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The More I Know, The Less I Understand - ebook

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The More I Know, The Less I Understand - ebook

The book presents a collection of essays written by undergraduate students who come to Poland from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) as a part of the intensive research seminar, “Witnessing Auschwitz – Conflicting Stories and Memories”. Each study in this volume is based on the unique interests of the young researchers and highlights a particular aspect of history related to Auschwitz. The texts come with invaluable footnotes by experts in the field who accompanied the students with advice and support throughout their research.

The authors of the essays, students, participate in an intensive research seminar developed by scholars from the University of British Columbia, the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Emmanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute. Each spring a new group of students travels to Poland for a month of lectures and study tours on subjects pertaining to pre-war Jewish life and the Holocaust in Poland. The essays in this volume are the results of this inspiring and important international, scholarly, and educational cooperation.

Kategoria: History
Język: Angielski
Zabezpieczenie: Watermark
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ISBN: 978-83-7704-243-4
Rozmiar pliku: 855 KB

FRAGMENT KSIĄŻKI

Piotr M. A. Cywiński Place of Memory. Place of Learning. Place of Reflection.

Primarily through the efforts of survivors, the space of Auschwitz-Birkenau became, after the war, a Place of Memory. With time it became a symbol of the entire Shoah, as well as many other tragedies caused by Nazi Germany. It has become the symbol of all failures and downfalls in human history. To use the metaphorical expression of Heinz Thilo, a German SS officer and physician in Auschwitz, it became the “anus mundi.” Today, millions of visitors, mostly young people, become acquainted with this space, and through this encounter they learn about history and the human tragedies of that time. They also have a unique and challenging opportunity to reflect on the essence of human behavior, the limits of freedom and the susceptibility of humanity to hate and demagogy. We strongly believe that, unfortunately, such deep reflection remains necessary even today.

Auschwitz can be encountered in a number of ways. Most visitors opt for guided visits, choosing between general or study tours. However, there are a growing number of projects that demand significant direct engagement from their participants. Such projects offer their participants a rare opportunity for reflection and a chance to explore in depth those things that Auschwitz can teach us about humankind. This collection of essays is the fruit of such a project initiated by The University of British Columbia and carried out with the academic and educational support of The International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust and The Research Center of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. These essays are a record of the participants’ reflections and deepening knowledge gleaned from their encounter with Auschwitz. They may help to shape one’s own way of approaching this particularly sensitive topic. They can be used to prepare others for a visit to Auschwitz or as part of an educational program. Finally, they can inspire personal reflection. I hope that the efforts of this determined and committed group of Canadian students, as represented by this collection of essays, becomes a common good to be shared with others, a means of disseminating memories, encounters and reflections about Auschwitz and the essence and limits of humanity.Bożena Karwowska Anja Nowak Introduction

The book presented here is comprised of a selection of essays that undergraduate students from the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) wrote as a part of an intensive research seminar, Witnessing Auschwitz, in the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. This seminar includes two weeks of lectures, study tours, discussion panels, workshops and consultations at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as part of a full month that each group of students spends in Poland. However, preparations for the seminar start earlier, with a course titled Representations of the Holocaust, which all of them take in Vancouver.

Peter Hayes, a prominent Holocaust scholar, warns educators that “making dreadful developments intelligible runs the risk of seeming to lend them a kind of intelligence or even justification” and he quotes a French proverb: “to understand all is to forgive all”.¹ Teaching and learning about the Holocaust should thus refrain from creating a false sense of understanding. It is our belief that instead, it should build an educated non-understanding on the basis of the scarce and incomplete historical documents available to us, and on various multidisciplinary notions and approaches. The teaching goals of this undertaking are to help students come to terms with confusing and often conflicting information, to become accustomed to the puzzlement created by incomplete knowledge about the Holocaust and to become more self-aware about the human need to judge.

In the introductory lecture of the course we show students a copy of a sketchbook with drawings portraying the life of Auschwitz prisoners. This sketchbook was found on site at the camp in 1947 and published for the first time in 2011.² While discussing the importance of this testimony, students eventually come to the realization that the victim who hid these “drawings in the bottle” was actually trying to reach out to them personally. To avoid the language barrier, the message comes in pictures, and it was hidden and preserved for a future generation. Thus, from the very beginning of the course, we very strongly emphasize that students are to learn about the Holocaust, but that they must also carry out this message and find their own ways of becoming what we call proxy witnesses. In line with these goals we emphasize that one of the reasons for studying the Holocaust is the persistent lack of closure and a constant need to examine and re-examine our knowledge about this dark period in human history.

Holocaust education in many countries is currently built around survivors and their willingness and ability to share stories with the next generation. This, for rather obvious reasons, is not a sustainable educational model. As Holocaust educators we must thus ask ourselves how to teach about the Holocaust when there are no more survivors to share their stories. This is the question we seek to answer in the collaboration between the University of British Columbia and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum as we continue to develop and implement this innovative educational program. In our model of multidisciplinary inquiry, students from various departments study issues related to the Holocaust in the context of the social responsibilities of researchers and professionals. The program follows a non-linear approach; it is structured around various issues connected with Auschwitz, the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, rather than retracing a linear sequence of historical events. In a similar manner, our students’ research is centered around a certain topic of interest to them: a circumstance or aspect of the camp that sparks their academic curiosity.

This new model based on multidisciplinary undergraduate research focuses on introducing students to conceptual tools and on fostering the development of critical thinking, instead of simply relying on the transmission of historical facts and personal stories. It stresses first and foremost an analytical and critical education, including awareness of the importance of ethical and respectful language. During the seminar in Poland students come into contact with the best researchers and educators in the field, who share their knowledge and expertise with the group and help students to develop their own research interests. At this point, the students gain their academic independence, working on questions that arise from their knowledge.

The sketchbook with which we start the lectures does not offer a happy ending, but it demonstrates an unparalleled faith in humanity. In the midst of unimaginable horror, witnessing the disappearance of the European Jewry and the cruelty of the SS, somebody believed that the German Nazi system would ultimately not succeed in changing traditional values, that people would still understand what was right and wrong, good and bad. And that one day we would follow the sketches, trying to learn more and trying to tell the story of what happened. We want our students to be guided by the same faith in humanity in their quest to become proxy witnesses.

The essays you will find in this book are the result of a long journey. Coming from various backgrounds, personal as well as academic, all of our students invested an incredible amount of time and dedication into learning about the camp and the crimes committed here. They presented themselves with a most difficult learning process, struggled with the immense challenge of this topic and the human fates it is comprised of and still found the dedication and intellectual strength to pursue their academic inquiries. In the preparatory course back in Vancouver, we guide students through a process that encompasses dealing with emotions - outrage, sadness and many other stages of powerlessness. Being here on site, the place touched all of us deeply, and we turned our emotions into an intellectual response and a great need to share and to educate others, to keep the stories alive.

Our students’ work is as multi-faceted as the young people who participated in the program: each of our authors is a lens that makes visible a different facet of this site and the events that took place. Together with our colleagues from the Museum we believe that historical knowledge is a necessary background for every study of the Holocaust, regardless of their specific disciplinary approach. Our students learned about the history of this site during lectures, workshops, study tours and seminars. At the same time, academics, educators and members of various departments of the Museum supported our students in developing their own questions and interests, taking the young people seriously in their ambition and their capacity to learn and to contribute to an academic exchange.

As editors, we did not want to interfere with the students’ own individual voices, and at the same time editorial and academic work with students is naturally varied. Some topics made it easier to challenge students and ask for several revisions and additions; in other cases students’ essays gave academics involved in the editorial processes an opportunity to add supplementary information in footnotes. Such additions as these footnotes feed into an important stream of historical background knowledge and allow us to address even more aspects of the students’ chosen topics without affecting the unique voices available in the students’ essays. In this way, we also direct interested readers to additional sources. You can read these “two voices” as an embodiment of the substantial exchange, between two generations of academics and educators, that has taken place and that will continue to take place over the years to come. These additions are not meant to be corrective; rather, they show the points at which the research editors found opportunities to open up additional paths, to complement or deepen certain perspectives, opening the book to a variety of readers, including educators and researchers.

It takes a village to raise a child and it takes many people and institutions to raise in young people such a strong need to share what they learned and to educate others about the Holocaust. After the Witnessing Auschwitz seminar, many of our students have created opportunities to speak to their peers and communities in Canada and abroad; they have committed themselves to volunteer work, initiated education workshops at schools, decided to pursue graduate programs in the field of Holocaust or Genocide studies, given talks, published articles, written their theses and been socially engaged in manifold ways. Their engagement with the topic sparked in them a need to pass on their knowledge, to share their experience and their commitment. This publication is another wonderful opportunity for their dedication and intellect to unfold, and for them to share what they have learned with a wider audience. It is also our way of thanking all those without whose help this would not have been possible.

From the first talks with Alicja Białecka (Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum), Dr. Janet Giltrow (Faculty of Arts, UBC) and Katherine Beaumont (UBC Go Global) on the educational cooperation between The University of British Columbia and the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Vancouver and the three consecutive Consuls General – Mr Krzysztof Czapla, Dr. Krzysztof Olendzki and Mr Marcin Trzciński – have continuously and generously supported the project. Also Marek Stankiewicz deserves a very special thank you for being with us from the very inception of the project through to every step of our long journey. Thank you as well to Michael Messer for his invaluable support over the years. The Witnessing Auschwitz seminar would not be possible without significant funding by the UBC Faculty of Arts Research Abroad (ARA) awards, the administrative support of UBC Go Global and the tireless and caring help of Shareen Chin.

The program of the seminar, designed with the crucial cooperation of Marta Berecka (Educational Projects) and the kind encouragement of the Director of the International Center for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust Mr Andrzej Kacorzyk, would not be the same without the continuous support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s Research Center, including that of the editors of this new kind of project, Dr. Piotr Setkiewicz and Dr. Jacek Lachendro, along with the Museum’s many other departments.

Graduate students from the University of British Columbia were able to accompany the seminar thanks to the generous support of the Holocaust Education Committee of the Faculty of Arts, which also supported several undergraduate students both in Poland and in Vancouver. A special thank you for the support of graduate assistants goes also to Prof. Markus Hallensleben.

Before the seminar papers took the shape of the texts in this book, they were presented during three consecutive Witnessing Auschwitz conferences at UBC. We would like to thank Nina Krieger and the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center for their organizational cooperation and for providing students with various platforms to share with others what they learned during the seminar. We are grateful to Prof. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young for being a part of the conferences and helping to make them an academic gathering of both students and faculty.

The book owes a lot to Adelina Hetnar-Michaldo, who seamlessly and graciously coordinated the work on its publication. Special thanks also go to Asia (Aja Jade) Beattie for her inexhaustible dedication to this book project. A sincere thank you to all our contributors, including students, academics, artists and editors, for their continuous interest and willingness to push on, developing and refining their ideas and bringing all this to life. The cover of the book was generously supported by Robert Płaczek, and the entire book took its final shape thanks to the invaluable advice and generous help of Jadwiga Pinderska-Lech and the publishing department.

Thanking everybody would require many more pages so - we extend our thanks to every single person and institution contributing to the learning experiences of students during their research in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

At the end - there were two people whose enthusiasm made it impossible to doubt that the project would be successful. Bill Levine and Risa Levine - we thank you for a lot. Actually, for everything.Maria Dawson The Roles of Food in the Development and Implementation of Nazi German Policies: A Case Study of the General Government

Food is a fundamental necessity for human life. Abraham Maslow in his now-famous hierarchy of needs qualified access to food as one of the most basic requirements that must be fulfilled before an individual can consider any other aspects of life and happiness. While this theory in its details is fiercely debated, it highlights the crucial nature of food in human lives. By extension, there is significant potential for food to be used as a tool of power, control and destruction. Psychologists, nutritionists, anthropologists and historians all have different ways of examining food and the role of food in society. By utilizing the tools of each of these fields, especially through a historical lens, this paper will examine the role of food in Nazi policy with a case study of the Nazi German occupied region of the General Government in Poland during the Second World War. In Nazi German policies food played a wide range of roles, an example of which will be examined, focusing on economic policies in the General Government region of occupied Poland and food deprivation and starvation as tools for implementation of the extermination programs within the AuschwitzBirkenau concentration camp.

Economics and Overpopulation

Agricultural and industrial food production in occupied Poland, and the failure of those industries to meet Reich standards of efficiency of production, were amongst the most pertinent justifications for the relocation of Poles upon the commencement of the German occupation. The displacement and extermination of European Jews and Poles was in part a decision justified not by social policy but instead by supposed pragmatic considerations of perceived overpopulation and suffering labor productivity.¹ The economic systems of Eastern Europe and Germany functioned on contrasting principles and practical decisions. Germany’s economy was more focused on high-efficiency and mass production with the intention of maximizing national wealth, while the Polish economy was more agrarian in general and more locally focused, often with trade interactions not stretching beyond the local.² The Polish agriculture market was based on a model in which there was very little, if any, surplus in production.³ This economic system of self-sufficiency within Polishe villages did not meld well with the Nazi German economic model. For the Third Reich government, a reduction in population in the General Government region was seen as being critical for increased productivity in the region in order for the economy to be more reflective of Nazi German ideals.⁴ Connections between poverty and the economic model in use in Eastern Europe were also drawn; correspondingly, as many of the Ostjuden were in lower economic brackets, the Nazis argued that their elimination was also a means of reducing poverty.⁵

German spatial planners and economists determined that overpopulation was the primary problem preventing the General Government region from achieving a correct economic order.⁶ The label of “overpopulated” was designated to a region if the calculated potential productivity of the land was higher than the actual productivity or was based on the level of unemployment.⁷ The Nazis assigned the label of overpopulated to a region when the calculated potential productivity of the land was higher than the actual productivity, or when there was a high rate of unemployment.⁸ The logic was the following: for the Nazis overpopulation meant a reduction of the amount of space available for agricultural development. This assumption translated into a formula that calculated the portion of a region available for food production using the number of people living in a given area and the cost of living.⁹ The equation implied that in places where the available land for agriculture was limited, and the cost of living was already relatively low, a reduction in population would improve production.¹⁰ Converting the population into an abstract factor entailed the possibility to see it as a neutral variable that could be managed without regards to any ethical considerations. As Götz Aly and Susanne Heim explain: “The actual function of this formula lies in it being abstracted from its substantive content and thereby suggests the possibility that individual factors can be manipulated . . . Thus expressed in manageable terms, population size became a magnitude that was, alongside others, variable at will”.¹¹

The Nazi Germans believed that the issue of overpopulation could be resolved with the removal or elimination of the Jewish population from the General Government territory.¹² The portion of the region’s population that was Jewish was approximately equivalent to the percentage by which the population would need to be reduced in order to achieve the desired population count in the eyes of the Nazi authorities.¹³ Thus, the Germans drew a link between economic development and the elimination of the European Jewry.¹⁴ This is important to acknowledge and review for the sake of understanding the political role of food, separate from its physiological role.

Starvation

In order to understand the uses and abuses of food control by the Nazis during the Holocaust, it is essential to also understand the basic physiology of starvation and the history of food control within the regime. The history of intentional starvation as a means of murder by the Nazis goes back to the early days of the Third Reich. Starvation was introduced as the first method to be used in the T-4 euthanasia program on disabled individuals, chosen because it was “passive, simple, and natural,” according to historian Michael Berenbaum.¹⁵ Thus starvation as a method of mass extermination, while a more indirect method than others that were utilized, was an integral part of Nazi extermination plans from the onset of the era of the Third Reich. In addition to starvation’s use as a method for intentional killing in the pre-war years, according to an Army journalist, the prisoners in the concentration camps were on a “deliberate starvation diet”.¹⁶

There are a number of levels on which starvation occurs; as Jack Shepherd observes, “the reality of the process of starvation is that rarely does a food supply completely and abruptly disappear.”¹⁷ Instead starvation occurs to varying degrees, with a “prolonged period of caloric deficit” causing “semistarvation,” which results in both physical and mental deficits that are often permanent.¹⁸ In order to categorize and quantify levels of starvation the medical and international communities have had to create standards of measurement. The lowest level of starvation occurs with the loss of 5 to 10 percent of an individual’s body weight and typically does not incur a loss of bodily function. The second level occurs with a loss of 15 to 35 percent of body weight, and if this occurs amongst the general population it is classified as a famine. The final and most severe level of starvation is when 35 to 40 percent of body weight is lost, and this is “invariably fatal.”¹⁹

There are a large number of nutrients that are necessary for sustaining human life. For example, a body must be able to build its own proteins and enzymes, which are mostly protein-derived. Without these, metabolism cannot take place, and starvation at the cellular level occurs.²⁰ Metabolism and some other biochemical reactions also require micronutrients.²¹ These are nutrients that, although only being required in small quantities, are essential for continued sustenance of life, the deficit of any given one can be equally devastating to macronutrient depravation.²²

Food Production in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau

Agriculture played an integral role in many Third Reich decisions, from the treatment of Soviet citizens upon the German invasion in 1941, to the justification for the relocation of hundreds of thousands of individuals across Eastern Europe, to the role of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in broader Nazi German industry and economic conditions. Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS and the man responsible for the oversight of concentration camps, had the intention for Auschwitz-Birkenau to become “the largest agricultural station in Eastern Europe,” where experiments relating to food production would take place; as well, a vast number of farms would exist as part of the camp complex.²³ Thus in the summer of 1940, just after the first transport had arrived to the camp in June, the first agricultural work detail was created.²⁴ Besides farming, Auschwitz-Birkenau also had its own slaughterhouse and dairy that were utilized for the production of food intended for consumption by prisoners as well as by SS personnel, and in some cases to be sent out of the camp to other regions of Reich territory.

Food produced in the concentration camp was made with the intention of being fed to both prisoners and German personnel, specifically the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau and soldiers on the front line. Between the food produced for the prisoners and for the Nazis there was an evident and intentional discrepancy in the quality of the food. There was also discrepancy in the means of production. For example, sausages produced for the SS were made in a room separate from that where sausages produced for prisoners were made.²⁵ In addition, these sausages were noted as having a higher caloric count and fat content than those for prisoners, and the production process used proper techniques for preservation, a luxury not afforded to the food of prisoners.²⁶ The lesser quality of preservation of sausages allocated for prisoners made the meat more prone to contamination and bacterial growth that would result in disease. In part as a result of the higher quality of meat afforded to the SS, theirs was the primary source of smuggled meat into the camp.²⁷ In order to smuggle meat out of the work detail any stolen food needed to be compensated for, as the SS kept close track of the amount being produced. This could be done by adding water to the sausage mix is order to replace the stolen volume.

The Nazis confiscated the land on which the slaughterhouse was constructed from the Polish citizens before it was designated for use by the Auschwitz concentration camp.²⁸ Construction on the land began before the commandant of Auschwitz had gained official possession of the territory, indicating the importance of food for the functioning of the Reich. It is also indicative of the influence of the camp’s leaders in the specific region.

Food Consumption in KL Auschwitz-Birkenau

Food and nutrition within the camp cannot be understood through broad generalizations of experience. For different prisoners who were in the camp at different time periods their experiences with food varied widely. It has been determined that with only the minimum provisions allotted to every prisoner within the camp through official means, it was possible to survive no longer than three months. In an essay by Rolf Keller, malnutrition is cited as one of the three primary reasons that of the 10,000 Soviet Prisoners of War sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in the fall of 1941, fewer than 10 percent were still alive five months later, in March of 1942. The other two reasons were the “brutal treatment” they received and outright murder committed by SS.²⁹ In order to survive longer than this, prisoners would need to either hold a position within the camp that would grant them greater rations and require less physically demanding work, or they would have to acquire food through alternate means.

One example of a means of acquiring additional food was to “organize”. This was the term used for obtaining items not issued officially within the camp. An example of this was that those working in the kitchen or within the network of food production; they would smuggle food out of their workplace to either consume themselves or trade for other commodities on the black market that existed within Auschwitz-Birkenau. Additionally, those who worked in what was referred to as “Canada,” the area in which the belongings from newly arrived transports were sent, were able on occasion to smuggle food as well as other items that could either be consumed personally or traded with fellow prisoners. Smuggling was a risky endeavor, one that would result in harsh repercussions if a prisoner was caught.

Within Auschwitz-Birkenau the majority of prisoners who worked within the food complexes of the camp and its subcamps were Poles, despite the fact that especially in the final year and a half of the camp’s operation the large majority of the prisoner population was Jewish.³⁰ This may be attributed simply to the fact that food production complexes were established in the early months of the camp’s operation when most prisoners were there as political prisoners. This however does not stand up to scrutiny as more subcamps were created over time, as the camp’s population was growing to its eventual peak around 100,000, and more food was necessary. It is possible that these positions were given to political prisoners as the effort for extermination was focused on Jewish people and these jobs were considered of higher quality, officially often including shelter, and unofficially the potential for acquiring additional food. Relatedly, in the second half of the camp’s operation some prisoners were permitted to receive packages from outside the camp, including food. Jewish prisoners were never granted this privilege, thus again indicating the targeted nature of starvation even within the confines of Auschwitz. To a certain extent, the diet of prisoners was influenced by where the transports arrived from. Some of the food procured from the luggage of new arrivals was sent out into the Reich, but some remained within the camp. Based on this the diet of prisoners was altered over the years of the camps operations. In addition, diet could be a means by which inmates could infer where transports were arriving from without having interaction with new arrivals, based on what foods were being introduced for prisoners. Rudolf Vrba elaborates on this in his memoirs, when he mentions that the prisoners knew transports were arriving from Hungary because of the influx of sausages.

Food in the Warsaw Ghetto

The Warsaw ghetto provides an example of starvation and systematic restriction to access to food that is important to examine in conjunction with starvation studies in concentration camps. It is important to recognize that starvation was not isolated to concentration camps, and in fact was in some cases arguably more rampant in the Jewish ghettos established by the occupying Nazi forces. In addition, those individuals who did survive life within the Warsaw ghetto were sent, with few exceptions, to concentration camps. Thus it is crucial to understand that individuals were arriving at the concentration camps from a variety of conditions.

In Poland, calories were rationed for the three demographic groups, as defined by the Nazi Germans. Jewish people were allotted less than 200 calories daily. Polish people were allotted approximately 700 calories while German nationals were allotted over 2500 calories. In the Warsaw ghetto specifically, even with smuggling, the daily calorie intake of residents was seldom greater than 1,100.³¹ In 1941 and 1942 more than ten percent of the inhabitants in the Warsaw ghetto died, a total of over 80,000 individuals.³² These deaths were the result of a combination of factors, not least of all starvation and overcrowding; the ghetto took up 2.4 percent of the city’s land and held 30 percent of its population. As well, disease ran rampant as a result of the first two factors.³³

The phenomenon of starvation, as well as methods of recovery, are difficult issues for scientists to study and understand because of the ethical implications that any human study would have. As a result, the examination and observation of residents in the Warsaw ghetto in 1942 and of prisoners of concentration camps after liberation in 1945 provide some of the rare observational data on starvation.³⁴ Additionally, within the Warsaw ghetto physicians began in February of 1942 to conduct studies on hunger and the related diseases after they recognized the unique opportunities to answer certain medical quandaries, and continued to do so until July of the same year.³⁵ This is also why today we have a relatively large amount of data on starvation in the Warsaw ghetto.

Food restriction and systematic starvation in the Warsaw ghetto is important to study not only for the extreme nature with which intentional starvation was carried out on a massive scale, but also for the role this ghetto specifically played in furthering the understanding of starvation and the development of post-war international standards of human rights.

Post-War Ramifications

Starvation was incorporated by the United Nations into the Convention for the Prevention of Crimes of Genocide in December of 1948 as one of the defining components of what constitutes genocide. They defined what constitutes genocide as, in part, an action “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” which has since been interpreted to include denial of access to food.³⁶ This decision acknowledged the specific role of starvation in the Nazi German extermination efforts, the degree to which starvation is able to decimate a population and the necessary breadth of the definition of genocide. Subsequent UN documents have either implicitly or explicitly addressed hunger and starvation and the basic rights of all people to food.³⁷

With regard to instances of mass famine or starvation in a variety of locations and time periods, the decision of external parties to provide aid is often too late in coming. This is largely because potential donors ask for quantitative evidence of the crisis, usually in the form of a death toll. This means that the crisis has to be well under way in order to elicit an international response. While denial of a crisis’ occurrence and delays in realized action play a role in prolonging the wait for aid, the demand for quantifiable data demonstrating the need for aid is the primary source of delay.³⁸ It is important to note that these statements were made primarily with regards to famines in the latter half of the twentieth century, but they are also pertinent to the study of the Holocaust and the international response to reports of starvation within the concentration camps, as well as broader conditions.

Conclusion

Food plays a role in human life and interaction beyond its simple physiological importance on an individual basis, from the conception of ideological policies supported by, or even arguably rooted in, agricultural concerns to the systematic deprivation of food and essential nutrients within specific populations based on ideological policies. The complexity of these roles are crucial to examine in studying the frameworks used for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in Nazi German occupied territory and the means of extermination used against, primarily, Europe’s Jewish population.
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