Generation Battle

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Production battle was a concept developed in 1934 by the then State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture , Herbert Backe , to increase the performance of food production . The program was announced by the Reich Minister of Agriculture Richard Walther Darré and Backe at the Reich Farmers' Day on November 17, 1934 in Goslar. The first mention of the “production battle”, however, is already in 1930 in Darré's contribution to the Völkischer Beobachter , in which he envisions such an action based on the model of the “ wheat battle” in Italy in 1925.

The production battles contained a catalog of measures ( The Ten Commandments ), through which the degree of self-sufficiency in Germany was to be raised to the highest economically possible limit in order to make National Socialist Germany as independent as possible from food imports, especially with a view to a new war. The measures were in detail: registration of all farms, improvement of the soil, enlargement of the cultivation areas for oil crops, credits for the farmers to purchase agricultural machines, building of dormitories for migrant workers , expansion of the state advice as well as the economical and effective use of the products. Due to the production battles , which were also discussed in school lessons, the German Reich only partially succeeded in establishing food self-sufficiency. Where the price fixing by the Reichsnährstand did not cover the production costs of a product, production fell short of expectations. This was shown, among other things, in milk production, in which responsibility for the milk price had been raised from the Reich nutritional status to the highest political level of the Reich leadership at the time. Above all, the lack of fat (so-called fat gap ) and legumes could not be compensated until the end of the war, despite the ruthless plundering of the occupied territories. The program, intended as a one-off propaganda campaign after the bad harvest in 1934 , was continued from 1940 as a war- generating battle until 1944.

A similar, much more successful program in Switzerland during the Second World War was called Plan Wahlen .

literature

swell
  • Herbert Backe, speech at the 2nd Reichsbauerntag in Goslar on November 17, 1934 , in: People and Economy in National Socialist Germany. Speeches by the State Secretary in the Reich and Prussian Ministry for Food and Agriculture Herbert Backe, Berlin 1936, pp. 5–18.
  • Herbert Backe, The production battle in the war , in: The production battle in the war, ed. vom REM, Munich 1940, pp. 5-16.
  • Clifford R. Lovin, The Production Battle 1934-1936 , in: ZAA 22 (1974), Issue 2, pp. 209-220.
Representations
  • Heinz Haushofer , History of ideas in agriculture and agricultural policy in the German-speaking area, Volume II, Bayerischer Landwirtschaftsverlag, Munich 1958, pp. 222–224.
  • Gustavo Corni , Horst Gies , Bread-Butter-Cannons: The Food Industry in Germany under Hitler's Dictatorship , Akademie Verlag: Berlin 1997, pp. 261–318.
  • Keyword production battle , in: Cornelia Schmitz-Berning: Vocabulary of National Socialism . 2nd ed., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 210-212.
  • Stephanie Degler, Jochen Streb, The lost production battle: The National Socialist Agriculture in System Comparison , in: Yearbook for Economic History (2008), Issue 1, pp. 161–181.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ H. Linder: The production battle in the biological teaching of the higher schools. In: National Socialist Education. May 1937, pp. 275-286.