Hunger winter 1946/47

Hunger winter 1947. Because of the catastrophic food situation, thousands stopped work in Krefeld on March 31, 1947 and gathered for a protest rally on Karlsplatz.

The famine winter of 1946/47 occurred between November 1946 and March 1947. It was one of the coldest winters in Germany for decades (list here ) and is considered the strictest winter of the 20th century in the North Sea region .

procedure

In his New Year's Eve sermon, Archbishop Joseph Cardinal Frings of Cologne justified mouth robbery for personal use; organizing food and coal is then also called " fringing ".

At the beginning of January 1947, a cold spell hit Western Europe.

From January 21, 1947, the cold spell also hit the British Isles . Cold and snowfall affected public life. Numerous people died in meter-high snowdrifts . Electricity rationing occurred in the UK and Ireland because coal-fired power plants ran out of coal. From 10./11. In March the cold subsided, but in the course of the thaw there were floods and floods. For example, in eastern England the River Wharfe , River Derwent , River Aire and River Ouse overflowed and flooded large parts of South Yorkshire .

The food supply collapsed in many places, especially in urban centers. The food crisis had already started in early 1946. According to historians' estimates, several hundred thousand people died in Germany ; At about the same time, two million people died in the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1948 as a result of hunger and extreme weather conditions.

Movies

• Anja Riediger, Heike Römer-Menschel: Do you want war again? The hunger winter - survival in bombed-out Germany. ARD, 2007 ( online )
• Alexander Häusser , Gordian Maugg : Hunger winter - survival after the war . TV documentary, ARD, 2009

See also

• List of famines
• American food policy in occupied Germany

literature

• Federal Archives and IfZ (ed.): Files on the prehistory of the Federal Republic of Germany (January 1947 to June 1947) , 1979, ISBN 3-486-44551-0 .
• Justus Rohrbach (Author), Hans Schlange-Schöningen (Ed.): In the shadow of hunger. Documentary on food policy and the food economy in the years 1945–1949. Hamburg and Berlin 1955.
• Thomas Berger, Karl-Heinz Müller: Life situations 1945–1948. Lower Saxony State Center for Political Education , 1983.
• Alexander Häusser, Gordian Maugg: Hunger winter: Germany's humanitarian catastrophe 1946/47. Federal Agency for Political Education . 2010.
• Alice Weinreb: Matters of Taste: The Politics of Food and Hunger in Divided Germany. (Dissertation) Proquest, ISBN 978-1243665386 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ DWD Climate Status Report 2001: Extreme Weather and Meteorological Events in the 20th Century (p. 5) (2001)
2. ^ NDR: Hunger winter 1946/47.
3. ↑ Katja Iken, Caroline Schiemann, Benjamin Braden: Moral goes to the devil In: one day , February 20, 2017.
4. ↑ A cold spell broke from Russia. In: Der Spiegel , 2/1947, January 11, 1947.
5. ↑ Lorenz Jäger: The "white death" joined hunger. (No longer available online.) In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . December 27, 2009, archived from the original on December 25, 2014 ; accessed on July 24, 2020 . 
6. ↑ Eugen Georg Schwarz: Crisis after the fall. In: Focus . March 13, 2006, accessed December 14, 2014 . 
7. ↑ Historical background to the hunger winter 1946/47 part 1 on Das Erste.de
8. ^ TV review: Der Hungerwinter , Der Spiegel , April 7, 2007
9. ↑ Hunger Winter - Survival After the War ( Memento from April 2, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), Das Erste , December 27, 2009