In an attempt to rationalise the attrition rates and select which workers would survive in a more economical fashion, the chairman of the coal organisation of Upper Silesia, Günther Falkenhahn, pioneered a system of ‘performance feeding’ for the ‘easterners’ working in his Plesschen Werke pit, taking away food from those who underperformed and redistributing it to those who exceeded their norms. He did not reduce the demand for new transports to replace the workers who died. As this cannibalistic version of Social Darwinism spread within the Silesian coal industry, it attracted Albert Speer’s
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