By spring 1945 when the Allied Military Government and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) confronted the masses of refugees and displaced persons gathered in, or streaming toward, occupied Germany in the wake of the Third Reich's defeat, food—its supply, distribution, and, not least, symbolic meaning—had been clearly established as a key political and psychological issue for military and occupation policy. The rhetoric of allied war aims and of relief work posited food provision as a fundamental issue of human survival, development, and dignity. In 1943, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, deploying both political and psychoanalytically oriented social work discourses, cautioned American policy makers planning the future of a defeated Nazi Germany about the importance of rationing for establishing control over an occupied population. “Whenever a people feels that its food supply is in the hands of an authority,” she reminded them—in terms suffused with unarticulated gender assumptions, “it tends to regard that authority as to some degree parental.” Moreover she added, “probably no other operation, even the provision of hospitalization and emergency care, is so effective in proving to an anxious and disturbed people that the powers that be are good and have their welfare at heart.”Footnote ¹

Mead's concerns about adequate food provision fit squarely into the New Deal inflected language of human rights and social security central to the American case against fascism and for a democratic postwar world. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's famous “Four Freedoms” address to the 77th Congress on January 6, 1941, designed to prepare the nation for possible participation in World War II, set as a condition of the liberty that fascism was threatening, not only freedom of speech and expression, and worship, but also the “freedom from want” necessary for real “freedom from fear.” The Atlantic Charter, proclaimed by Churchill and Roosevelt on August 12, 1941, as they vowed to support Great Britain and the Soviet Union with Lend Lease aid, promised all states—and significantly both “victor or vanquished … access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” It elaborated the vision articulated by Roosevelt, announcing that the peace resulting from the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” would “afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”

Indeed, the dream of establishing a global United Nations, not as the name for the Allies battling Nazism but for a new and better League of Nations committed to the preservation of the peace that would inevitably follow this second world war, arguably first began with an international conference focused on food. A May 1943 gathering at Hot Springs, Virginia, led to the formation of an interim international commission which became the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the new UN in 1945.Footnote ² In November 1943, in the midst of brutal warfare in Europe and the Pacific and in the face of the ongoing Nazi extermination project, forty nations agreed to establish the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration as the international agency mandated to deal with an expected massive flow (and hoped-for repatriation) of displaced persons and refugees.Footnote ³ In his 1944 State of the Union address to a nation at war, Roosevelt (FDR) reiterated the principle that political and civil rights were inextricably connected to material entitlements; food was a basic inalienable human right. “A man in need is not a free man,” he stated unequivocally and warned that “people who are hungry and out of jobs are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”Footnote ⁴ Thus, the basic tenet that everyone had the “right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger,” which would eventually be enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was integrated into Allied war aims. Here, too, as is generally the case in this wartime and early postwar human-rights language, gender was not explicit in the conventional exchangeable vocabulary of “man” and “people.” Between 1945 and 1948—and in many ways into the 1950s—these putative “rights” would be severely tested in the on-the-ground conflicts over food rations and entitlements that roiled occupied and defeated Germany.

The Politics of Rationing

As Mead had predicted, in the aftermath of unconditional surrender in 1945 and the influx of millions of refugees into the western occupation zones, differential access to food supplies or goods that could be exchanged for food became a key gauge of the occupiers' favor and group or individual classifications as victim, perpetrator, or bystander during the Nazi regime. For displaced refugees in a war-torn Europe with no legitimate borders or national institutions, access to adequate food and disputes over the meaning of “adequate” also served as markers of allied and international commitment to the realization of the Allies' lofty war aims. After Germany's unconditional surrender, allied and especially the U.S. Military Government took on the ultimate responsibility for feeding the local population as well as the masses of refugees streaming into occupied Germany, including up to fourteen million ethnic German refugees and expellees from the eastern territories conquered by the Red Army.Footnote ⁵ Together with UNRRA and associated nongovernmental aid organizations, the Military Government also confronted millions of Nazi Germany's victims: prisoners of war (POWs), forced laborers, liberated concentration camp inmates, and more unexpectedly, and my focus here, more than a quarter million mostly eastern European Jews. They had survived the Final Solution, in death and labor camps, in hiding or with the partisans, or in the Soviet Union; many of them were now fleeing renewed anti-Semitism in postwar Poland and Romania. After May 1945 and in ever larger numbers in 1946, “the surviving remnant” (She'erit Hapleta) of east European Jewry sought shelter and awaited further emigration in displaced persons camps or in German towns under American occupation.Footnote ⁶

During the war, John Maynard Keynes reportedly “scoffed” that President Roosevelt's New Deal-based interest in food relief led him to “start with vitamins” as the “best strategy for post-war reconstruction.”Footnote ⁷ As it turned out, vitamins, and especially calories, did become a fulcrum of wartime planning as well as of postwar and then Cold-War occupation and reconstruction politics. The calorie, as Nick Cullather has detailed in a fascinating article on “The Foreign Policy of the Calorie,” was invented in 1896 in an “airtight chamber” in a Wesleyan University basement where a so-called calorimeter measured a graduate student's food intake and labor output in units of thermal energy. It quickly become an important measure of “social and industrial efficiency” during the Progressive Era and an “instrument of power” for military planning and humanitarian relief operations during and after World War I.Footnote ⁸ During and especially after World War II, calories—and what they could and could not provide in terms of food and sustenance—became a measure also of the Allied commitment to human “welfare” and rights, noted by Mead, proclaimed by the Atlantic Charter, and finally codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

By the end of the war in 1945, American Jewish groups, faced with the enormity of the catastrophe that had befallen European Jewry, were intensely interested in pursuing an international human-rights agenda. On the 153rd anniversary of the U.S. Bill of Rights, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) proposed an “International Bill of Rights” on the grounds that something must emerge out of “a war waged for the liberation of mankind” and that “as in the past, what happens to the Jews foreshadows the future of human rights and dignity everywhere.” Positioning Jews as both the particular canary in the mine and as (therefore) universal, the AJC admonished that “the treatment of the Jews after this war will remain the symbol of the fate of all men and all nations.”Footnote ⁹ Indeed, several years before the UN Declaration proclaimed a right to food and recognized in its preamble that “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world,” the Jewish survivors of World War II in displaced persons (DP) camps in occupied Germany (mostly in the American zone) insisted that these principles were not just symbolic or legal issues in an emerging international human-rights “regime” but concrete (and contested and complex) matters of material and social entitlement.Footnote ¹⁰

For the occupiers, therefore, questions about food supplies for DPs were inextricably linked to disputes about adequate nutrition for the Germans, how much they needed and how much they deserved. Did they require just the minimum to prevent epidemics and serious social disorder or enough to actually satisfy the population? These questions were, of course, both political and practical. Food politics had become part of the “arithmetic of standards” that marked welfare state and humanitarian activism in the second half of twentieth century. UNRRA, which was responsible for aid to “non-enemy nationals” had declared a (frequently unattainable) daily intake of about 2,500 to 2,650 calories to be adequate, the amount that the International Labor Organization of the League of Nations had set in 1935 as the global standard for the working adult.Footnote ¹¹ Despite Allied planning based on the principle that defeated Germans should have no more food than the most hard-hit Allied nation, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) originally set German rations at 2,000 calories, no less than for liberated countries such as France or Belgium. As it turned out, however, the victors had underestimated the extent of the war damage and overestimated the degree to which Germans would be able to provide for their own food. When local supplies, including the contents of well-stocked German military depots, ran low, official rations for the defeated were quickly reduced, initially to a low of 1,000 to 1,250 calories daily.Footnote ¹²

Under the chaotic conditions confronted by the U.S. Military Government and UNRRA at the war's end and throughout the occupation, a complex and novel language of grams of fat and total daily calories, vitamins, or cigarettes and coffee allotments emerged. It calibrated new (and constantly shifting) standards of victimization, entitlement, and—very importantly—recognition among the many different groups present in the American occupation zone. During a period of tumult and extreme scarcity, defeated Germans and surviving Jews competed—against each other and also among themselves—for the favors of the “good parent,” embodied by occupiers and international relief organizations. Each group resented the ostensible (and in reality extremely limited) privileging of the other, maintaining that their political innocence or severe suffering entitled them to precious supplies or a higher level of rations. To extend Mead's analogy, the allied “parents” discriminated among their various more or less dependent “children,” who in turn squabbled over who was more entitled or deprived. “‘Calories’ became a kind of magical concept” and rationing categories not only established daily allotments but also delineated differential degrees of victimization, criminality, or complicity, providing in visceral form a measure of “transitional justice.” They worked as a “universal currency” defining standards of justice and efficiency that operated in tandem with the informal currency of coffee, cigarettes, and nylons supporting the postwar black or “gray” market barter economy.Footnote ¹³

In this calculus, ration levels set by degrees of guilt and work capacity often doubly jeopardized women even as, in a world of “surplus women” and men missing in action or prisoner of war camps, they were generally responsible for food provision and distribution.Footnote ¹⁴ Drafted as Trümmerfrauen to clear the rubble, often (but certainly not always) as punishment for having been members of, or married to members of, Nazi organizations, women were also most likely to be classified as “unproductive” Hausfrauen eligible for the lowest-level ration card, dubbed the Himmelsfahrtkarte (ticket to heaven) because it could not provide for a livable diet. At the same time, there was no clear standard for what in fact constituted a livable diet. American occupation officers, constrained by regulations that reminded them, “You are entering Germany, not as a liberator, but as a victor,” were constantly balancing the desire not to “pamper” the Germans with the urgent need to maintain order and prevent epidemics.Footnote ¹⁵ By December 1945, they felt they had the food situation in Berlin “under control, with an average of 1,600 calories daily.”Footnote ¹⁶ When German officials and newspapers warned in 1946 that Berliners and up to sixty-five percent of their children were in danger of starvation, the American commander in Berlin, Colonel Frank Howley, dismissed their worries as “bushwah,” part of the persistent sullen whining and “aggressive” self-pity that virtually all observers perceived as the dominant German post-surrender mood.Footnote ¹⁷

In an ironic reference to the erstwhile national anthem, the sometimes still irrepressible Berliner Schnauze (cynical wit) lamented, “Germany, Germany, without everything [ohne alles], without butter, without fat, and even the little bit of marmalade is eaten up by the occupiers.”Footnote ¹⁸ But, as Americans did not tire of pointing out, German outrage at the low level of provisioning was no doubt influenced by the enormous quantities they had been accustomed to consuming before, and even during, much of the war. Prewar Germans had enjoyed an average of 3,000 calories per day, including a good deal of alcohol, large quantities of bread and potatoes, and an astonishing 106 grams of fat, always the marker of an ample diet. Even at the height of the war in 1944, with German cities under severe bombardment, the average intake still stood at a generous 2,000 calories a day. As Götz Aly has noted in his study of what he has controversially termed “the Nazi welfare state,” “The Nazi leaders were constantly handing out benefits to ordinary Germans, keeping them remarkably well fed and well supplied.”Footnote ¹⁹ Historians agree that “‘official rations to ‘Aryan’ consumers did not fall below subsistence until late in the war. Even then, ‘the looting of a continent (and the government's concern about a repetition of the hunger in World War I) made sure that German rations were by far the highest in Europe.’”Footnote ²⁰

Despite its claims to scientific rationalized neutrality, the calorie has clearly “never been a neutral, objective measure of the contents of a dinner plate.”Footnote ²¹ Judgments about the nature of the German people and degrees of guilt and need influenced food and rationing policy, and these were in turn often challenged and revised in the face of actual on-the-ground conditions, which moreover, varied widely. Punitive views about provisioning of the German population frequently shifted when occupiers confronted the devastation in the bombed-out cities. Others, particularly Jews, active antifascists, and those who had directly witnessed the liberation of the camps, were shocked and outraged by the relative comfort and feigned innocence of many Germans, especially in rural areas.

In an indication of American ambivalence about whether hunger and disease in Berlin constituted a potential humanitarian crisis or a defensible punitive deprivation, the Military Government warned its personnel not to attribute deaths to starvation or freezing for fear of causing “undue alarm among the civilian population.”Footnote ²² Annoyed that the Soviets, following their more explicit policy of fraternization with (often newly converted) supportive “anti-fascist” elements, tried to gain political advantage with generous soup kitchens, Colonel Howley groused, “Where the Russians parceled out extra bits of food in return for services rendered and for general political loyalty, I distributed food to the Germans to keep them from starving on our hands. I was not, however, in favor of giving them American sirloin steaks every night.” Howley, who emerged from his tour of duty a rabid anticommunist, found that Germans nevertheless reviled him as the “beast of Berlin” for his food politics. With some irony he noted, “Perhaps I had been unnecessarily blunt in saying so, but I had come to Berlin with the idea that the Germans were our enemies. Even though it was becoming more evident every day that it was the Russians who really were our enemies, I still was not prepared to embrace the Germans as allies.”Footnote ²³

Relatively quickly, however, political considerations changed and adequate amounts—of both calories and types of foodstuffs—were increasingly likely to be set with reference to not only the recent Nazi past, but also the Cold War present. The Americans (and British) had been determined to impose punitive measures on the Germans, ensuring, for example, that their diet should at least not exceed the low standard of postwar Great Britain, which had instituted severe rationing only after the war to manage the heavy costs of occupation. But their trepidation about being outdone on both the propaganda and provisioning front by the ever more troublesome new antagonists in the east, the Soviet Union and its German communist allies, proved a powerful counterweight.Footnote ²⁴ Notwithstanding the Red Army's record of rape and plunder as the Soviets battled their way toward and into Berlin, the Americans feared potential popular support for a Soviet occupation driven by Stalin's conciliatory vow that “the Hitlers come and go but the German Volk remains.” German officials were adept at playing on anxieties that too severe a stance would turn the defeated Germans toward communism. In her famous album, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly, the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White displayed a scarily “Aryan”-looking female “Professor Koch” (Cook), into whose mouth she put the lines that Americans imagined all Germans were perfecting: “America must supply food, or Stalin will have an easy time.”Footnote ²⁵ Others ominously rhymed, “Geben Sie uns genug zu essen, sonst können wir Hitler nicht vergessen” (Our food needs must be met, otherwise Hitler we cannot forget).Footnote ²⁶ Adequate food offered not only a bastion against “anarchy” among the displaced but also a bulwark against revanchist Nazism and now communism. Revising Bertolt Brecht's Weimar refrain that “erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” (first comes the chow, then morality), American occupiers fretted that if there was “a choice between becoming a communist on 1,500 calories and a believer in democracy on 1,000 calories,” low or decreased rations would “pave the way to a Communist Europe.”Footnote ²⁷

These tensions later culminated, of course, in the dramatic conflicts of the Berlin Blockade and Airlift in 1948, which unfolded just as the General Assembly in New York promulgated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948, one day after the same body had unanimously passed the Genocide Convention. During the blockade, the communists hoped to lure West Berliners into the east with promises of full shops and adequate food supplies, while the west tried to score points with the airlifting of tons of supplies. In the event, West Berliners neither yielded to eastern propaganda nor subsisted solely on the much heralded supplies flown in from Frankfurt's Rhine-Main air base, managing instead with a combination of Allied goods, foraging in the countryside, and furtive shopping in the east.Footnote ²⁸

It was just this ability of Germans, occupied but nonetheless still living in their own familiar country—a perception that extended to German expellees and refugees who were, after all, also uprooted from what they knew as Heimat—to supplement low rations by recourse to relatives in the countryside or the goodwill of their customary grocers or butchers (not to mention Cooperative of American Remittances to Europe, or CARE, packages) that had already infuriated their former victims during the immediate postwar months and years. Surviving Jews, who had expected the Allies to see them as liberated and highly deserving victims of the Germans, were embittered by what they perceived to be grudging treatment toward troublesome foreign refugees. For survivors of Nazism, whether Jews or antifascist “politicals,” privileged food rations were more than an urgent necessity; they also represented political recognition and an initial form of reparation.

Contemporary human-rights activists have argued that states have the obligation to protect and facilitate access to food supplies for those who might be disadvantaged in receiving food. In the case of occupied Germany, where there was no state authority to carry that role, the DPs expected UNRRA; the main Jewish relief agency Joint (American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee, or JDC); and finally the Military Government, which held quasi-state responsibility, to fulfill that role. When those missions were inadequately or grudgingly fulfilled, survivors knew whom to blame. They resented the limited and above all unappetizing rations supplied by their American protectors and UNRRA, as well as the patronizing and bureaucratized manner in which aid was distributed by international and Jewish aid organizations. As Hasia Diner has elaborated in her book, Hungering for America, east European Jews, relying on reports from family and friends among the more than two and a half million of their brethren who had emigrated to the United States starting in the 1870s, had long viewed America as the home of affordable and plentiful food. To Jews, Diner argues, food always meant more than “calories for survival.” Beyond its ritual significance, it served as a major indicator of differential status, and Jews had traditionally assumed that the more privileged community members were obligated to provide for the less fortunate, especially on holidays and the Sabbath.Footnote ²⁹ The emotional and symbolic valence of food furthermore reflected the ways that food and access to food had marked one's standing in a concentration camp hierarchy and been crucial for survival in general, whether in Nazi camps, in hiding, or as refugees in the Soviet Union.Footnote ³⁰ Even in the most drab transit camps or assembly centers, Jews maintained the emphasis on holiday feasts, occasions for which they demanded and received special allotments, involving, for example, the resumption of matzoh baking at the Sarotti plant in Berlin or the shipment of kosher meat from Denmark and wine from Palestine.Footnote ³¹ Survivors' attitudes toward food reflected “deeply held beliefs about food as an entitlement of all Jews,” and hence they were even more resentful and suspicious of the minimalist rations provided by aid groups and the Military Government.Footnote ³² They expected more and were not shy about expressing that expectation.

Conflicts about food and highly polarized perceptions of deprivation certainly marked and perpetuated the bitterness between Germans and Jews. Special envoy Earl Harrison's August 1945 report to President Truman had notoriously claimed that in the very early postwar months, the Allies had treated the “Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under military guard, instead of the S.S. troops” and posited that “One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”Footnote ³³ In fall 1945, with the memory of liberation still fresh and the Nuremberg trials about to begin, a Jewish aid organization acknowledged that “No doubt the children loitering in railway stations or wandering on the roads suffer cruelly at the approach of winter from a total lack of food and clothing.” The relief team insisted, however, that the countryside, if not the cities, was “almost everywhere [is] intact, the herds of horses, of cows, of sheep, are well fed, the barnyards are well, even very well stocked.”Footnote ³⁴ Supported and often incited by their chaplains, American-Jewish servicemen wrote to their families, hometown congregations, and American Jewish aid organizations, describing the relative prosperity of the German perpetrators compared to the plight of the liberated Jews. In outraged missives, they eloquently challenged the litany of complaints from Germans about the privileges in housing and food granted to Jews by the occupiers. In a letter home, a German-Jewish GI described sickening scenes of decaying bodies, “shrunk, only bones and skin,” being dug out of mass graves by local Germans, even as “six kilometers away were people living in a town as good as you can imagine, a bit rationed but not suffering, in nice houses, with dogs and cats that had to be fed and with good clothes to wear.”Footnote ³⁵ “I don't wish to be depressing, darling,” a Jewish officer wrote to his wife in December 1945, but the stark fact was that SS and Wehrmacht prisoners and German civilians received “more calories per day than the people who really suffered under the Nazis.”Footnote ³⁶ In the wake of outraged press reports and protests from American Jewish representatives as well as such reports from the field, Truman reacted swiftly, ordering the (often reluctant) implementation of Harrison's recommendations for improved conditions, separate camps, and a certain level of internal autonomy.

At the same time, Germans, often seen by the Allies and Jewish survivors as undeservedly well fed, for their part quickly positioned Jews as “privileged.” Germans resented Jews' guaranteed access to UNRRA rations in displaced persons camps, the generosity of individual American Jewish soldiers and their chaplains, and the much-envied Joint supplements, which provided not only dried food but also chocolates, coffee, and above all, the cigarettes that were central to black-market trading. To Germans—as well as to some occupiers and UNRRA officials—it looked as if the Harrison Report cemented Jewish survivors' position as having a “privileged status well above that of any ordinary displaced national of the United Nations.”Footnote ³⁷ From an international political perspective, “the international administration of Jewish DPs between 1945 and 1950” may have constituted, as Daniel Cohen provocatively argues, “an oft-overlooked yet important ‘judaeophile moment’ in the aftermath of the Holocaust.”Footnote ³⁸ But it did not feel that way to the Jewish DPs, and much of that sense of disappointment, bitterness, and lack of recognition congealed around food. Their mood was captured in the 1950 Hollywood film The Big Lift by the gruff, honest Sgt. Kowalski, Montgomery Clift's Polish-American (and in some ways, one suspects, a stand-in for a Jewish) GI sidekick, who, even in the face of the Soviet blockade, says of the Berliners he is protecting from communism, “They can't remember Dachau, Lidice, Buchenwald, Rotterdam, Warsaw. That they can't remember, but that they couldn't get meat last week, that they remember.”Footnote ³⁹

American requisition of German homes and apartment blocks to house the increasing population of Jewish “infiltrees” from eastern Europe seeking refuge in the American zone further inflamed German rancor. By 1947, the keen sense of unfair and arbitrary treatment by the victors led the Council of German Towns and Cities (Deutsche Städtetag) to avail itself of the new occupier-provided rhetoric and explicitly protest such evictions as human-rights violations. Indeed, Alice Weinreb has compellingly argued that many Germans used their own postwar experience of “hunger” to construct themselves as helpless and innocent victims of brutal and unfair occupation policies and were adept at “adapting a language originally created for the victims of Nazi oppression to fit their own situation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ When official rations in the British zone were reduced to 1,550 calories in March 1946 and the British Military Government, like U.S. Commander Howley in Berlin, proscribed the use of clinical malnutrition categories to describe the situation, German physicians—an occupational group noted for its staunch support of the National Socialist regime—were not above making comparisons to starvation conditions in concentration camps. In 1947, a particularly harsh year in which “A worldwide scarcity of foodstuffs, a hard winter, exhausted soil, and problems with the distribution system” for food exacerbated an already difficult situation, defeated Germans responded to a reduction in rations with sporadic strikes and unabashed appeals to “international law.” Local political leaders had no compunctions about claiming that by reducing rations, the Allies were violating the terms of the Atlantic Charter which had, after all, pledged that the result of “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny” would be peace, economic prosperity, and “freedom from fear and want” for both victor and vanquished. In June of that same crisis year, the German Chamber of Physicians, meeting in Bad Nauheim, appealed to the international moral conscience by depicting a famine-like situation: “The whole people, once vigorous and healthy, has been weakened by starvation and is now utterly incapable of work and is on the verge of manifest infirmity.”Footnote ⁴¹

Such alarms gained support among some unlikely advocates such as the British-Jewish publisher Victor Gollancz who documented appalling conditions in ruined German cities. Undoubtedly, ordinary Germans in cities were suffering from a rationing system much more onerous than that imposed by the Nazi regime. They, too, objected to—and subverted—the calorie regime devised by the occupiers. A cartoon in the Berlin women's magazine sie from January 1947 shows a son asking his mother “cooking over an improvised stove, … ‘Mother, do we always have to eat calories? Couldn't we occasionally eat a nice piece of cake?’”Footnote ⁴² In general, however, even sympathetic occupation officials agreed that Germans greatly exaggerated reports of malnutrition; on the whole, Germans were still relatively well fed, certainly better nourished than the British. While German rations were indeed lower than those granted to Jewish displaced persons and officially designated “victims of fascism,” the calorie-counting inscribed into ration levels was deceptive.

Most Germans did not have to rely only on official rations. Unlike DPs, who depended on, and indeed were officially required to depend on, supplies provided within the confines of their camps, especially in the early period, Germans had access to non-rationed and fresh food. As “natives,” or even as ethnic German refugees, they could more easily resort to contacts in the countryside or with familiar and friendly grocers. Germans were hardly suffering from famine, unimpressed and irritated occupiers noted; it was just that they were so accustomed to a substantial diet and even saw “obesity” as a sign of health. These critical perceptions of German food consumption and its bodily manifestations focused particularly on women; the same apparently well-nourished Fräuleins who proved to be such attractive fraternizers also provoked deep resentment among some occupiers. Disgusted by the plump women he saw in Celle, the essentially undamaged town near the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, a British officer sarcastically remarked that, “If slimness is fashionable among German women, then Celle was certainly a most unfashionable place.” And this was in a town that had taken in so many German refugees from the east that its population was some seventy percent higher than its prewar level.Footnote ⁴³ Margaret Bourke-White also reported that “All along the line we were amazed at the lavish food stores which we found in German cellars and at the excellent wardrobes hanging in the closets of the homes we requisitioned” and added, “Especially the Fräuleins,” the object of so much controversy about fraternization, were in “good shape, their teeth are the giveaway. Much better than in any German occupied country.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Depending on the location of the observer—both in terms of geography and personal or political sympathy, the on-the-ground situation could look quite different. In general, DPs averaged only about 1,600 calories a day, getting up to about 2,000 daily only in 1948 when the departure of many displaced persons allowed for more generous allotments.Footnote ⁴⁵ To Jewish survivors as well as many Allied observers (especially, but not only, American-Jewish servicemen, chaplains, and aid workers) defeated Germans—and especially women—still seemed relatively well fed, well scrubbed, and prosperous, particularly in the rural areas where many of the larger Jewish DP camps were located. Interestingly, the mass influx of ethnic German refugees from Soviet-occupied territory in the east into precisely those rural areas did not alter this assessment. Bavaria alone, which was the center of DP life with three major and numerous smaller Jewish DP camps and communities, also took in some two million ethnic Germans. To be sure, the local peasants complained about the presence of their uprooted compatriots from the east and labeled them “dirty and untidy” as well as “ungrateful.” But the arrival of these German refugees did not seem to arouse as much resentment and fear as the numerically much smaller incursion of ragged Jewish survivors and “infiltrees” who were crowding into refugee camps and surrounding towns and villages.Footnote ⁴⁶ Recent German literature and media debates have emphasized the belated attention now being given to supposedly tabooized German memories of their own victimization during the war. But for many allied occupiers, the shock was not so much the extensive destruction of Germany but how unscathed much of it still appeared to be. The relative comfort and the highly developed self-pity of the defeated Germans—so frequently described as “sullen”—is a strikingly consistent theme.Footnote ⁴⁷

Jewish DPs deeply resented the seemingly willful misapprehension of their own unique situation, expressing bitter frustration at what they came to call “the enigma of German irresponsibility.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The additional remnant of several thousand German Jews, concentrated in four-power-occupied Berlin, was incredulous that the victors initially categorized them as Germans, thus deeming them free to share in the hardships of the defeat and occupation of those who had so recently persecuted them. After their experience of hiding, forced labor, incarceration in death camps, or precarious above-ground life marked with a yellow star, they were not even automatically entitled to the benefits initially decreed by the Soviets for the political victims of fascism (Opfer des Faschismus, or OdF). And their relatively quick inclusion as “victims” (rather than as antifascist “fighters”) entitled them to only one ration level higher than the respective German category. This juggling of entitlements angered ordinary Germans who now found themselves officially disadvantaged, but seemed pathetically inadequate to the survivors. Jews—and their supporters in the Military Government—argued that “Aryan” Germans, even under threat of bombs on the home front or in the military, had been well supplied with food and drink virtually until the very end, much of it plundered from, or produced by, their victims. If Germans were hungry and cold and homeless, so were German Jews, but for Jews the hardships of defeat came on the heels of years of deprivation and terror. As a German-Jewish woman who had survived underground in wartime Berlin cuttingly observed a few years later, Germans continued to live a fairly normal life, even in an increasingly ruined Berlin: “While the Aryans went to work, took trips, ate and dressed well, I had to hide and disguise myself and live in constant dread … A forbidden onion, lemon, some meat, etc. in the house … was enough to deliver us into the hands of the Gestapo.”Footnote ⁴⁹ An “Aryan” Berliner, by contrast, remembered about the horrors of defeat that “The bombs in winter 1944/45 were bad, but the days that came now were almost impossible to bear.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Moreover, as Paul Steege's careful study of everyday life in postwar Berlin demonstrates, “anything—even the most luxurious or extravagant item—could be obtained for a price.” Legal rationing, with its five levels, was only “one part” of a multifaceted supply system. The fraught symbolic nature of ration levels was thus underscored by the fact that its prescriptions bore little relationship to the reality of what people actually consumed; it could be more or less or just different in category or quality. Recognizing the fundamental arbitrariness of the system in practice, people devised survival strategies that matched their own shifting standards of moral and pragmatic acceptability. Ordinary Germans' very fresh memories of World War II and the Nazi “racial state” figured in their understanding of the black market's “moral economy” and “just price.” The postwar black market, with its distinctions between greedy illicit versus necessary acquisition, was surely shadowed and shaped by Berliners' own recent (and also quite “ordinary”) experiences of “Aryanization,” the deportation of Jewish neighbors and subsequent bargain acquisition of their goods at auction, reliance on forced labor, and wartime looting.Footnote ⁵¹

The Political, Bureaucratic, and Emotional Economy of Food

For UNRRA and Military Government authorities responsible for feeding the victims of Nazism, primarily the east European Jews classified as Displaced Persons, food was indeed a politically volatile issue. But it was primarily expressed, not in the language of rights, or even entitlement or humanitarianism, but in terms of grams and calories. UNRRA files are filled with careful charts on the caloric value of foods, more meticulously broken down than in any diet book, ranging from beef carcasses (544 calories per pound) to sweets and candies.Footnote ⁵² DPs were continually subjected to nutritional studies and mass weigh-ins by public health workers, the necessary and standardized corollary to medical examinations and dusting with DDT.Footnote ⁵³ DP camp “Food Offices” kept careful records of all foodstuffs and cigarettes delivered by the Joint (under license from UNRRA and its successor, the International Refugee Organization, IRO), noting precisely (at least on paper) when and how many goods were received and then distributed. Long typed lists tracked the goods, many of them scarce and valuable, that entered the DP camps: cigarettes (American), tobacco, and canned meat, followed by marmalade, sardines, powdered and condensed milk, potatoes, bread, butter, flour, fat and Schmalz (lard), fish, powdered eggs, cocoa, some nonspecified (and probably dried) vegetables, followed by—and often listed separately—precious extras, such as sugar, chocolate, biscuits, salt, and coffee. Sick and pregnant residents received ration cards for half liters of milk from the camp store.Footnote ⁵⁴

For Jewish survivors, therefore, for whom food supplies were generally adequate, sometimes even calorie-laden, at least after the early period of chaos, the issue became, just as Margaret Mead had sensed, one of quality rather than quantity. How food was prepared was often more important than what was served, she had cautioned, “a sign of the sympathy and understanding emanating from the occupying power.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Just as they perceived American Jewish shipments of old and worn clothing as insulting, Jews in DP camps interpreted the provision of tasteless (and unfamiliar) American dry and canned foods—Quaker Oats and dried peas—as a sign of disrespect and lack of compassion or understanding for the trauma they had endured. DPs were stuffed with milk and grain, and sometimes they became quite preternaturally plump, but they wanted more than rations measured by calories. Indeed, the fresh fruits and vegetables that they craved and that were essential for health had only negligible caloric value in terms tracked by aid bureaucracies. Survivors yearned for the local ingredients and styles of food preparation that a postwar food regime now bound to U.S.-dominated international relief agencies and their need to unload American wheat, had, as Nick Cullather puts it, been consigned to a “vernacular past.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Jewish dietary laws added another layer of conflict to already contentious postwar food politics. For the relatively small but vocal group of orthodox Jews, for whom war and persecution had made adherence to religious codes extraordinarily difficult if not impossible, the right to kosher food and kitchens became a gauge of the occupiers' and the aid organizations' respect for the “freedom to worship” enshrined in western liberalism and specifically listed as one of FDR's “Four Freedoms.” Jews argued among themselves and with military and relief authorities over the availability of separate kosher facilities (with their multiple sets of dishes and tableware), kosher margarine, fats, and meat. The provision of ritually slaughtered meat was especially problematic because DPs often resorted to black-market purchases of cattle from local German farmers. Impervious to all American and German protestations about improper and unhygienic conditions, Jews illegally (but according to religious precepts) butchered cows, frustrating German police who could not exercise their authority within camp grounds.Footnote ⁵⁷

These numerous conflicts, internal as well as among Jews, Germans, and Allies, demonstrated that food, as the DPs repeatedly pointed out, was much more than a—necessary—matter of calories and physical survival. Food was in most cases plentiful and carbohydrate- and hence calorie-laden, but it was unappetizing and monotonous. The “bare essentials” were not good enough. The definition of “adequate” as it would be promised by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was bitterly contested in the years before the UN manifesto, and the document itself did little to clarify the issue. Indeed, the promises of Article 25 were not really fleshed out until 1966, in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which declared an entitlement, “at a minimum” to “necessary subsistence rights—adequate food and nutrition, clothing, housing, and the necessary conditions of care.” As we have seen, well before food was explicitly defined as a human right, DPs in occupied Germany demanded satisfaction according to their own interpretation of “adequate.” In fact, neither for them nor for the Germans did adequacy mean basic subsistence. It signified precisely what FAO officials specified as adequate only many years later, namely food that was available, culturally acceptable, able to supply “essential nutrients” such as vitamins (and not just some allotted ration of calories), safe and free of toxins, and last but certainly not least, “of good quality.” A far cry from postwar notions predicated on caloric content, the human right to nutrition now requires, at least theoretically, food that tastes and looks appetizing and provides the “dietary diversity” necessary for good health.Footnote ⁵⁸ It also insists that recipients (or claimants in current language) are presumed to be knowledgeable and trustworthy about their own needs and that those views are respected, again quite a different perspective from the postwar context in which aid organizations were willing to grant some self-government in the interests of better and more efficient management but certainly not willing to grant the survivors themselves an “expert voice” in their care.Footnote ⁵⁹

Clearly, food was defined according to an emotional as well as a physiological and political economy. Occupied Germans viewed the DP camps as a kind of Schlaraffenland (wonderland) of “sugar and spam, margarine and jam, plus cigarettes and vitamized chocolate bars” ready for lucrative sale on the black market, and they sullenly protested the puny privileges granted to the Jewish victims.Footnote ⁶⁰ Americans worried about alienating Germans by setting rations too low and giving the impression of indulging unruly displaced persons, and simultaneously labored to assure concerned American Jews and skeptical antifascists that they were not pandering to former Nazis. Jews often suspected that German suppliers deliberately offered them bad, or withheld good fresh, food. Unquestionably, the apparent disparity in calories and rations, favoring Jewish DPs over Germans, masked the fact that Jews in DP camps and the Germans in the towns and villages that surrounded them had entirely unequal access to food. In the early months, before the Harrison Report led to improved conditions, Jewish DPs, subject to Allied “care and control,” were virtually imprisoned behind the both protective and restrictive borders of the refugee camps and limited in their ability to forage for fresh food. But even after restrictions on movement eased, they remained subject to arrest for economic “crimes” once they slipped outside the territory of the camps. DP status was technically bestowed on an individual and hence “portable,” but in practice gaining its benefits, such as food rations and medical care, depended on residence within a camp.Footnote ⁶¹ These regulations led to the confusing circumstance—helping to muddle any reliable statistics—that many Jewish “free-livers” who had moved to German cities, towns, and villages remained registered in DP camps, thereby still assuring themselves of rations even as they left behind the safe but confined world of the Jewish camps.

DPs who maneuvered to supplement their somewhat more ample rations were condemned and not infrequently arrested as black marketeers. In one infamous and tragic case in March 1946, some 200 German police officers, resonantly accompanied by dogs and bullhorns, as well as a handful of U.S. military police, shot and killed a Jewish DP while hunting down black-market activities in a DP camp near Stuttgart. The victim, Schmul Dancyger, a survivor of Auschwitz and Mauthausen, had just the night before been reunited with his wife and children who had also somehow miraculously made it through the war. The raid had succeeded in recovering several illegally held chickens.Footnote ⁶²

Military Government and relief officials, who were themselves Jewish, were constantly at pains to point out to their skeptical colleagues that when it came to the black market, Jews were only participating in what had become a virtually universal and indispensable “gray market” practice—as pervasive and impossible to ban as fraternization. In fact, they were conspicuously underrepresented among the large-scale operators and big “sharks.” As targets for charges of black marketeering, Jews were nonetheless doubly vulnerable. On the one hand, as camp survivors or “infiltrees” from the east who had spent the war in hiding, with the partisans, or, in the majority of cases, as refugees in the Soviet Union, they looked “shabby” compared to the docile if sullen Germans with their “clean German homes and pretty, accommodating German girls.”Footnote ⁶³ On the other hand, sometimes they actually looked better, fattened up by carbohydrate-rich rations and quick to dress in stylish clothes stitched by master tailors in the camps. Jews arrived from Poland carrying all they had been able to scrounge, provoking reports that these “post-hostility refugees” were “well dressed, well fed, healthy … [with] pockets bulging with money.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Increasingly, survivors were seen, by defeated and occupier alike, not as victims of National Socialism, but simply as intrusive foreigners (Ausländer). The fact that within a year of the war's end, Jewish DP camps were crowded with “infiltrees” from newly communist Poland, most of whom had been repatriated from their harsh but life-saving wartime refuge in the Soviet Union and could therefore be labeled as victims of communism rather than Nazism, only reinforced these perceptions.

In 1947, in response to the difficult food situation as well as the escalation of the Cold War, the U.S. replaced the hard-line Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Order 1067 decreeing denazification and demilitarization with a much less stringent directive, and the Military Government eliminated its policy of assigning higher food rations to the victims of Nazism. This shift away from the politics of vengeance and justice toward reconciliation with the former enemy in the service of anticommunism and German economic recovery had been in the making at least since Secretary of State James Byrnes's conciliatory September 1946 speech in Stuttgart. The proclamation of the Marshall Plan in June 1947 confirmed that the U.S. was committed to the peaceful anticommunist reconstruction of western Germany, not its demise. Thus, numerous policy changes in 1947 signaled an end to Jewish DPs' (relative) “Golden Age” of special access to American power, protection, and rations. Still, with the assistance of sympathetic American military personnel, Jewish relief organizations, especially the Joint, ensured that Jewish survivors continued to receive supplementary food packages (in addition to medical, legal, and other services). Moreover, JDC workers or American Jewish servicemen were able to use the authority and economic power of the U.S. occupation, including the exchange value of American cigarettes and coffee or Mickey Mouse watches, to secure scarce goods, such as paper for DP publications or extra food for holiday treats, from German suppliers. When Lucy Schildkret (later Dawidowicz, the well-known historian of the Holocaust) arrived in Munich in fall 1946 as a JDC employee in a U.S. major's uniform, she found that the (in)famous beer hall where Hitler had tried to stage his aborted 1923 coup “had been converted into a Red Cross center where you could get hot dogs, ice cream sodas, and other American fare.” Pleased to lord it over the Germans she hated, she nevertheless felt a bit uneasy in “the most polarized society I had ever known,” summoning up for her “the image of the Raj, the British reign in India.”Footnote ⁶⁵

An illustrated story with the headline, “American families are joyously reunited as glum Germans watch,” in the May 1946 issue of Life Magazine sympathetically detailed some of these resentments for the American public. As the first 343 of a projected 30,000 American dependants arrived in occupied Germany, they were “greeted with cheers, a band, rose corsages, coffee, and doughnuts.” Traveling first class through Germany, they confronted “a ruined country and the curious, often resentful looks of impoverished German people,” acutely aware that those Americans could purchase the equivalent of the 3,000 calories daily that the Germans had once enjoyed while they were now officially entitled to only 1,275. Obviously somewhat critical of American victors' entitlement, Life reported that American families lived in “undamaged house[s]” with “at least one German servant provided by the Army,” a level of comfort certainly much higher than the vast majority of military families would have had at home.Footnote ⁶⁶

Germans also openly protested what Kathryn Hulme, an adventurous young American wartime welder turned UNRRA worker, portrayed as the continued treatment with “kid gloves” of the “prima donnas of the DP world.” Jewish survivors, on the other hand, would not only have underscored the second half of her statement that “perhaps they deserved the rating,” but insisted on the painful inadequacies and ironies of their situation as homeless refugees or disowned former citizens in the “bloodsoaked” land of their tormentors.Footnote ⁶⁷ Jews insisted—to the point of engaging in protest hunger strikes in the DP camps—that now it was the Germans' turn to provide for them and the occupiers' task to enforce that responsibility: “They, who are guilty of our sufferings and tortures, they who robbed us of our fortunes, they must be forced to feed us during the time we are compelled to stay in this country in order to make it possible for us to regain our health.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Food—its quantity, quality, and distribution—was central therefore, both practically and symbolically, to these polarized understandings of wartime and postwar experience. As the anthropologist Mead had understood, food crucially defined people's sense of how fully they were recognized and valued as human beings rather than, as DPs were frequently labeled, the miserable and unwelcome “human debris” of war and genocide. For the traumatized survivors, calorically adequate food was simply never enough. Constant hassles ensued; Jewish aid officials begged the Military Government to release to the DPs Red Cross packages that had been destined for U.S. prisoners of war who thankfully no longer needed them, but then the DPs themselves were none too thrilled with the contents.Footnote ⁶⁹ Once the early supply problems were solved, DPs continued to complain—obsessively, it was said—about the quantity and taste of food; it was never enough and never good enough. American white bread and the hated UNRRA green peas could not satisfy. Drawing on the (to our eyes astonishingly reductive, condescending, and often plain ignorant) psychoanalytic understandings that dominated mental health practice in the 1940s, social workers and psychologists were quick to discern unhealthy and self-destructive patterns of “reckless eating” and “excessive desire for food,” especially “sweets, chocolate, coffee, and pastry.”Footnote ⁷⁰ They perceived refugees' preoccupation with food as symptomatic of the regression to an infantile state, complete with childlike “[in]ability to plan,” “apathy … helplessness … maniac excitement … aimless aggression” that the dependent DP existence fostered.Footnote ⁷¹ At best, their analysis of the emotional economy of food interpreted these reactions as a displaced response to catastrophic loss.

Relief workers understood the many grievances about the quality of food, clothing, and housing as both legitimate and the product of a deep and ultimately insatiable longing for care and dignity that no amount of institutional improvements would be able to assuage: “Complaints regarding the distribution of food just never ceased.”Footnote ⁷² Food desires, they concluded, were not rational. While conceding that “the realistic component of these complaints is unquestionably large and these complaints are in most instances justified,” aid workers also reported that “we have all seen instances where these complaints continue even though, from an objective standpoint, the complaints are excessive in relation to the reality of the situation.”Footnote ⁷³ DPs living outside the camps, however, were less critical of UNRRA rations. Perhaps, aid officials surmised, food just tasted better in a non-mass-institutional setting and people were better able to supplement their military style rations with familiar items such as sauerkraut, garlic, and onions. Survivors, whether they had actually been in death camps, in hiding, or in the Soviet Union, suffered from a hunger that could not be satiated by calories and vitamins. As one frustrated but sympathetic UNRRA pediatrician reminded her calorie-counting superiors, “people do not eat calories, but food,” and that food had to be appealing.Footnote ⁷⁴ “How are we going to live—on calories,” one DP bitterly asked an American visitor, and, like many observers, she realized that “Calories in the DP camps had ceased to be a heat or food unit but had become the symbol of the drab, squalid existence” of the refugees.Footnote ⁷⁵

It was this desire for food that could be more appetizing and more nurturing, rather than, as most critics insisted, the drive for profit and luxuries or even the search for necessities such as fresh milk for children, that pushed people toward the black—or more properly, gray—market. DPs aimed to access the fresh meat, fruits, and vegetables that their German neighbors were able to take off the land or acquire from cooperative shopkeepers and that occupiers and aid officials took for granted. Trade in food provided an occasion for resentment and skirmishes over entitlements, as well as a crucial site for negotiations among Jews and Germans: about revenge, guilt, victimization, and how to coexist in the post-Nazi present. Jews sought escape from their institutionalized and dependent existence by creating an autonomous cultural and political life within the DP camps. But they also ventured further afield, trading for fresh food and small treats on the black market, studying in German schools, and moving away from or back and forth between the camps and the world outside. And that pursuit of the ordinary pleasures of everyday life—whether of food, education, entertainment, or even sex—brought them into both conflict and contact with their German neighbors.

Ita Muskal, for example, recalled with some pride how at age eighteen, as a young refugee from Romania, she became a “businesslady” and a bit of a “big shot” as a Feldafing DP camp black marketeer. On a larger scale, UNRRA officials sometimes found that German farmers were reluctant to hand over milk from their cows or other supplies, but in this “gray” market, Ita could go to her “best provider,” a German woman with a lovely garden filled with flowers and fresh produce. She brought her cigarette wages and treasures from the camp kitchen in which she worked: margarine, peanut butter, and the dried and canned goods, such as Haferflocken (Quaker oats), peas, sardines, and tuna fish, that the Germans prized and the DPs disdained. She would collect Marks and goods and take them to the nearby villages or into the Bourse, the main black market on Möhlstrasse in Munich, for serious trading. Decades later, she still vividly remembered the deep satisfaction of walking the two and half miles to a nearby village café with her cash and ordering a German pastry, just like the “businesslady” she was, or the defiant pleasure of going to the German grocer, ordering bread, salami, and buttermilk, and insisting on real Swiss cheese. The grocer wanted to sell her an inferior, smelly cheese, Schmierkäse, but Ita would have none of it. “Too expensive,” he told her, but Ita said no, “I have money and ration cards, I want the cheese with the holes.” And then she would treat herself to the short train ride home, munching her cheese on the way. When Ita took her wares all the way to Munich, she even collected real dollars from the storekeepers, using them for further luxuries, such as a dress or a pair of shoes for which the skilled DP shoemakers and tailors would charge $10 in hard currency. Armed with a picture from an illustrated magazine, she could take her dollars to the shoemaker and get the shoes she wanted, just as they were shown in the German paper. And sometimes she went into Munich with her husband Sam and played the “big shot.” They would go out, to the theater or circus, or even to a real restaurant to eat the “Liverwurst” that she loved.Footnote ⁷⁶

Such transactions provided a means precisely of gaining agency and overcoming the (putatively childlike) dependency that characterized refugee life. Good food, whether fresh meat or vegetables, a pastry, or a rich liverwurst, offered respite from packaged rations and the regimented managed life of the postwar “refugee nation.”Footnote ⁷⁷ In this context, it is important to note that women, and particularly mothers, the traditional guardians of subsistence and bearers of the claim to food, with a long history of recourse to food riots, had little political voice in the DP community. Similarly, while many of the UNRRA and then IRO field workers handling the distribution of food were women, part of a new international generation of welfare professionals whose humanitarian aspirations often overlapped with a search for independence and adventure abroad, they were not the decision makers.Footnote ⁷⁸ As Ita's story shows, women certainly participated in the black and gray markets of food trade, but preoccupied with caring for babies, children, and managing precarious households, they generally left the larger operations to men who were free to travel between urban markets.Footnote ⁷⁹

Notwithstanding their (always at least nominally illicit and subject to sanction) ability to find tasty and fresh goods through barter and on the black market, Jews frustrated with the caloric regime imposed on them were also surely reacting to the blatant hypocrisy and barely concealed anti-Semitism of some UNRRA and Military Government officials. Most notorious perhaps was Frederic Morgan, the Englishman who was, until he was finally forced out in 1947, head of UNRRA in Germany. He had no compunctions about confiding to his diary that after he had spent an unpleasant afternoon in a DP camp listening to the complaints of “miserable creatures[who] rehearsed all the usual Jewish grievances and were determined to radiate gloom,” he dashed off with “great relief” to Munich “in time for a quick change, a delicious snack,” and a rush to the Bavarian State Opera, “where we sat in Hitler's box to hear ‘Fidelio’” followed by a “delicious late dinner in company with a gang of visiting women.”Footnote ⁸⁰

Ironically, therefore, the victims, classified as stateless refugees or “homeless foreigners” (heimatlose Ausländer) dependent on “handouts,” were inevitably cast in the position either of “nudging” mercenary complainants or as “privileged” when they received or demanded the paltry benefits they had been granted in recognition of their past suffering. Germans, for their part, especially as the Cold War progressed, increasingly expected to be rewarded for their good (that is, docile) behavior in the present rather than punished for possible crimes in the past. This enabled them to contrast their position as citizens in their own renovating country, simply demanding their rights to the satisfaction of basic needs, with the undeserved “special pleading” and advantages of their victims. Virtually all accounts by aid workers describe their charges as alien and unattractive, if unquestionably needy. Jewish relief personnel—mainly from the JDC—also struggled with these sentiments, but the mostly non-Jewish UNRRA workers expressed themselves more explicitly. These frequently reluctant helpers recognized Jews as priority victims but often not could relinquish the notion that while persecution had undoubtedly contributed to their disagreeable behavior, it nonetheless understandably subjected them to further discrimination. Like the hapless Morgan, the British tended to be rather more direct about their prejudices than the Americans, who were inhibited by the alert presence of American Jewish advisers and organizations. Malcom Proudfoot, a British aid official, exasperatedly remarked in his 1951 study of European Refugees:

Overwhelmed aid workers felt that the victims should be grateful to be treated as well as they were; with time UNRRA (later IRO) and the Military Government were relieved to hand over much of their care and supervision to Jewish groups willing to take on the thankless task of helping these unregenerate clients. UNRRA estimated that the JDC contributed ten million pounds of food and ten million pounds of clothing from 1946 to 1950. At the same time, the very success of the relief agencies in meeting basic needs served to undermine Jews' claims to relief. The fact that Jewish survivors, stuffed with carbohydrates, were not, or at least no longer looked like, emaciated death camp survivors did not increase their credibility as victims. Yet even the dyseptic Proudfoot conceded as a matter of course that, “German sufferings after the war were mild indeed compared to the misery that had been suffered in their concentration camps.” In a prescient coda, he added:

Like most of his colleagues, the hard-headed but clear-eyed Proudfoot was not naïve about the pervasive claims of innocent victimization by Germans, even as he was not inclined to be overly sympathetic to their Jewish victims.Footnote ⁸²

Food, Human Rights, and Zionism

Their vulnerable and often begrudged status as needy supplicants led surviving Jews to a growing recognition that the key to the granting of human rights—seen as just and universal rather than as benefits and privileges that were inherently particular and unjustly privileged—was a claim to nationhood and national identity. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at least formally, located the individual refugee as an entitled subject of internationally recognized rights rather than as an object of international compassion (or not). But, because the charter signed in San Francisco in April 1945 did not authorize the new UN to “intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any State,” it was abundantly clear that these rights only operated within the context of citizenship in sovereign nation-states.

In 1945 the liberal American Jewish Committee, sharing in the dream of the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter, had declared that the “Jews of Europe slaughtered by the Nazis may not have died in vain if, at last, love of life and freedom shall be cultivated with the same skill formerly applied to perfecting the instruments of death.”Footnote ⁸³ The catastrophe of the Holocaust could never be redeemed but in some sense, both the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and the utopian vision of Jews as the catalyst (if not the vanguard) of a movement for universal human rights served to give some meaning to the disaster that had befallen European Jewry. Toward the end of the DP era in occupied Germany, however, it seemed to the vast majority of the displaced Jews and many of the relief workers who had managed them that the human rights of Jews could only be guaranteed if they, like the other signatories of the United Nations, had their own sovereign nation-state. Even Roosevelt's iconic “freedom from want” had been phrased in national terms: “which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.” Seven years later after the war was won, the Universal Declaration's Article 25 called for a right to food, but Article 15 stated that “everyone has the right to a nationality.”

The She'erit Hapleta of European Jewry quite successfully achieved a proto-national status in their embrace of Zionism and the demand for a Jewish national homeland. For displaced Jews, in the wake of the Final Solution, the demand for a particularist nation-state in which they could automatically claim the rights of citizens seemed the most plausible path to universal human rights. In this particular case, the agency and management of refugees not only epitomized, as Daniel Cohen posits, “the shift from collective to individual rights,” but also demonstrated the continuing purchase of collective, ethnic, and national affiliations, especially in the pursuit of human rights.Footnote ⁸⁴ Jews were, as Hannah Arendt pointedly noted in 1945, “the only group among the stateless whose nationality is neither recognized nor clearly defined.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Unlike non-Jewish Polish or Baltic DPs whose lands had turned communist and who now constituted themselves as “nations in exile,” permanently uprooted Jewish DPs imagined an end to exile and insisted that they did have a national home that they only needed to reach and populate. Improbably, as Janet Flanner, the New Yorker's correspondent in Europe, reported in 1948, “Of all those now homeless in this foreign land, the Jews are the cheeriest,” because “Their faces were turned toward Israel.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1945, the American Jewish Committee was still arguing in its proposal for an “International Bill of Rights” for the right of return to European lands and that “It must be our conviction that the Jews will again be able to live in the countries from which they were driven and to participate in the civilization and culture they have shared and enriched for centuries.” By 1948 that position had very little legitimacy among the remnant survivor community in occupied Germany, Austria, and Italy.Footnote ⁸⁷

Indeed, the collective environment of the camps and even the broader DP community (including the approximately twenty-five percent of Jewish DPs who lived among Germans in towns and cities while still relying on UNRRA/IRO for rations and the Americans for protection) and the collective language of Zionism mitigated against the elaboration of abstract individual rights claims. Jews formulated their calls for rights differently: in political demands for entry to Palestine and a Jewish state and for the fulfillment of concrete material needs of everyday life, for food and housing.Footnote ⁸⁸ Moreover, quite in contrast to the dominant emphasis on the existential dangers of statelessness, the strange postwar conditions had produced a situation where, certainly for many displaced east European Jews, statelessness had become preferable to a citizenship that might mandate repatriation to a nation they feared and to which they felt no allegiance. Yet, as Arendt pointed out in her seminal article on “The Stateless People,” published in the same issue of Contemporary Jewish Record as the American Jewish Committee declaration, even though statelessness did have certain advantages, such as the possibility of evading unwanted repatriation, the deprivation of citizenship in a nation continued to produce extreme insecurity and vulnerability.

International organizations pressing for a universal commitment to individual human rights did provide a context for claims to human rights that did not depend on national citizenship. But unquestionably, and notwithstanding Arendt's assumption in 1945 that the emergence of refugees as the “newest social group in contemporary history” constituted “the clearest sign of the disintegration of the European national states,” universalism continued to be expressed in national terms.Footnote ⁸⁹ As Arendt later formulated in her famous chapter nine of The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, “denationalization [had] become a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics,” and most Jewish DPs were determined to grasp for themselves the protections of a nationalization that was, as they imagined, entirely their own and precisely therefore willing and able to guarantee their universal human rights.Footnote ⁹⁰ European Jews had learned that the minority rights their representatives had fought for after World War I, and that the League of Nations had supposedly guaranteed, could not protect them. At the same time they had learned that citizenship of the nation-state in which they resided also did not necessarily protect them. For the exhausted and traumatized displaced Jews of occupied Europe, the dream of citizenship in a specifically Jewish nation outside the Europe that had betrayed them was not much of a stretch as a novel guarantee of human rights. Moreover, given the reluctance of the United States to admit them—at least until the passage of the quite limited 1948 and the more expansive 1950 DP Acts, the Zionist path also seemed the only solution to endless displacement likely to gain superpower support in the United Nations.

Survivors understood on a literally gut level what the UN World Congress on Human Rights posited in its 1993 Vienna Declaration: “The right to take part in the conduct of public affairs enables people to change their food or health situation at a political level.”Footnote ⁹¹ This right to have rights, to use Arendt's formulation, was precisely what the DPs and the stateless did not possess. Political agency depended on recognition as a national collective, and this was a status that Jewish DPs aspired to via a passionate Zionism, which in some ways allowed them to act as a proto-state even while they were still displaced and in transit in occupied Germany.Footnote ⁹² As Anna Holian notes about the efforts of Jewish and particularly non-Jewish Ukrainian and Latvian DPs in Munich to gain some form of political self-representation, “Even their ability to articulate their grievances so that others might take action was hampered by the lack of a right to political self-representation. Moreover, because they lacked this right, their claims to recognition, assistance, and restitution were often viewed with skepticism. Their attempts to claim a right they didn't have encouraged the authorities to view them as troublemakers, and cast doubt on the veracity of their claims.”Footnote ⁹³

Unlike the ethnic German refugees who were citizens of occupied and then, after 1949, an essentially (officially “semi”) sovereign Federal Republic of Germany, displaced Jews could claim no political rights as citizens. For DPs, the allotment of basic benefits such as food worked as a concrete manifestation—and representation—of their human rights, and on that level of rights or, if you will, social citizenship, women's labor in procuring and preparing food gained an implicit if not explicit political significance. Moreover, food provision, such as the receipt of UNRRA rations (for displaced persons), JOINT supplements (specifically for Jews), or American CARE packages (for Germans), and differential reactions to black- or gray-market violations by Germans or Jews served as important terms through which questions of guilt, victimization, entitlement, and rights were conceptualized and enforced in the early postwar years.

UNRRA's definition of “relief and rehabilitation” tended to separate psychological needs—which were recognized to only a limited degree—from the more immediate urgent requirements for food, medical care, and shelter. But in fact, the two were inextricably linked. In spite of the sometimes egregious and widely publicized inadequacies in relief efforts, immediate needs were met relatively quickly and with remarkable efficiency. Food and feeding could not, however, be disconnected from the symbolic and emotional; they were intensely political and personal. Food remained a key issue well after the initial problems of severe hunger and malnutrition had long been solved, indeed until currency reform and the emigration of most displaced persons after 1948. Not only the numbers of calories but the kind and quality of food available to Germans and Jews, especially fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables (as well as proper clothing, rather than worn and faded cast-offs), often came to stand in for the highly contested recognition of relative suffering and the entitlement to human rights and dignity. The experience of Jewish survivors as displaced persons in postwar occupied Germany underlines therefore how much Universal Human Rights declared by a United Nations were both dominated on the ground by basic economic and social human needs such as food and delimited by access to nationally defined and codified citizenship.