One way or another, virtually everyone alive in Germany in the 1930s had an acute personal experience of prolonged and insatiable hunger. Nor was mass starvation a distant threat confined to Africa and Asia. On Germany’s eastern borders in the early 1920s, the turmoil of war, revolution and civil war in Russia, Poland and the Ukraine had precipitated an agricultural disaster, which by 1923 had claimed the lives of perhaps as many as 5 million people.
