Turnip winter

On 1 December 1916 the Deputy Chancellor of the Reich, Karl Helfferich, signed an ordinance on potatoes which came into force on 4 December. Until the end of the year a German resident could get at most a pound, that is half a kilogram, of potatoes a day, and from 1 January to 20 July 1917 at most three-quarters of a pound. Germany was entering the hardest winter of the war. Potatoes, for two years the basis of the diet, ran out, and their place on the table was taken by the swede. The period went down in history as the “turnip winter” (Steckrübenwinter or Kohlrübenwinter).

Harvest failure

Cut off by the blockade from foreign food, Germany had rationed bread and flour since 1915, and there was hardly any meat, so potatoes became the main food. At the beginning of 1916 people were eating two and a half times as many as before the war, and by the spring the stocks from the previous harvest were almost exhausted. The countryside lacked labourers, horses and fertiliser. A rainy autumn brought potato blight (PL), and in October it turned out that the harvest had reached only about half of the previous year’s. Part of the crop rotted in the fields. The War Food Office (Kriegsernährungsamt), created in May 1916 and answerable directly to the Chancellor, was no help.

The ordinance of 1 December

The ordinance laid down who was allowed to eat how many potatoes. A farmer could keep up to one and a half pounds a day per person for himself and his household, and only a pound in January and February. Everyone else was subject to rations, with a supplement for workers in heavy labour. Only diseased potatoes or those smaller than an inch could be used as feed, and only for pigs and poultry. Pickling potatoes was also banned. The municipalities were to secure the rest of the crop for the Reich Potato Office (Reichskartoffelstelle), which sent it where potatoes were short. Hiding stocks and breaking the rules carried up to a year in prison and a fine of 10,000 marks. The German Historical Museum notes that even such reduced rations often could not be handed out.

Swedes instead of potatoes

Until then swedes had been grown mainly as fodder. They grow in almost any weather, need little fertiliser and contain a fair amount of vitamins, but few calories. In Bergedorf near Hamburg, as early as November 1916, two pounds of swedes were handed out instead of a pound of potatoes, and in December the potato ration was halved. From January 1917 cards and coupons for swedes were issued. In February the weekly ration in Bergedorf was two pounds of potatoes and ten pounds of swedes. Leaflets and wartime cookery books suggested how to make them into soup, casseroles, cutlets, puddings and jam. They were added to bread dough, and dried and roasted as a coffee substitute, since coffee had long been missing because of the blockade.

According to the Prussian chronicle, an adult was supposed to receive that winter about 270 grams of bread, 35 grams of meat, 25 grams of sugar, 11 grams of butter and a quarter of an egg a day, but often even that was not available. In January and February 1917 severe frosts came, and homes stood unheated for lack of coal. People queued, ate in soup kitchens and looked for food on the black market, which few could afford. The Berlin physician Alfred Grotjahn noted on 20 February 1917 that Germany was sliding into famine, though a well-organised famine. In February Georg Michaelis became Prussian commissioner for food.

Consequences

In the winter and spring of 1917 the daily ration fell to about a thousand calories, roughly a third of what an adult man needed. In Berlin, Hamburg and the towns of the Ruhr emaciated people of all ages were to be seen. Child mortality rose by half during the war, and in Berlin fewer than half as many children were born in 1917 as in 1913. Tuberculosis and influenza spread. How many people in Germany died of hunger and malnutrition is not known exactly. The German Historical Museum estimates their number for the whole war at about 700,000; other estimates are lower or higher.

The ordinance of 1 December applied throughout the Reich, including the Prussian partition, the Poznań region and Pomerania. In the spring of 1917, in April, the government cut the bread rations further, which set off a wave of strikes that began in Berlin and Leipzig. The harvest of autumn 1917 was only a little better and reached about half of a normal one.