Swarthout’s Reviews > The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy > Status Update

The Fuehrer had demanded more workers. Gauleiter Sauckel was dedicated to delivering them. Hitler and Sauckel now demanded that the workers be fed, which was clearly a necessity if they were to be productive. And yet, given the level of grain stocks, Backe was unable to meet this demand.

Goering had spoken casually of feeding the Eastern workers on cats and horse-meat. Backe had consulted the statistics and reported glumly that there were not enough cats to provide a ration for the Eastern workers and horse-meat was already being used to supplement the rations of the German population

...the SS and the Wehrmacht were deliberately murdering millions of people, who could just as well have served as workers for the German war economy...it is hard to avoid the impression that the Third Reich faced an unresolvable contradiction between its genocidal racial ideology and the practical imperatives of production.

In the three years between June 1941 and May 1944, the average rate of loss for the Wehrmacht was almost 60,000 men killed every month on the Eastern Front.

"The plan called for the German armoured columns to drive for three days and three nights without interruption. To ensure that the drivers could go without sleep, the quartermasters of the advanced units stocked up with tens of thousands of doses of Pervitin, the original formulationof the amphetamine now known as ‘speed’, but more familiar in the 1940s as ‘tank chocolate’
Panzerschokolade)."