusses various such strategies for surviving increasingly catastrophic circumstances, ranging from how people dealt with rationing systems, to the use of substitute products and recycling, barter, black-marketeering and smuggling, and even survival prostitution. In addressing examples from Norway to Greece and from France to Russia, this volume offers the first pan-European perspective on the history of shortage, malnutrition and hunger resulting from the war, occupation, and aggressive German exploitation policies. 

Introduction: Supply Situations: Nazi Policies of Exploitation and Economies of Shortage of Occupied Societies during World War II; Tatjana T?nsmeyer.- Part I: Economies of Scarcity and Ersatz Site.- Black market in the General Government 1939-1945: Survival strategy or (un)official economy?; Jerzy Kochanowski.- Economies of Scarcity in Belarusian Villages During the Second World War. How New Findings from Oral History Projects put a Perpetrator Centered Historiography in Perspective; Tatsiana Kasataya and Aliaksandr Smalianchuk.- Supplies under pressure. Survival in a fully rationed society: Experiences, cases and innovation in rural and urban regions in occupied Norway; Guri Hjeltnes.- The Black market is a crime against community: the failure of the Vichy Government to create an egalitarian distribution and the growth of the black market in France duringl³J