I’ve finally come to one of the Axis powers in this series on World War 2 home front cooking. Definitely a trickier and more sensitive subject to discuss, but it’s fascinating to learn about a side of the war that is rarely covered.
I do think it its important to see both side even if the subject is rather hard to discuss but because of that its rarely covered even though its the other part of the history coin
I would enjoy seeing the homefront cooking of China and Japan too if Max can find historical information on it. As long as the subject is treated with sensitivity, which I know will be the case as it has been so far, there shouldn't be any issue with covering the homefronts of the Axis powers. I'm Vietnamese and all four of my grandparents were there when Japan occupied our country, and by 1945 they had stolen an enormous amount of food which lead to the deaths of over a million people. I condemn that absolutely as would almost every Asian outside of Japan, but I still would be very interested in knowing what Japanese civilians and soldiers ate at that time.
it’s great that you’re able to cover these kinds of sensitive, but necessary topics to bring to light. just know that we’ll watch it anyway, hope to see a vid about ww2 Japan and Italy recipes
German here. German baking recipes often specify 30g of flour for dusting the baking pan. When my grandma made potato dishes like this, it was usually in a cast iron pot. It was greased and dusted with flour. In my grandma's school cookbook, for a "potato and pear casserole" it says "grease the dish with a bacon rind and dust it generously with the 30 g of flour“. So I guess that‘s what it is meant for
As a German myself, I really appreciate that you also cover this side of the war. Looking away from history or the terrible parts that happened, gets us nowhere. This, like all of your videos, was really educational and covered a side of the war, history books don't usually cover. Keep up the good work!
@@plumicorn I meant looking away or not talking about it doesn't get us anywhere. I might've written that more confusing, than what I meant, sorry. I think remembering what happened is important, otherwise we'll just keep repeating the same mistakes from the past.
Well done, Max. Ignoring our enemies and the darker facets of history won't make them go away. We have to face them. Thank you for handling this with grace.
Also the governments are the enemy. I have to tell American and British ppl who justify bombing German and Japanese cities with war crime whataboutism and saying they supported the war effort this exact thing. Not that they care. I'm Canadian. My grandma's dad was in the war, in England. He was very against the Germanophobia, Italophobia, and Japanophobia. He apparently once said (the rare times he talked about the war) of Germany, Italy, and Japan: "The people are never the enemy. The governments are to blame."
One thing about the Yeast flakes is they are popular with vegans and vegetarians since they provide a cheesy flavor and vitamin B12 - maybe more of this or as you said add cheese
Italy might worth a shot, but there's no formal rationing in China, in stead forced harvest and army on the farm were the preferred method for both armies, so much so to the point that Japanese army in 1944 basically became a bunch of temporary workers for local landlords, while the Nationalist army was farming on their own.
Hey Max! German here, longtime watcher and lurker. I just wanted to say that I'm always so impressed by your effort to pronounce the words in different languages so accurately. I know it's pretty hard for americans to get the pronounciation of my language right, but you nailed it! This series is one of my favourites of yours. Thank you for all those videos. :)
He does do an impressive job. I took a semester of German in highschool and I couldn't stand how much it sounded like bastardized English (though I knew it was more like the opposite). Y'all got some cool words!
It's the best part of this channel! Max even tries hard to pronounce Chinese words correctly, in the correct tone. Most other TH-camrs don't even try, which is annoying!
@@travis4482 It's neither, it's more a spectrum of modern languages that grew out of the same languages and deviated separate ways over time, but it's true that some elements of German dialects sound like old and fusty English, but some others have independently gained similarities to English that are interesting. Some Austrian dialects use "I" instead of "Ich."
16:10 my great-grandfather was a farmer in Poland before he was taken at the age of 16 during the invasion to a labor camp in Germany. He was forced to grow crops for the German’s and he was even forced to take care of an officer’s children after their mother died. He met his wife (my great-grandmother) at the camp. Once, my grandmother was beaten so badly by a guard that she “slept for a week”. It was a coma and she had permanent brain damage from that experience. After the war they left and became farmer’s in America and polish food is still very important to my family to remind us of Ojciec. (He lived to 98)❤
Good that they managed to escape. My great-grandfather in Poland was also sent to a labor camp by the Germans for about 2 years. Then the Soviets came and sent him to a labor camp in Siberia for 7 years because he had previously been part of the Polish military. It's good that your grandparents were spared that. Greetings from Germany ✌🏼
The main concern for Germany in WW2 was that the allied Naval blockade cut German off from Grain, vegetable, and animal oils and fats as well as petroleum from the United States. As happened in WW1, the so called " Engljsh disease, Rickets was a consequence of tge British and French Naval blockade of the North Sea ports. The Germans only starved very late in tne war by starving everyone else on the European continent. The German troops were glad to finally get out of Greece as they only controlled the towns not the countryside. The Greek partisans would use a knife on any captured German, by sliding their throats to conserve ammunition. A gruesome end.
notice that Miller is not smiling, there is no music, no funny bussiness, he is doin it for history not for the fun. very good Miller very good. respect
I'm also partial to the ancient recipes, although there's clearly fewer surviving recipes. Honey glazed mushrooms have even become a standard side dish for me.
Hi! German from Southern Bavaria here. My grandmother was born in 1933 and spent her childhood and youth in a tiny village (about 20 families or so) about a half hour away from Augsburg. She remembers that towards the end of and after the war, they had two relatively wealthy farmers in the village who had plenty of food and wouldn't share with the rest of the village. She was the second oldest of 6 brothers and sisters and went from house to house to beg for food regularly. She gets angry to this day when she talks about how the wife of one of the farmers would refuse to give up old bread crusts because they were keeping them for their pigs. They mostly lived off a few boiled potatoes the wife of the other farmer gave them, stuff they found in the surrounding forests / fields / abandoned gardens and some donations from the local minister. Since they were quite a large family known in the village, her dad wasn't home and some of the other families sometimes also took pity on them and gave them some leftovers. Her dad was a lumberjack employed with a local baron before the war, so they were already quite poor. He was captured and held in captivity in Russia towards the end of the war, so it was their mom and she and her sisters. During the worst times, they also resorted to slaughtering the barn kittens. One of her starkest memories seems to be US soldiers riding through her village in tanks. They had a middle aged lady in the village who was a hard core nazi and who had threatened to shoot the American Troops with her hunting rifle from her window, should they dare to enter the village. So all the kids and some of the adults were terrified she would open fire from her window and the tanks would blow them up. She was also scared of the black men because she had been told stories about "the black american devils" and how they treated women and children. Contrary to her belief, the US troops were super nice to the women and kids and they were handed some chocolate by the soldiers passing through.
My grandmother grew up at that time. She fled to Hungary with her family that largely died on the trail but got sent back. She wound up working as a farm hand and the tender age of 4, but the food was so scarce by the end of the war that she ate rotten apples, moldy bread, and drank spoiled milk and beer to sustain herself. She is still kicking at 84 watching this with me.
I have been watching your videos for a long time and I genuinely love that you can tackle such a difficult subject with so much grace and respect. No one with a soul can justify what happened. But we can empathize with the first persons that were affected.
The one story I remember my German grandmother telling me about the war was about how she finally found some food and made the best dish she'd ever tasted. But then she made it again after the war, and it was just terrible. Hunger really is a powerful force
My great grandmother fled Soviet collectivism not long before the war. Even after living in the US for like 60 years, she still had an accent thanks to the strong Eastern-European communities in Chicago. I always remember her speaking very highly of my great grandfather's Polish side of the family (others who also fled Europe), and if she did speak of Russia, it was never anything good. Just found it interesting that you and many others on here with relatives from Germany have somewhat endearing stories, yet the handful of older Russians I've met haven't had a single good thing to say about their homeland.
My father’s expression is “hunger is the best sauce” whenever he makes something and I compliment it. It’s cute but in these circumstances, it’s sadly true.
A reasonable choice, too. It's good to know that, even if they weren't kept on starvation rations while forced to perform heavy labor, and were infinitely better off than the people who were, ordinary German citizens could still have their food confiscated by the government at any time. No one benefited from this war. Not really.
@@IchbinX Honestly, I think we understood this period of history better in the years before the man in charge of Germany at the time became He Who Must Not Be Named.
If I am being frank, people need to be less sensitive about talking about historical topics. If we dont speak about and learn from them then the true tragedy is that we will not have learned anything and make the same mistakes again.
I watch your channel a lot because I love history and cooking, but today I saw your Bombas socks advertisement and wanted to say we were hit by a tornado in April, and relief workers brought packs of Bombas socks the company had donated for us in survival packs and we were so thankful. They really do good, great company.
My grandmother told me a story when she was young during WW2 the family gathered around for a meal of hutspot, which is a traditional Dutch meal of boiled and mashed together potatoes carrots and onions, when a bomb landed near their home and shattered a window getting glass all in their food before they were able to eat it. She remembered it so well because of the amount of work that went into getting food in Holland during the occupation. She said it would take all day for her father to go around the countryside to try and find things to eat for their family.
That's crazy, my grandma from Belgium has that EXACT story except it was a rabbit stew, she still says "If we had put the lids back on the pans when the sirens sounded, we would've had dinner." Their town was already liberated and it was Christmas, so they had rabbit stew, which was a very rare treat during WW2 and takes hours to cook.
My grandfather told me a story about the cat they had during WW2. The cat always scratched everybody and my great-grandmother had told my grandfather that they would get rid of the cat if he did it again. The cat did it again and my grandfather took him to the butcher. I'm not sure if they actually ate the cat, because they story always stopped after the butcher. My great-grandmother was upset about it though. He also told stories about demolishing empty homes for wood to use as fuel, eating tulip bulbs and cycling on a bicycle with wooden wheels. Food was very hard to get, especially after they had to leave their home (it was demolished by the Germans).
As the granddaughter of Ukrainians who had to flee due to Germany’s actions in WWII I still really appreciate hearing about how their average citizen lived and survived during this time and food is a great vessel for sharing an that history. To survive is human. To not talk about it leaves holes in history and our understanding of it and that doesn’t benefit anyone. It happened, we should acknowledge and talk about it in informative ways, especially ones that remind us how real it was, and I think your videos are great ways to do that. I think this is an important addition to your series Max
As a grandson of a Ukrainian who was enslaved and survived in Germany, I agree. It is amazing how important food becomes when you are denied access to it regularly, and how even an onion given by allied soldiers can mean the difference between life or death in those times. As the Timeghost army says: Never forget!
This video is the most convincing demonstration of what sets you apart from the other professionals in the business. You've navigated this one brilliantly. Absolutely amazing job. PS. It's a bit ridiculous that we can't mention a certain German party in historical context without being screwed up by the TH-cam algorithm...
Well, I guess there are so many people out there using the word as a racial slur willy nilly that the TH-cam police can't pick up the difference between that & historical references.
I am thinking of my recently deceased aunts. They were Greek and grew up in Athens in WW2. My eldest aunt said that carts would come around in the morning and take away those who had died at night due to starvation. The carts were often two stories high. My grandmother talked about walking 10k one way to go to the black market. She was always very proud that all of her 5 children survived and that her furniture was intact (people burned furniture in the winter for heat). If you go to the Greek war museum there are inventories by the Germans in what and how many foodstuffs they had taken. My aunts were always concerned about how thin my cousins were and trying to fatten them up. It didn’t get better after the war because of the civil war. I remember a family friend from around Pyrgos talking about petrosoupa (stone soup). Of course it had no nutritional value, but the children thought they were eating something.
My grandmother who survived multiple wars was specifically traumatized by the starvation the Germans caused here during those events. She would keep uneaten food even if it was visibly colonized by say fungus and serve it as normal to eat, specifically bread she would eat and serve even if green as a hulk and full of puffy hair structures and she would even say "free penicillin" because that's what she told herself and the kids to convince to eat it. If anything fell and hit the ground she would fall upon her knees crying and begging god for forgiveness and she would try to clean the food that fell and serve it back. At times she would also pretend or tell me as a kid to, when thirsty, pretend that I turn on a water source (forgetting the English word for it) and drink from it, in my imagination, so I guess they didn't always had access to drinkable water either. Btw I don't know for how long and why but both her, my grandfather and their extended family (brothers, sisters, probably mother since father was dead) were living in caves outside the city (Herakleion of Crete) where they all had their kids too, so maybe that's why they probably couldn't even reliably access water. My grandpa on the other hand seemed largely unscarred (even though he had been through even more wars, dude lived for a century, born on paper at 1902 but likely in truth earlier than that since it was the practice at the time for many (my father and uncles too).
@@DragonlordSVS I didn’t even mention the water situation. The Germans cut off the water supply to Athens later in the war. My dad was 1 at the time, and the family would save any water drops for him. My dad has stories of finding moldy bread, cutting off the mold and eating the bread. I think most of the survivors of that time were severely traumatized mentally. Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of them left.
@@christinamendrinos3163 Damn maybe the same thing had happened to my grandmother and thats how she got stuck with pretending to drink imaginary water to quench her thirst even when life had returned to normalcy. Wasn't aware of Germans also rationing/shutting off water.
I am German and living in Germany, and this dish is so familiar and comforting to me. Even in this modern day and age Germans absolutely love their Eintöpfe and potato dishes! And I do enjoy to eat pickled red beets as a side for many of my meals, they're so good! It's fascinating how our country, culture, and political landscape have changed so much-- yet we still eat food thats so similar to the food that people ate back then. Thank you for your lovely video, as always!
But like he said, most germans would grate some cheese on their Auflauf nowadays and use cream instead of milk. Also I'm pretty sure the flour was meant for a roux, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the recipe.
@@neonity4294 Im assuming the cheese is used instead of the yeast flakes / nutritional yeast. Nutritional yeast has a cheesy flavour, so I’m guessing the war recipe used it as a substitute for cheese (as well as being packed with different nutrients)
I was raised by my German Grandmother in her home of at least 40 years (from the 1940's into the 1980's). She would tell me of many stories from surviving after the war. She rented an up stairs apartment from her land lord who lived on the floor level. As I grew older, it was my job the bring fire wood and coal bricks up from the cellar, clean the ashes out and stoke the fires in the mornings. Even in the 70's and 80's, almost all cooking and heating was using wood and coal in her house. Even electricity was a luxury. Once or twice a week, we'd walk into town to the butcher shop (where the butcher would always give me a treat of a small piece of bologna) and then to the bakery to buy our bread, where the baker would also give me a treat. I was never allowed to tend the garden or chickens. Living at the edge of the city, she knew where most of the walnut trees were and we'd stop there on some of our walks to gather a few. The stories she told on our walks... As bad as it sounds, one of my favorite meals was always Nudel und Hund (Noodles and dog) I'm sure there are stories behind that name but I never asked. It was just ground meat gravy over noodles, sometimes with mushrooms, onions and carrots. It's still to this day my go to comfort food to remind me of simpler times.
You know the german speech: Kopf ab, Schwanz ab: Hase. In Bezug auf Hund und Katze mag das bestimmt haben. Bei mir in der Gegend wurden Katzen häufig als Dachhase bezeichnet. Also... den Rest überlasse ich jetzt deiner Vorstellungskraft.
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 as I know it from my grandma (born 1920) it was really just browned onions, ground meat and cooked pasta (any short pasta), salt and pepper. When on hand she added cream. Sorry for inserting myself.
My dad knew a lot of funny/disgusting names for food from his time in the army. Like “exploded pilot” and such. I'm not german. I think it's just folksy/vulgar humor. Like the american SOS - "Stuff on a Shingle” - Creamed Beef on toat
My great-grandparents often told stories about life during the Nazi regime, particularly about the challenges they faced as farmers. One thing they always mentioned was how the NSDAP enforced strict controls on meat production. After butchering, farmers were required to hand over large portions of meat to the state, leaving little for their own families. It was a tough time, and they described how most of the pigs were incredibly meager back then-partly because resources were scarce, but also because farmers needed to underreport the weight of their livestock. To get around the inspections, my great-grandparents and their neighbors developed a system. When the inspectors came to check the weight of the pigs, they would bribe them with a share of the very meat they were supposed to report. The inspectors would look the other way, accepting the pigs as lighter than they actually were. This way, my great-grandparents could keep enough meat to feed their family and share with the community. It was a risky but necessary act of quiet defiance in a time when survival often depended on finding ways to outsmart the system.
Strange how a fascist/lawless regime makes otherwise law-/moral abiding citizens into criminals just to survive. That's what makes my stomach churn seeing what's going on in the world today...
So many recipes in my family for mock this, mock that. Two world wars and two recessions kept those alive 😂. I still make ‘mock mayonaise’, gardeners pie (with mock pie) etc. We all know how to preserve greens and fruit. My Dutch grandmother was so traumatized by bad smell (due to no more soap) she hoarded soap for decades. She died in 2004 and we still have bars of soap from the fifties, sixties and seventies 😂
Thank you for talking about the famine the Axis caused in Greece. It is one of the big World War II crimes, that is rarely talked about outside of Greece. It was so bad, that most Greeks today are obsessed with food, we call it the Occupation Syndrome. Because our grandparents (I was born in 79) have all told us stories about how they searched for nettles etc or they were forced to eat cats, dogs and rats... And my grandparents, both sides, lived in villages in rural areas where things were better than in Athens, where people would die at the streets. One of my grandfathers was a member of the Greek Resistance, the biggest Resistance movement in Europe in relation to the population (about 40% of the Greek population participated one way or another in the Resistance, but most European historians overlook it because the Greek Resistance was organized by communists, so at the end of WW II the Allies, especially the British turned against them and contributed to the Greek Civil War). The Resistance fighters were hiding in the forests in the mountains, where they could hunt, but they also got help and food by the people in the villages. The people who had barely enough bread would share the little food they had with the Resistance fighters. And then there were the traitors, who worked with the Nazis and/or took entire fortunes, houses, gold jewels etc in exchange for a bottle of olive oil...
Fascinating, I live in Australia & we have the biggest Greek population outside of Greece. So, I know a lot of Greek people & I find this information very interesting and has made me really sad. Even the information in the video that 300,000 Greeks died of starvation is really atrocious.
@@kseniagalina4290 Sadly, there are not any accurate film adaptations about it. Because after WW2, our allies turned against us and "helped" (first the British , then the Americans) in sparking a civil war, working together with the Greeks that during the Occupation worked together with the Nazis. The communist rebels lost the civil war and the winners wrote a very different history and made films that hushed up the reality. The people who fought with the largest Greek resistance organization (ELAS - ΕΛΑΣ) were hunted down, even after the civil war. The Greek resistance was actually only recognized by the Greek state in the 80s, after a military dictatorship in the 70s crumbled down (almost taking the country with it) and a socialist democratic party came to power.
@@cariaus3758 Greetings from Greece to Australia! It was infact the aftermath of the WW2 and the civil war that boosted the immigration of Greeks to Australia. There were already Greeks in Australia, but when in 1954 the Australian government invited Greeks to work in the country, many more took the opportunity, in order to flee from poverty, hunger, destruction and political division that was the result of the civil war that came after the Axis occupation. The aftermath was devastating both for the communist members of the Resistance and the poor right wing voters. Thats why in the 50s and 60s many Greeks migrated to Australia, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Sweden etc. Now I got an idea: Max could do a video about recipies of Greek immigrants in Australia or in general about Australian cuisine in the early days of colonization.
@@ΒασιλικήΣαμαρά-ε7ε Thanks for the information and I think a lot of Greek families have kept your traditional recipes, that they now share with all of us. Delicious!
And now they’ve stepped up to support another genocidal regime by sponsoring this nazi recipe. Good to know bombas supports our American war criminals with socks just like they apparently have no problem with the original nazis.
Are you going to do an episode about the Netherlands? Because the west of our country had a massive famine during the war and they had to become very creative to even survive. A good example is eating tulip bulbs
My wife's grandmother was a child near Dresden during World War 2. They were lucky enough to have a pear tree, and essentially subsisted on slightly rotten pears from the cellar through the whole war. The rest of her life she refused to eat another pear. She left for America as soon as the war ended to escape the soviets, and said she gorged herself on chocolate bars for the entire boat trip.
My mom used to sprinkle flour over the layers of potatoes... Layer potatoes, onion, flour, then salt, pepper & dabs butter evenly spread across the top, repeat. Then she would pour milk to the bottom of the top layer of potatoes. Then she would put sausages on top. Cover with foil.And bake covered until the potatoes was tender at 350° for about an hour. Remove the foil once you've checked the potatoes for done this and continue baking until the potatoes are browned This recipe is very similar to homemade au gratin potatoes
Yes, it seems to be a variation on au gratin potatoes common to German-speaking cultures and their neighbours. We have a variety specific to my home country, too, which has been in close contact with German-speaking Austrians for centuries. But this (the Hungarian) variety is made with boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, smoked Hungarian sausage and sour cream instead of the béchamel-like flour and milk combination.
This is similar to a recipe passed down in our family, except ours included slices of apples. Apples are not a surprising addition, since the family had apple trees in their back yard.
Austrian here. My grandma was a child during WW2 and she used to tell us stories about the time. She lived in a very rural part of the country, far away from any front. Her parents were farmers and comparatively well off, since the farm was pretty big. Cow's milk was confiscated, so pretty much everybody in the village had a goat. She and her family never had to go hungry. They also had prisoners of wars helping them on the farm and they were treated like family. They ate at the same table and got the same food. A local boy once helped during harvest and was of course fed lunch by my great grandmother. They had Knödel and the boy started crying because he'd never seen so much food in his life. He got to take some home to his family and was overjoyed.
@@angelcabeza6464 I think he mainly refers to the food. Like he said, eating the same food at the same table (instead of just getting their tiny ration). It was similar with my great grandparents. They were farmers and also had a Ukrainian forced laborer during the war. At lunch, everyone ate together, family as well as farm workers. Which included the Ukrainian guy. He got the same amount of food as everyone else. However, I'd say that calling it "he was treated like family" is definitely an exaggeration. And it's trivializing the situation, and mainly used to downplay individual guilt. Because even if you did treat the forced laborers decently and like humans, that still doesn't change the fact they were effectively slaves. Of course treating them like regular humans was better than many did, but it's a stretch to call it "treating them like family". However, in a very cynical twist of fate, treating the Soviet forced laborers well often meant unknowingly signing their death warrant after the war. Because the Soviets treated everyone who came back well-fed as a traitor and sent them to the gulags. Which was known by the end of the war. Said Ukrainian guy didn't want to go back in 1945, but the British sent every Soviet POW and forced laborer back, whether they wanted or not.
My father was in his teens in Poland when he was slaved out. He was with a buddy who was able to bribe an official to send them to a farm, rather than to a factory, where they figured they might be able to sneak some food if they didn't get fed. Which they did have to do.
My great grandfather had a similar story he grew up on the Polish German border at the time so he spoke German better then most and during the war was sent to work in a shop under a guy named Speer, yes like the artitechet no idea if related but he was treated human but the older shop keeper while the shop keepers son was fully into the ideology and when ever would visit my Great Grandfather would have to basically be on his best. Luckily he was able to survive the whole war just working in the shop.
My Grandmother was taken by the Germans in their double pronged attack against Ukraine: 1) Deplete the farms to starve the people. 2) Enslave the people to enrich Germany. She worked at a hotel during the day and at an estate cleaning the house in the evening, then slept in a bunkhouse attic with other slaves at night. She had stories of going into the sewers to catch snails so the hotel would have meat to feed officers (high class chefs could face criminal charges for denying service to military officers), and of being allowed the privilege of licking the flour from her fingers after making rolls for the kitchen all day. She sadly also had stories of girls vanishing because a civilian German man offered her an entire potato or a piece of bread...
Mr. Miller you have indeed paid your dues and are among some of the best history and food channels I have ever seen. Keep on being the best you can be.
I am of German descent and my grandparents would tell me of how it was pre-war. After attending one singular N*** rally with their next-door neighbors, my grandparents saw the writing on the wall and fled the very next week to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Thank you for the video!
I've lived in Germany for over 20 years and am fluent in the language. Max's pronunciation of German is indeed quite good (not perfect, but quite good).
I can’t speak for how accurate the German pronunciation was in this video. But as a swede, in the videos he has done before with Swedish dishes and names, the pronunciation was surprisingly good. Not perfect, but quite good. And many many times better then what you normally see in English speaking media.
His pronunciation is good enough that I can always understand which word he is saying, which is better than 99% of english speaking youtubers (I just this week had to turn on subtitles of a history video because I for the life of me couldn't figure out what the youtuber was saying in MY native language 😂). For someone who I assume does not actually speak german, that is quite impressive.
Fun facts: It's called the English disease in Sweden also. No, the British didn't deliberately cause rickets anywhere, but they sure had a lot of it during the industrial revolution, where it was so prevalent in the mill towns that other European countries took note. London especially was a real hotbed for it, as many people basically never had access to direct sunlight or fresh vegetables.
Tbf here in the UK we learn about it as something that happened a lot here in the industrial revolution times as well. It's interesting to hear it's called that in several places!
Yeah, that's what I learned too - I'm from England, and we also learned that rickets was called 'the english disease' because during the industrial revolution, London produced a lot of smog; This smog would cause children to not get much sunlight and lead to rickets, as well as malnutrition if you were a poor person, who probably couldn't get a lot of fresh veg.
Rickets is linked to a lack for vitamine D and therfore to a lack of sunlight. It was first described in GB and there allocated to certain regions. My Grandmother and my mother got when nthey were kids as a kind of a proactive treatment god liver oil (Lebertran, in German). Parents were obsessed with this desease.
I remember talking to my adopted grandma who lived in berlin during the war. She told me storys of how her family had to boil the wall paper off of the wall so they could wat the slower from the wallpaper paste. And how hard just surviveing through the end of the war was so brutal. And how basically the thing that keep her going was the chocolate bomber. Who would drop chocolate to the german people after the war. Her family escaped from east Germany as the wall was being built into west germany by buying a map from a farmer who had marked where the land mines were in his field as they were building the berlin wall. Really a fascinating woman and really gave me a perspective on what it was like to be there.
My grandparents were in their late teens when WWII broke out in Greece. I grew up with their stories about the war and the extreme hunger they experienced, first under Italian occupation, then under German occupation...They were farmers and soldiers would storm their homes, confiscating the majority of anything they had harvested, leaving them very little to get by on...And yet they still considered themselves to be lucky as living in the countryside, they were able to gather the odd wild greens to boil and eat, while people in the cities would literally look through garbage heaps in hopes of finding even the smallest scraps of food...It's no wonder that an entire generation of Greeks after the war could not and would not waste food and were obsessed with having enough food stored at home and making sure that their children and grandchildren were always well-fed...
I wrote a paper on this. Cool to see the topic here randomly. Yes the rural people of Greece were much better off, starvation was commonplace in the cities. The people that suffered the most were the refugees who got no aid from the government. Fun fact: The Germans living in Greece (many of them, anyway) were happy with the invasion at first. Until they found out they would suffer just as the Greeks from lack of food etc. Karma.
My parents lived in Germany in the 1950s; they say that people planned meals around potatoes, not meat. My folks copied their neighbors and bought a hundred-weight of spuds for the winter and couldn't figure out how to eat so many. They became very popular because they gave away potatoes to their neighbors.
Our family made this "Casserole" on a regular basis throughout the 70's and 80's with a few changes (no fennel, but onions or leeks). Regarding the flour, either toss your potato rounds in the flour or add a sprinkle from a shaker in each layer. We would also add grated butter sprinkled in each layer as well. We would also use rosemary instead of caraway seeds.
Removing the fennel would change the flavor profile very much as well as using rosemary. It is a completely different potato casserole and not the same dish. Otherwise every pasta with sauce are the same dish.
Great video thanks! My grandma was from Bavaria, Germany. She always talked about the rations of the food when she was a child. Her grandmother would make “put and scrape” which was where you smear some meat onto the bread and scrape it back off. You had to make the meat last for many days! Sugar was very hard to come by also. She said her grandmother was baking a cake when Americans started bombing her village…Her grandma refused to go down into the basement until her cake was done because sugar was that rare! Bombs were going off all around and she stubbornly waited for her cake to cook!
My German grandparents grew up during WWII in Eastern Germany, I have heard so many of their horror stories from that time. I remember them explaining just how little food they had: one loaf of bread for the entire family made from grains of wheat they collected one by one from the ground in farmers’ fields after the crop had been harvested, or my Opa being so starving in the middle of the night he would sneak the only potato they had left in the house and selfishly eat it raw like an apple. So heartbreaking, how the different regions of the country were affected with rationing and food shortages. I’m glad they survived!
Sometimes I forget just how recent all this really was, like yeah I know it wasn't all that long ago from reading about it, but seeing relatively young people still say their parents remember the war is different. For me, it was my great great grandparents I never met who fled poland during the war so I guess there's more temporal distance for me if that makes sense
What part of Germany are you talking about? The former GDR was "Middle Germay" in WW2, as there were more eastern parts (Ostpreußen, Schlesien etc). Also, the real time of hunger started AFTER the end of the war for the Germans as during the war the Germans stole food from the occupied countries. Yes, there were rations in the war but people starved afterwards.
My nanny and great-aunt with their kids where driven out by the Polish and only survived by gathering potatoes and left-over crops until they reached a safe haven in north germany. I think the wellbeing of germans is highly overstated
@@Mara-fk4vc I only learned about this part when visiting Wroclaw about a year ago. Few people talk about this, although I have known about the descendants of Early Modern German-speaking settlers in Hungary, who were also forced to leave after WW2.
Everytime my sister and I left food on the plate my Grandpa would say: "Ihr habt noch nie gehungert", (You have never felt hunger before) He would say that every single time😂
You did a very good job tackling such a difficult time and subject. Your skills as an approachable historian really shine through in this video. Well done.
Just a little clarification on the "turnip winter": the vegetable in question ("Steckrüben" in German) were rutabaga, a.k.a. swedes, not what's usually called "turnips" in English.
Growing up, we called these rutabagas “yellow turnips” vs the regular white/purple ones. I disliked their strong flavor as a kid, but love them now, especially mashed with butter, cream and potatoes…
@@sheepewe4505 It depends on the Scot in my experience. Sometimes neeps are turnips (the white ones), sometimes swedes (the yellow ones). Tbh it's a little frustrating as someone that likes turnips but isn't keen on swede.
A video on Japanese homefront food would be very interesting. I know things got pretty desperate over there by war's end and even before Midway, soldier's rations were lacking badly, and considering the soldiers got the bulk of the food stuffs, I can only imagine what the civilians were putting up with. I had great uncles who served there in the post-war occupation and even that was a touchy subject they rarely spoke on.
It was basically no food. Ironically the situation of Japanese peasants was pretty damn similar to that of Chinese peasants on the other side, despite the Japanese army "winning" for much of the war. If it wasn't for the American occupation, Japan would have almost certainly had a Communist revolution after the war.
"The grave of fireflies" is based on the true story of two Japanese children dealing with food shortages at the end of WWII. The animated production of this book was certainly worth watching.
A friend of mine shared some stories with me about his experience as boy toward the end of the war. A half cup of rice and half a pickled plum was a ration for a day sometimes. He used to catch grasshoppers with a piece of bamboo and a paper bag. They would stir fry them if they needed food. Or if they had food would run a needle and thread thru them to dry and feed the chickens for the eggs.
That you have to censor yourself because TH-cam no longer supports its mission of educating and sharing ideas and performance, is silly. Being afraid of words, and making content producers afraid of words, is just disappointing. Miller does an excellent job, despite the constraints. Talking about how Germans ate was important: understanding how Germans approached the problem of food and food supply under their ideology of success adds a great layer to our understanding of the War. Thanks, Mr Miller!
The TH-cam algorithms lack nuance and don’t differentiate the word not mentioned in this video between educational use or if it’s used as propaganda for the neo fascists. Unfortunately there’s a lot of that on here, they manage to sidestep the algorithm with dog whistles
To be fair, did youtube ever claim to be anything but a machine for maximum profit at minimum effort? There is no reason for any customer (advertiser) would want their ads on any specific video, but there is incentive to *not* want it on some videos. Rational max-profit solution is to demonetize with the widest net possible with no recourse. I wish I could call it peak capitalism, but I see no reason it can't go.... peak-er.
@radekc5325 And the channels that are demonitized as advertiser unfriendly still get ads played on their videos, but the content creator does not get paid their share of ad revenue.
When did TH-cam ever have such a mission? Ever since it became possible to monetize anything on this site, and certainly ever since Google bought it, TH-cam has been about profit, not education. It is outrageous that people feel compelled to censor themselves to this extent, but it's not exactly out of line with what TH-cam has been for a very long time now.
The "Wartime Farm" series did a segment on German bread. By the end of the war, ingredients like silage - fermented animal food - and sawdust were being used to stretch the grain supply. Surprisingly, the hosts said the taste was okay, even if it was hard to chew. I imagine that didn't help morale any. As to why the South and West had food - there are entire video series that explore all the issues with transportation and logistics within Germany. It's a complicated situation that the leaders created. It's amazing Germany managed as well as it did considering who was making decisions. In WWI, Britain had the largest number of men rejected for military service on medical grounds than any other nation. The reason - diseases like ricketts and others caused by vitamin deficiencies were rampant in urban areas. It was one reason why the British government promoted victory gardens so heavily.
Rickets was a big problem for the poor people in cities like London. You either need to eat food rich in vitamin D, like milk and eggs, supplements or sunshine. Food and supplements were to expensive for the poor and the working poor. Cities like London had a problem with air pollution, so sunshine was a problem as well. Today, rickets is a rare disease in developed countries. Unfortunately, due to food insecurities and lousy fast-food diets, it might find it's way back.
I'm a history undergrad and I actually really like how you gave quick mention to the atrocities happening at the time and that even the people who weren't involved benefitted. I think the food history you provided gives context that most people don't see. A lot of people have no idea what german domestic life was like during the second world war. I was reading an interview with a housewife named Frau Fischer, and she refers to having some "wonderful years" around the war, and talked briefly about sort of making a challenge out of making do during. With the context from this video, I can see how people could sort of attach an identity to the collective struggle, even if that struggle is for something terrible. The ways that the German government manufactures consent for war through domestic life is really interesting.
If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by "manufactures consent for war"? I never had the opportunity to study history in an official setting but I've always loved learning about it
@ basically there are things that states do to make it so that people aren’t outraged and instead support states going to war or waging wars on other states that are not showing any military aggression towards their state. A lot of it is done through news media nowadays, and has a lot to do with rhetoric around certain groups of people. There’s a book called Manufacturing Consent that is more political theory but builds its arguments on historical events. But in the case of WWII, demonizing other peoples and creating reasons for people to cheer on war efforts is pretty blatant. Like the propaganda isn’t subtle. What is subtle is how they get people to accept the conditions of everyday life that have been impacted by the state waging war with other states. So in Britain for example, the state framed a lack of house-making materials as an opportunity to rally for your country and fight the nazis from your home. Media about domestic life had a lot of “mend and make do” type slogans. Churchill would periodically go on the radio and cheer people on to eat their vegetables so that they can be “fit and in fighting form,” but really it was to encourage the public to grow their own food and not make such a big fuss over rationed items like meat and butter. Nowadays, most of what we see in the discussion of manufactured consent is before wars start rather than after, since our domestic life doesn’t really get rocked the same way that it did during the word wars, at least as long as war doesn’t happen on our soil.
I totally agree - things like the pot luck meals, emphasis on family life and health with promises of greater prosperity, the Hitler Youth (effectively like a Scouting movement with added propaganda) all served to persuade the populace in Hitler’s rise and maintenance of power. Actually looking in to this and the psychological and sociological conditions gives much more insight into what happened (and a better chance of averting another situation in future) than simply equating the German populace at the time with what was done in their name. I love the labelling of this as ‘manufacturing consent for war’. It should be a reminder for us that when politicians are promising us some of what we as individuals and families find important it is also necessary to look at their wider agenda and actions (which we might not be in agreement with).
@@kjarakravik4837 He means by Germans stating "wonderful years", the German people benefited from German invasions and looting of other nations. Essentially endorsing the war for material gain through propaganda without engaging in direct coercion. German domestic life was dependent on the course of the war. Manufacturing consent in a Chomsky term
Ugh... no. Fastest way to ruin a small-scale internet production like this is to hand it off to professional producers. Besides, more people watch sites like YT now every day than cable TV ever got. Commercial television is a dying medium.
My grandma was the child of one such "self sufficient" farms in Austria and even before the war, they were not well off. She always said her mother was the best at preparing frog legs from frogs they caught on the riverside. Eggs, butter, meat and all the good stuff was usually sold for money - she never said if any of their goods were requisitioned for the war. For a while she even lived with the local midwife because her family couldn't afford to feed her and she was the oldest and would be ok living by herself and helping out with work.
Can add a bit to the topic, both my parents where children in the eastern regions during that time. This is according to my father: His father was a chief milker, which apparently was a "skilled labor" and in high demand on the farmsteads. He was very picky regarding his workplace, often when things where not to his liking packing up things and heading with his family to the next farmstead, strongly disliked the milking machines. Food was alsways good on the farmsteads, no shortage on meat (not the prime parts of course), milk and eggs. He also had PoWs and also force recruited civilians from russia working under him. It was forbidden for them to even eat the same table, he still allowed it - my father remembered that there was one time where a officer from the police demanded for him to stop it he just replied "They work with us, they eat with us." and the matter was settled (this would likely have gone different if it werent a local (town) police officer). When the forced labourers were to be taken away to "work in the factories" he managed to get them back by claiming them essential for the farmsteads operation and later helped them to get away when the eastern front was drawing closer and closer. This is according to my mother: She lived in a small village where people were given a house and a small plot of land which was supossed to make them self sufficent - but that was only manageable with additional work on the fields of rich land owners. For the families relying on unskilled labour that usually meant the children also having to work from an early age to get by. Food was sparse, often having to be stretched heavily. --------- My father remained highly fit and without much of health worries until his death, my mother on the other hand was afflicted with lots of troubles, many bone related. I do believe, without proof of course, that their nutrition as children had a hand in that. Overall I was really suprised how almost "medieval" life in the villages was, just as a few examples: The smith in my mothers village handled dentistry. Shoes where usually wooden clogs, usually oversized for you to grow into as a child, wearing layers of socks at first to make them fit. When the rich land owners approached their estate with a carriage the workers were supposed to head to the roadway and bow.
My grandma was born in 1936 in Germany. She lived in a rural area in the middle of Germany. She often told us how she and her two siblings were hungry and just bad one pair of shoes for the winter. They shared it, so only one of the kids was able to go to school when it was cold and had to teach the other two what they learned. They took turns, so everyone of them was able to learn as much as much as possible. Nearly all food they grew was taken by the officals/military. So they had to search food in the forests and collect beechnuts and other seeds to make oil out of it.
@@Mara-fk4vc I can imagine this must be hard. In Germany there's rarely talked about this part of history. From my grandparents generation most people didn't talk about this part of their life at all. My grandma is the only one in my big family who ever started to talk about it. I think it's a pity. Learning about how she and her siblings grew up helped me a lot to understand her habits and views.
My father was born in the country in Germany in 1941. My grandmother lost her husband in 44 and she remarried and moved to the good ole USA. I know some of the recipes but she passed at an early age so when I find one that remi ds me of her cooking I go nuts! Thank you. I am making this for my father tonight.. I am sure he will love it with his pork chops. Lol
We don't have to look at history anymore, it's currently repeating. There are pogroms happening in Europe as we speak. Observe the present, and if you ever said "I would never support nazis" as a child, make good on that promise today.
Could you imagine 20 years ago, being told that you can't mention words that are historical terms so your video can be played?? Aside from that, amazing video as always, love your channel!!
People forget how TH-cam works. They pay Max a portion of the advertising money they receive from the ads that play during the episode. Advertisers don't want to pay much (or be associated with) complicated topics like the Nazi party. Max avoided the terms to ensure he got the best return on his time and effort for this video.
@@kjdude8765 No, it's not just about advertisement money. Videos that are not monetized are buried by the algorithm. It's another type of shadowbanning. TH-cam uses the advertisements as pretext to shadowban.
You could use milk cut with water and save some of that whole milk for another recipe. Or when rinsing out milk bottles, use the milky rinse water for a recipe. that's what they did during ww2. Just a thought. And no housewife during ww2 would ever peel a potato. use the whole thing, just scrub it good.
Growing up in germany I was always taught that you only ever peel potatoes AFTER you cook them, because then the skin comes off without wasting any of the potato with it. Germans don't like potato skins for some reason.
@@Roddy556 I hate it when people make dishes with the skin left on. From mashed to potatoes salad. We generally eat less potatoes these days and opting for rice and other root vegetables.
@@oomflemThe skins do have more solanine in them so if you are eating a truly massive amount of potatoes then eating all the skins as well may make you ill.
Ein richtig gutes Video,über das Essen im Krieg hab ich mir nie richtig Gedanken gemacht. Bin bei meiner Großmutter groß geworden(Jahrgang 1926).Sie hat mir erzählt das sie mit sieben Jahre angefangen hat im Haushalt zu helfen, das war damals so üblich. Es gab immer einfache aber sehr gute Küche. Schön das ihr auch mal die deutsche Seite betrachtet.
Thank you for using caraway, which is the correct spice. Online dictionaries and specifically google often translate Kümmel into cumin, which has a totally different taste. I'm born in the south of Germany where fennel definitely wasn't a common vegetable. In fact it first got popular in the beginning of the 70's - thanks to the growing Italian population. Potatoes and onions would have been our choice.
Wow! The video is great, like all of them. The disclaimer was moving. Trying to navigate such a sad, disgusting, time in history was hard but Max handles it very nicely. I was moved watching and listening to him. That being said, I am very glad you are showing all sides. Bravo!
From German (Bavarian) family recipes that I remember.. the flour is most likely meant, 1. for coating the pan after greasing it, and 2. to coat the cut potatoes to help them form a crust. Cut potatoes are often tossed in flour in several recipes, similar to some French fries
Ukrainian here. my great grandma was around 15 when she was taken to Germany as a forced worker. she was given to a relatively wealthy family and she was treated kind of well, more like a household staff than a serf/slave. that family despite being well off, was also on strict rations but they always shared food with her equally. she used to remember children of that family with fondness and never complained about the time she spent in Germany, despite how clearly traumatized she was. however after the war ended, Ukraine was stricken with a famine of 1946-1947 due to the country’s resources being so depleted by the war and tyrannical soviet regime, and our whole family barely survived that. WWII didn’t just end. it had long and painful consequences for every country affected by it.
I mean honestly, if u made hour videos. We wouldn't mind the extra history on all the topics, from b.c to 20th century. Ur channel is interesting and fun. And u always give us a good laugh or two.
It's awesome to see that you're not intimidated to take on the difficult parts of this series. History is always offensive if one tells the truth, so we may as well watch and learn.
@@Mara-fk4vcso Mr smarty pants over here Enlighten us what parts of history are not true? The ones that hurt your feelings? The ones that are against your agenda and ideologies? ❤
Hey Max! I am actually from germany and my grandma made similar dishes when I was younger :) So this definitely kept on going even later (she was born in 1940). And I just wanna say thank you for your efforts in your videos. Found your channel just a few months ago because of the Victoria Pudding. Greetings from germany ✌🏻
If Margarine were banned, it would be a butter world. Jokes aside, Yvaltal sighting! Also the Aegislash from last week's video is one of my favorite pokemon.
It used to be the other was around... Margarine was banned in Dairy States in the 1950s. One could buy a white margarine like food and color it with a food coloring packet enclosed. We used to go to Iowa to buy margarine.
A great uncle was interned at a POW camp in Germany and I remember my grandmother stating that potatoes and water was his diet there. For the rest of his life, my great-uncle couldn't stomach eating potatoes and only rarely ate them.
If this is from '41, I wonder how/what was eaten in '44 by the average person. Also, it amazes me what can be put on TH-cam w/ no problem, but a word USED IN PROPER HISTORICAL CONTEXT is a problem.
@@Kymmee2100 Right. I had to laugh at that, given all the BS I see on TikTok and TH-cam. And hunger was a real thing in Germany though many of the occupied countries sent their harvests and food to Germany so it wasn't as bad as in NL, Poland, etc.
@MsTimelady71 I will always remember the story of how Audrey Hepburn's family (like everyone) was reduced to eating flour made from tulip bulbs by the end of WWII.
@@georgiafrye2815 Bread alone is not a proper food. It lacks certain vitamins and fats. Black Bread (Schwartzbrot) in itself is healthy but tends to encourage bowl movement
A story from my mother, who grew up during the war in germany she and my grandmother went to pick up their rations one day. on this day, the rations have been shortened again, due to the length of the war. my grandmother complained how she should feed my mother and her 4 brothers, as most of the food was shipped to the eastern front. another woman overhard the complaint, and this woman was the wife of a high party member. she told my grandmother to shut up or "she will be removed" luckily my grandparents had a garden and some animals like chicken and rabbits to ensure the nutrition of the family
As someone who is a current immigrant in German, when you said “the German rationing system was notoriously complex” that made laugh. Cause it’s so very very German nothing can ever be easy in this country
Is that...a thing somewhere? "Opfer"'s definition in everywhere I looked included "sacrifice" first before "victim", and more importantly "victim sunday" makes no sense whatsoever?
@@Tinil0 "victim" is the main response when you enter "Opfer" into google translate. And often content creators take the google translation unreflected, if it makes sense or not. I give him credit for being more thorough.
Good episode. I also used to think that potatoes had no flavor of their own, but then I went to Peru, home of potatoes. Their potatoes have so much flavor! No butter, sour cream, or other flavoring required.
Hats off to you for that very thoughtfully worded disclaimer at the start of the history section. You are a very eloquent person who understands the impact of his words.
One of the things I enjoy the most about these videos is actually the comment section! It's so eye-opening to read people's family history. My grandfather lived in Italy during WW2 and told stories of having to eat cats to survive. When you're little you just think wow, that's gross but the older you get, the more you realise how insanely hard it was to go through this and how much it took to survive!
Fascinating stories as usual. I am the grandson of Norwegians who came to America right before & after the war. I would love to see an episode on what recipes/food was eaten in occupied Norway.
Thank you for making this video. I wondered if you'd cover germany. I'm german myself and it is a heavy legacy that we inherited; but it is part of our history. And I find it dangerous to ignore it or not exploring things like cooking during that time. I got some stories from my Grandma who was born in 1940 into a farmer family in the Spreewald-region. She could really cook and had some great recipes, like bread-soup. I really loved this as a kid.
My Maternal Grandmother was a Polish Christian Holocaust Survivor. She was slave labor. She worked for a German Farmer and his wife. They told my Nana and the other slaves not to tell the Nazis what they were eating. Herman and his wife refused to do the starvation diet on the slaves, Herman and Katie feed the slaves whatever they had to ate. I am so grateful for the care and compassion that they gave my Nana and the others.
@@dianestafford6968 Your poor grandma may have been displaced and been under forced labor, but Polish non-Jews were NOT being gassed and exterminated. She is NOT a holocaust survivor.
I don’t blame the average German for the Holocaust. Those in power lied to them & controlled them. I’m sure there were millions of Germans who didn’t agree with the Nazi’s policies & beliefs.
It's crazy how we got to the point where people deny genocide of Poles during WW2. You need to create "Polish Christian Holocaust Survivor " to get your point across.
@@mixererunio1757 If we can have people denying the deaths of 6M+ Jews simply because religio-political differences... You bet your ass we would have Polish/Slavic/French/North African Genocide Deniers
My great-grandfather was taken prisoner in May 1940 when the Germans invaded Belgium and then was used as forced labour in Austria until the end of the war. I haven't heard any specific anecdote about food other than he used to get extremely angry when my grandparents and later my mother wouldn't eat their whole meal. It goes to show how lack of food was a deeply traumatizing thing back then.
A Belgian by birth and living in Australia here. My paternal grandfather was sent to Leipzig as forced labour. Oddly, he was right-wing and passed that on to my father. It's easier to tell you what nationalities Dad likes, rather than the ones he doesn't like. My maternal grandfather was in the Belgian resistance, was betrayed, and last was seen in Buchenwald. The man I knew as my maternal grandfather was a Czech deported who refused to go back after the war because he hated the Russians :P
My grandma's mom lived to 106. I knew her well. Grandma passed last year at 103, spry as they come. I'm so grateful for the intimate first hand accounts of their youth.
My mother was in her 30s when I was borne in the early 1950s. Conversations about WWII would come up occasionally. I remember my mother talking to me about the difference between the SS and majority of German soldiers. She explained that many, if not most, of German soldiers were just like my dad, brothers, and uncles. They were people just trying to live their lives, put food on their families’ tables, and were often drafted into service. The soldiers’ families were just as sad as US families when they died. She encouraged me to avoid painting everyday hard working people with those in power who do horrendous things. I always enjoyed our conversations, including the one about her friend who struggled with battle fatigue (PTSD). She taught me to think more critically about the world around us. Thank you for this video.
I'm polish but did a lot of reading of my own, as opposed to just believe what I'm told. Telling people that SS and the rest of the army were two very different things is never easy
When I was a kid I remember my grandma talking about Rickets and calling it the English disease. Her explanation was that England was always gray and rainy and that a lack of sun caused Rickets. She was always reminding me of this when I resisted her pushing me to go play outside. (We had plenty of sun here in the US.) Come to find out that the main cause of Rickets is a vitamin D deficiency and that indeed, sunlight helps prevent it.
I never really got this as rickets doesn’t just automatically spawn in when it’s not really bright, it’s for people who don’t go outside not for countries which aren’t particularly sunny.
@@RyanGoslingthestonecoldsigmaif you don't have enough food sources of vitamin D (which if you're having issue getting food at all you probably aren't, bc most dietary vitamin d is from animal sources), a country that lacks strong sun is going to also have issues with rickets because it's that much harder to get enough if you're already deprived. The lack of sunlight is a compounding issue for the disease.
As far as I know the name comes from industrial revolution times. In big cities like London there was so much smoke, the sky was grey. Also, poor children had to work in factories and even mines from a young age. It’s called the English disease in different European languages.
Rationing was world wide no matter what country you were in. Food is a universal thing that binds us all together. Thank you for taking the time and energy to cover all countries and for the disclaimer. Times were and are hard atm but we are all here to enjoy your videos and of that I am graciously appreciative. This isn't much but I give it with a glad heart.
Actually, this whole series was(still is kinda) hard to watch for me. But, thank you for tackling such a painful topic. May we all heal from the wounds of war.
My great-grandma was already in her twenties when the war broke out, she used to tell us stories about that time and how even in Switzerland where she lived they had to plant victory gardens because they were surrounded by the Axis and mostly cut off from the rest of the world so food was in short supply. She also told me stories about Germany where she visited before the war but when a certain man was in power. Really interesting but also chilling stories about that time.
I do appreciate to see both sides of the cooking in this. Many tend to do one side of the internal parts of the War mainly in the allies. i love this channel and learning more of the niche side of food! Keep it up!
Can I just say how much I appreciate your consistency. I always have trouble deciding what to watch while I’m on lunch, but every Tuesday at 12pm there’s another fantastic video waiting for me.
HA! finally something I can share a bit of personal Info on. See i am from germany (and id be happy to show you around if you ever decide to visit my general region) and so is my family, and indeed, has been for quite some time, including the days of the 2nd world war. My Grandfather was a social democrat who got expelled from his school for "lacking political maturity" and had to spend most of the war fleeing from the Nazis,ending up in his hometown of Halle where he met a young Prussian Refugee Girl from Königsberg (Current Day Kaliningrad) who herself had fled the advancing red army. She... it probably comes as no surprise is my Grandmother, and she suffered tremendously during those years. She had to bury her own Grandmother in the snow (she froze to death), as well as her infant sister who succumbed to starvation. She later recalled having to survive on potato peel for weeks on end, begging everyone and anyone for even the smallest bit of food, sometimes digging her hands bloody trying to get some root in the frozen soil. On the other side, my family was quite well off, that part of my family was something close to the modern equialent of feudal aristocracy, they owned a lot of land, which they then exchanged for fishing rights to avoid wartime confiscation. My family - in effect me - still holds those fishing rights, which actually are for all intents and purposes ownership rights of a stretch of the Werra River in Lower Saxony. The river is ecologically dead though, but thats another matter. Anyway on that side my Grandfather was a teen at the time of the war and, like so many others, was drafted and thus joined the SS. He then went to "clear" the Ghetto of Warsaw, where he was ordered to shoot a child. He refused and got sentenced to death for it, with the sentence "commuted" to minesweeper duty, where he spent the rest of the war dismantling mines. He somehow survived and later became a train driver, though he never got promoted because - even after the war - he had technically been sentenced to death. During the War, his Father (who sold the land) lived in "our" current day country home where he also ran a fishing restaurant of local renown, though it too had to eventually grind to a halt under the increasing war effort. In those days, they surived mainly on the fish they caught, with other means of sustenance - for example eggs, milk and even potatoes - being to exception. They were lucky they had the fishery, other people in that area did not fare nearly as well. Matters were made worse when a stray shell hit their barn, in effect destroying all but a brick wall (that still has the hole in it) and making most of the supplies stored within all but worthless. I confess that here, I have to stop. The latter end of the war and the immediate aftermath have, sadly, not been conclusively documented and my own efforts to conserve have only picked up recently (as my Grandmother passed, allowing access to a lot of family artifacts and documents, such as the Party Membership Book of my Great-Grandfather, etc.), but I will try my best - I am a historian after all, though usually for Greek Antiquity - but it will take some time.
@ Oh I specialized in pre-antiquity, anything between the "Dark Ages" (sketchy term in current academia as I’m sure you’re aware, but probably the most evocative) and the period known as classical antiquity, which, for my intents and study purposes begins after the second invasion of Persia. Having studied in Leipzig, Germany, the main focus of my research was Diplomatics and Papyrology, the city has a truly amazing wealth of Papyri and Ostraca which lend themselves very well to analysis. Keep in mind though I was only a rookie researcher, as it were, and regrettably I had to stop a year ago for financial reasons, now essentially reduced to researching in my leisure time.
I can't hit "like" because it is a hard story. So happy that your family survived! Do you believe there is a reason for that? A purpose for you to be? An amazing story.
Recently, I try daily to be thankful for everyday that I get to have delicious breakfast and dinner, roof over my head, and family that is in good health. 🙏 Remember, someone would give EVERYTHING to have your blessings. Do not take your life for granted! Awesome video today, really helped me appreciate what I do have. ❤
I was very glad that you mentioned the famine in Greece during the second world war. While there are a ton of ancient Greek recipes on the channel, and lots of history to boot, seeing my own family history featured on the channel made me feel a swell of emotion. Modern Greece has such a fascinating history that's often overshadowed by history from ancient times, and I'm glad that you were able to shine some light on it.
Been a World War II history fanatic for 30 years… Love these Max … I’ve watched and read so much about all facets of the war including the homefront and even so I’ve learned things from your videos on the subject thanks for the diligent research
In Hungary we also call rickets english diseas and some fun fact: we have a jam originating from WWII that we eat to this day and called Hitler-bacon which is basically a firm jam containing pumpkin, but it is fruit flavored and mostly used in baked goods nowadays
As a historian from Germany I'd say you dealt quite well with this tough topic, Max. What one could perhaps point out particularly in this specific and in a broader historical context, would be the power and biopolitical aspects of food control. The atrocities connected to food is one aspect of the Nazi's project of dominating countries they conquered. But the controlled access to food on the homefront is also quite a powerful tool to increase domestical power over the population and to drive people into the war machine.
That makes sense of the part in the video about industrial workers getting more rations than everyone else. "Work in our factories, and you'll get to actually eat".
Congratulations Max on a very thoughtful, nuanced and well- balanced episode. This is a difficult topic and I think you handled it beautifully (as always). I particularly admire the way you separated the party from the nation while still showing that the nation as a whole benefited (for a while) from the theft of food. Your touching on the hunger of the first world war was also very clever. Thanks so much for the effort you put into these videos!
I’ve finally come to one of the Axis powers in this series on World War 2 home front cooking. Definitely a trickier and more sensitive subject to discuss, but it’s fascinating to learn about a side of the war that is rarely covered.
Thanks For this max! Your hardwork is always appreciated! Can't wait For italy on this series
Every side of history has it's purpose of being discussed.
I do think it its important to see both side even if the subject is rather hard to discuss but because of that its rarely covered even though its the other part of the history coin
I would enjoy seeing the homefront cooking of China and Japan too if Max can find historical information on it. As long as the subject is treated with sensitivity, which I know will be the case as it has been so far, there shouldn't be any issue with covering the homefronts of the Axis powers. I'm Vietnamese and all four of my grandparents were there when Japan occupied our country, and by 1945 they had stolen an enormous amount of food which lead to the deaths of over a million people. I condemn that absolutely as would almost every Asian outside of Japan, but I still would be very interested in knowing what Japanese civilians and soldiers ate at that time.
it’s great that you’re able to cover these kinds of sensitive, but necessary topics to bring to light. just know that we’ll watch it anyway, hope to see a vid about ww2 Japan and Italy recipes
German here. German baking recipes often specify 30g of flour for dusting the baking pan. When my grandma made potato dishes like this, it was usually in a cast iron pot. It was greased and dusted with flour. In my grandma's school cookbook, for a "potato and pear casserole" it says "grease the dish with a bacon rind and dust it generously with the 30 g of flour“. So I guess that‘s what it is meant for
Thats what I know from my grandmother as well. anything that got greased, baking forms whatever, got also dusted with flour.
Thanks for the insight! I’m looking into making this dish
As a German myself, I really appreciate that you also cover this side of the war. Looking away from history or the terrible parts that happened, gets us nowhere. This, like all of your videos, was really educational and covered a side of the war, history books don't usually cover. Keep up the good work!
The negative stuff happened after the war. The wrong side won
@@plumicorn I think he means in this setting.
@@plumicorn I think you misunderstood their comment. They said that NOT looking at the negative parts of history would get us nowhere.
@@plumicorn I meant looking away or not talking about it doesn't get us anywhere. I might've written that more confusing, than what I meant, sorry.
I think remembering what happened is important, otherwise we'll just keep repeating the same mistakes from the past.
@@plumicorn rationing happened world wide. Didn't matter what country you were in. Food is universal as well.
German saying: Everything has an end, except sausage. Sausage has two.
If there are not enough potatoes, though, even sausage has an end.
😂 Fact.
Every stick has two ends, and slingshot has three.
True, and it is a certified classic.
th-cam.com/video/X5C9gkgrKPI/w-d-xo.html Gottlieb Wendehals. What a blast from the past.
Well done, Max. Ignoring our enemies and the darker facets of history won't make them go away. We have to face them. Thank you for handling this with grace.
Also the governments are the enemy. I have to tell American and British ppl who justify bombing German and Japanese cities with war crime whataboutism and saying they supported the war effort this exact thing. Not that they care. I'm Canadian. My grandma's dad was in the war, in England. He was very against the Germanophobia, Italophobia, and Japanophobia. He apparently once said (the rare times he talked about the war) of Germany, Italy, and Japan: "The people are never the enemy. The governments are to blame."
I know you said Japan might be the last episode, but episodes on Italy and China would be very cool to see as well!
France might be interesting too, I can't imagine them taking very kindly to Germans telling them what they can eat!
Agreed -- there's a whole story in the prominence of rice in the Italian diet during the war.
One thing about the Yeast flakes is they are popular with vegans and vegetarians since they provide a cheesy flavor and vitamin B12 - maybe more of this or as you said add cheese
Italy might worth a shot, but there's no formal rationing in China, in stead forced harvest and army on the farm were the preferred method for both armies, so much so to the point that Japanese army in 1944 basically became a bunch of temporary workers for local landlords, while the Nationalist army was farming on their own.
Yes, Italy please.
But also the Netherlands as those who were starved like you mentioned it regarding the Greek.
Hey Max!
German here, longtime watcher and lurker. I just wanted to say that I'm always so impressed by your effort to pronounce the words in different languages so accurately. I know it's pretty hard for americans to get the pronounciation of my language right, but you nailed it! This series is one of my favourites of yours. Thank you for all those videos. :)
He does do an impressive job. I took a semester of German in highschool and I couldn't stand how much it sounded like bastardized English (though I knew it was more like the opposite). Y'all got some cool words!
English speakers usually butcher every other language.
So it is a much welcome surprise to see someone putting in the effort
👍
It's the best part of this channel! Max even tries hard to pronounce Chinese words correctly, in the correct tone. Most other TH-camrs don't even try, which is annoying!
@@travis4482 It's neither, it's more a spectrum of modern languages that grew out of the same languages and deviated separate ways over time, but it's true that some elements of German dialects sound like old and fusty English, but some others have independently gained similarities to English that are interesting. Some Austrian dialects use "I" instead of "Ich."
His Latin is amazing
16:10 my great-grandfather was a farmer in Poland before he was taken at the age of 16 during the invasion to a labor camp in Germany. He was forced to grow crops for the German’s and he was even forced to take care of an officer’s children after their mother died. He met his wife (my great-grandmother) at the camp. Once, my grandmother was beaten so badly by a guard that she “slept for a week”. It was a coma and she had permanent brain damage from that experience.
After the war they left and became farmer’s in America and polish food is still very important to my family to remind us of Ojciec. (He lived to 98)❤
💔❤️
@@owleyes9739 I am very grateful that you are here. Our grandparents went through hell on earth. Thank you for sharing your grandparents story.❤❤❤
Thank you, for sharing this story.
Good that they managed to escape. My great-grandfather in Poland was also sent to a labor camp by the Germans for about 2 years. Then the Soviets came and sent him to a labor camp in Siberia for 7 years because he had previously been part of the Polish military. It's good that your grandparents were spared that.
Greetings from Germany ✌🏼
The main concern for Germany in WW2 was that the allied Naval blockade cut German off from Grain, vegetable, and animal oils and fats as well as petroleum from the United States. As happened in WW1, the so called " Engljsh disease, Rickets was a consequence of tge British and French Naval blockade of the North Sea ports. The Germans only starved very late in tne war by starving everyone else on the European continent. The German troops were glad to finally get out of Greece as they only controlled the towns not the countryside. The Greek partisans would use a knife on any captured German, by sliding their throats to conserve ammunition. A gruesome end.
notice that Miller is not smiling, there is no music, no funny bussiness, he is doin it for history not for the fun. very good Miller very good. respect
i got to admit max your homefront series has become my second favorite of your work. the first being your medieval videos.
I agree. The medieval is my favorite, too.
I'm also partial to the ancient recipes, although there's clearly fewer surviving recipes. Honey glazed mushrooms have even become a standard side dish for me.
was gonna say exactly this, would love to see japan or france (if anything was going on in france food wise)
@@Dia.dromesagreed!
Agree, this series is super interesting to me as someone who does Allied WW2 re-enactments
Hi! German from Southern Bavaria here. My grandmother was born in 1933 and spent her childhood and youth in a tiny village (about 20 families or so) about a half hour away from Augsburg. She remembers that towards the end of and after the war, they had two relatively wealthy farmers in the village who had plenty of food and wouldn't share with the rest of the village. She was the second oldest of 6 brothers and sisters and went from house to house to beg for food regularly. She gets angry to this day when she talks about how the wife of one of the farmers would refuse to give up old bread crusts because they were keeping them for their pigs. They mostly lived off a few boiled potatoes the wife of the other farmer gave them, stuff they found in the surrounding forests / fields / abandoned gardens and some donations from the local minister. Since they were quite a large family known in the village, her dad wasn't home and some of the other families sometimes also took pity on them and gave them some leftovers. Her dad was a lumberjack employed with a local baron before the war, so they were already quite poor. He was captured and held in captivity in Russia towards the end of the war, so it was their mom and she and her sisters. During the worst times, they also resorted to slaughtering the barn kittens.
One of her starkest memories seems to be US soldiers riding through her village in tanks. They had a middle aged lady in the village who was a hard core nazi and who had threatened to shoot the American Troops with her hunting rifle from her window, should they dare to enter the village. So all the kids and some of the adults were terrified she would open fire from her window and the tanks would blow them up. She was also scared of the black men because she had been told stories about "the black american devils" and how they treated women and children. Contrary to her belief, the US troops were super nice to the women and kids and they were handed some chocolate by the soldiers passing through.
Can you imagine that, struggling so hard to survive, in comes the enemy and they give you chocolate of all things as a treat.
She's not wrong about the blacks.
They were vicious during the Civil War and Vietnam war too
@@BM_100 yes, the civil war, vietnam, wwii.
all wars where whites were known for their heckin wholesome behavior, themselves.
Cult life@@saber2802
@@BM_100 Your cult is calling.
My grandmother grew up at that time. She fled to Hungary with her family that largely died on the trail but got sent back. She wound up working as a farm hand and the tender age of 4, but the food was so scarce by the end of the war that she ate rotten apples, moldy bread, and drank spoiled milk and beer to sustain herself. She is still kicking at 84 watching this with me.
Why Hungary?
@erzsebetkovacs2527 Her family had friends there who were wealthy.
@@genautelevishn5999 About what exactly? That in farming towns there wasn't food?
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 Because in Hungary there were less supporters of the Axis powers more extreme ideas if you know what I mean.
Amazing! God bless her!!
I have been watching your videos for a long time and I genuinely love that you can tackle such a difficult subject with so much grace and respect. No one with a soul can justify what happened. But we can empathize with the first persons that were affected.
The one story I remember my German grandmother telling me about the war was about how she finally found some food and made the best dish she'd ever tasted. But then she made it again after the war, and it was just terrible. Hunger really is a powerful force
My great grandmother fled Soviet collectivism not long before the war. Even after living in the US for like 60 years, she still had an accent thanks to the strong Eastern-European communities in Chicago. I always remember her speaking very highly of my great grandfather's Polish side of the family (others who also fled Europe), and if she did speak of Russia, it was never anything good. Just found it interesting that you and many others on here with relatives from Germany have somewhat endearing stories, yet the handful of older Russians I've met haven't had a single good thing to say about their homeland.
My father’s expression is “hunger is the best sauce” whenever he makes something and I compliment it. It’s cute but in these circumstances, it’s sadly true.
I think that was a classy/sensitive disclaimer. Very reasonable.
A reasonable choice, too. It's good to know that, even if they weren't kept on starvation rations while forced to perform heavy labor, and were infinitely better off than the people who were, ordinary German citizens could still have their food confiscated by the government at any time. No one benefited from this war. Not really.
History is important. This censorship is for weak sheep, and their beloved corporation.
@@IchbinX Honestly, I think we understood this period of history better in the years before the man in charge of Germany at the time became He Who Must Not Be Named.
If I am being frank, people need to be less sensitive about talking about historical topics. If we dont speak about and learn from them then the true tragedy is that we will not have learned anything and make the same mistakes again.
@@TristanBlack91 Like Democrats, yes. I agree.
I watch your channel a lot because I love history and cooking, but today I saw your Bombas socks advertisement and wanted to say we were hit by a tornado in April, and relief workers brought packs of Bombas socks the company had donated for us in survival packs and we were so thankful. They really do good, great company.
My grandmother told me a story when she was young during WW2 the family gathered around for a meal of hutspot, which is a traditional Dutch meal of boiled and mashed together potatoes carrots and onions, when a bomb landed near their home and shattered a window getting glass all in their food before they were able to eat it. She remembered it so well because of the amount of work that went into getting food in Holland during the occupation. She said it would take all day for her father to go around the countryside to try and find things to eat for their family.
And today holland is under muslim occupation
That's crazy, my grandma from Belgium has that EXACT story except it was a rabbit stew, she still says "If we had put the lids back on the pans when the sirens sounded, we would've had dinner." Their town was already liberated and it was Christmas, so they had rabbit stew, which was a very rare treat during WW2 and takes hours to cook.
My grandfather told me a story about the cat they had during WW2. The cat always scratched everybody and my great-grandmother had told my grandfather that they would get rid of the cat if he did it again. The cat did it again and my grandfather took him to the butcher. I'm not sure if they actually ate the cat, because they story always stopped after the butcher. My great-grandmother was upset about it though. He also told stories about demolishing empty homes for wood to use as fuel, eating tulip bulbs and cycling on a bicycle with wooden wheels. Food was very hard to get, especially after they had to leave their home (it was demolished by the Germans).
@leanne5343 why would germans demolish a dutch home without any reason?
that is why you always cover your food kids
As the granddaughter of Ukrainians who had to flee due to Germany’s actions in WWII I still really appreciate hearing about how their average citizen lived and survived during this time and food is a great vessel for sharing an that history. To survive is human. To not talk about it leaves holes in history and our understanding of it and that doesn’t benefit anyone. It happened, we should acknowledge and talk about it in informative ways, especially ones that remind us how real it was, and I think your videos are great ways to do that. I think this is an important addition to your series Max
As a grandson of a Ukrainian who was enslaved and survived in Germany, I agree. It is amazing how important food becomes when you are denied access to it regularly, and how even an onion given by allied soldiers can mean the difference between life or death in those times. As the Timeghost army says: Never forget!
Agreed from the granddaughter of Hungarians
To think we have people in this country who consider it oppression when their wifi goes out.
@@Rockhound6165 No one seriously thinks that.
@@HarryNott unfortunately yes they do. Just ask my daughter.
This video is the most convincing demonstration of what sets you apart from the other professionals in the business. You've navigated this one brilliantly. Absolutely amazing job.
PS. It's a bit ridiculous that we can't mention a certain German party in historical context without being screwed up by the TH-cam algorithm...
Well, I guess there are so many people out there using the word as a racial slur willy nilly that the TH-cam police can't pick up the difference between that & historical references.
Because actual facists are back in a very real way.
I am thinking of my recently deceased aunts. They were Greek and grew up in Athens in WW2. My eldest aunt said that carts would come around in the morning and take away those who had died at night due to starvation. The carts were often two stories high. My grandmother talked about walking 10k one way to go to the black market. She was always very proud that all of her 5 children survived and that her furniture was intact (people burned furniture in the winter for heat).
If you go to the Greek war museum there are inventories by the Germans in what and how many foodstuffs they had taken.
My aunts were always concerned about how thin my cousins were and trying to fatten them up.
It didn’t get better after the war because of the civil war. I remember a family friend from around Pyrgos talking about petrosoupa (stone soup). Of course it had no nutritional value, but the children thought they were eating something.
My grandmother who survived multiple wars was specifically traumatized by the starvation the Germans caused here during those events. She would keep uneaten food even if it was visibly colonized by say fungus and serve it as normal to eat, specifically bread she would eat and serve even if green as a hulk and full of puffy hair structures and she would even say "free penicillin" because that's what she told herself and the kids to convince to eat it. If anything fell and hit the ground she would fall upon her knees crying and begging god for forgiveness and she would try to clean the food that fell and serve it back. At times she would also pretend or tell me as a kid to, when thirsty, pretend that I turn on a water source (forgetting the English word for it) and drink from it, in my imagination, so I guess they didn't always had access to drinkable water either. Btw I don't know for how long and why but both her, my grandfather and their extended family (brothers, sisters, probably mother since father was dead) were living in caves outside the city (Herakleion of Crete) where they all had their kids too, so maybe that's why they probably couldn't even reliably access water. My grandpa on the other hand seemed largely unscarred (even though he had been through even more wars, dude lived for a century, born on paper at 1902 but likely in truth earlier than that since it was the practice at the time for many (my father and uncles too).
Your grandmother was such a strong woman for being able to shepherd your family through all of that.
@@jromero9795 thank you. She managed to have another child after the war. She was an amazing woman.
@@DragonlordSVS I didn’t even mention the water situation. The Germans cut off the water supply to Athens later in the war. My dad was 1 at the time, and the family would save any water drops for him. My dad has stories of finding moldy bread, cutting off the mold and eating the bread.
I think most of the survivors of that time were severely traumatized mentally.
Unfortunately, there are fewer and fewer of them left.
@@christinamendrinos3163 Damn maybe the same thing had happened to my grandmother and thats how she got stuck with pretending to drink imaginary water to quench her thirst even when life had returned to normalcy. Wasn't aware of Germans also rationing/shutting off water.
I am German and living in Germany, and this dish is so familiar and comforting to me. Even in this modern day and age Germans absolutely love their Eintöpfe and potato dishes! And I do enjoy to eat pickled red beets as a side for many of my meals, they're so good! It's fascinating how our country, culture, and political landscape have changed so much-- yet we still eat food thats so similar to the food that people ate back then. Thank you for your lovely video, as always!
Die meisten können doch nicht mal mehr kochen
@@livewallberg Ok, boomer
But like he said, most germans would grate some cheese on their Auflauf nowadays and use cream instead of milk. Also I'm pretty sure the flour was meant for a roux, but it wasn't mentioned anywhere in the recipe.
@@neonity4294 Im assuming the cheese is used instead of the yeast flakes / nutritional yeast.
Nutritional yeast has a cheesy flavour, so I’m guessing the war recipe used it as a substitute for cheese (as well as being packed with different nutrients)
watching this in Germany, while eating Eintopf with potato and red beet. 😂
I was raised by my German Grandmother in her home of at least 40 years (from the 1940's into the 1980's). She would tell me of many stories from surviving after the war. She rented an up stairs apartment from her land lord who lived on the floor level. As I grew older, it was my job the bring fire wood and coal bricks up from the cellar, clean the ashes out and stoke the fires in the mornings. Even in the 70's and 80's, almost all cooking and heating was using wood and coal in her house. Even electricity was a luxury. Once or twice a week, we'd walk into town to the butcher shop (where the butcher would always give me a treat of a small piece of bologna) and then to the bakery to buy our bread, where the baker would also give me a treat. I was never allowed to tend the garden or chickens. Living at the edge of the city, she knew where most of the walnut trees were and we'd stop there on some of our walks to gather a few. The stories she told on our walks...
As bad as it sounds, one of my favorite meals was always Nudel und Hund (Noodles and dog) I'm sure there are stories behind that name but I never asked. It was just ground meat gravy over noodles, sometimes with mushrooms, onions and carrots. It's still to this day my go to comfort food to remind me of simpler times.
Fascinating. Thanks for sharing
You know the german speech: Kopf ab, Schwanz ab: Hase. In Bezug auf Hund und Katze mag das bestimmt haben. Bei mir in der Gegend wurden Katzen häufig als Dachhase bezeichnet. Also... den Rest überlasse ich jetzt deiner Vorstellungskraft.
Would love to see the recipe for that.
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 as I know it from my grandma (born 1920) it was really just browned onions, ground meat and cooked pasta (any short pasta), salt and pepper. When on hand she added cream. Sorry for inserting myself.
My dad knew a lot of funny/disgusting names for food from his time in the army.
Like “exploded pilot” and such. I'm not german.
I think it's just folksy/vulgar humor.
Like the american SOS - "Stuff on a Shingle” - Creamed Beef on toat
My great-grandparents often told stories about life during the Nazi regime, particularly about the challenges they faced as farmers. One thing they always mentioned was how the NSDAP enforced strict controls on meat production. After butchering, farmers were required to hand over large portions of meat to the state, leaving little for their own families. It was a tough time, and they described how most of the pigs were incredibly meager back then-partly because resources were scarce, but also because farmers needed to underreport the weight of their livestock.
To get around the inspections, my great-grandparents and their neighbors developed a system. When the inspectors came to check the weight of the pigs, they would bribe them with a share of the very meat they were supposed to report. The inspectors would look the other way, accepting the pigs as lighter than they actually were. This way, my great-grandparents could keep enough meat to feed their family and share with the community. It was a risky but necessary act of quiet defiance in a time when survival often depended on finding ways to outsmart the system.
Strange how a fascist/lawless regime makes otherwise law-/moral abiding citizens into criminals just to survive. That's what makes my stomach churn seeing what's going on in the world today...
So many recipes in my family for mock this, mock that. Two world wars and two recessions kept those alive 😂. I still make ‘mock mayonaise’, gardeners pie (with mock pie) etc. We all know how to preserve greens and fruit. My Dutch grandmother was so traumatized by bad smell (due to no more soap) she hoarded soap for decades. She died in 2004 and we still have bars of soap from the fifties, sixties and seventies 😂
That is so interesting. What do you make mock mayonnaise with?
Thank you for talking about the famine the Axis caused in Greece. It is one of the big World War II crimes, that is rarely talked about outside of Greece. It was so bad, that most Greeks today are obsessed with food, we call it the Occupation Syndrome. Because our grandparents (I was born in 79) have all told us stories about how they searched for nettles etc or they were forced to eat cats, dogs and rats... And my grandparents, both sides, lived in villages in rural areas where things were better than in Athens, where people would die at the streets. One of my grandfathers was a member of the Greek Resistance, the biggest Resistance movement in Europe in relation to the population (about 40% of the Greek population participated one way or another in the Resistance, but most European historians overlook it because the Greek Resistance was organized by communists, so at the end of WW II the Allies, especially the British turned against them and contributed to the Greek Civil War). The Resistance fighters were hiding in the forests in the mountains, where they could hunt, but they also got help and food by the people in the villages. The people who had barely enough bread would share the little food they had with the Resistance fighters. And then there were the traitors, who worked with the Nazis and/or took entire fortunes, houses, gold jewels etc in exchange for a bottle of olive oil...
Fascinating, I live in Australia & we have the biggest Greek population outside of Greece. So, I know a lot of Greek people & I find this information very interesting and has made me really sad. Even the information in the video that 300,000 Greeks died of starvation is really atrocious.
Reminds me a lot of resistance in the ussr and partisans. Are there any classic films that depict the Greek resistance that you described?
@@kseniagalina4290 Sadly, there are not any accurate film adaptations about it. Because after WW2, our allies turned against us and "helped" (first the British , then the Americans) in sparking a civil war, working together with the Greeks that during the Occupation worked together with the Nazis. The communist rebels lost the civil war and the winners wrote a very different history and made films that hushed up the reality. The people who fought with the largest Greek resistance organization (ELAS - ΕΛΑΣ) were hunted down, even after the civil war. The Greek resistance was actually only recognized by the Greek state in the 80s, after a military dictatorship in the 70s crumbled down (almost taking the country with it) and a socialist democratic party came to power.
@@cariaus3758 Greetings from Greece to Australia! It was infact the aftermath of the WW2 and the civil war that boosted the immigration of Greeks to Australia. There were already Greeks in Australia, but when in 1954 the Australian government invited Greeks to work in the country, many more took the opportunity, in order to flee from poverty, hunger, destruction and political division that was the result of the civil war that came after the Axis occupation. The aftermath was devastating both for the communist members of the Resistance and the poor right wing voters. Thats why in the 50s and 60s many Greeks migrated to Australia, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Sweden etc. Now I got an idea: Max could do a video about recipies of Greek immigrants in Australia or in general about Australian cuisine in the early days of colonization.
@@ΒασιλικήΣαμαρά-ε7ε Thanks for the information and I think a lot of Greek families have kept your traditional recipes, that they now share with all of us. Delicious!
I will say shout out to Bombas, they sent a bunch of socks to my unit when deployed, and they held up really well the whole deployment and after.
And now they’ve stepped up to support another genocidal regime by sponsoring this nazi recipe. Good to know bombas supports our American war criminals with socks just like they apparently have no problem with the original nazis.
Are you going to do an episode about the Netherlands? Because the west of our country had a massive famine during the war and they had to become very creative to even survive. A good example is eating tulip bulbs
I would be really interested in hearing about what those in occupied European countries were eating!
Surviving off of tulip bulbs is violently Dutch and I'm here for it
Wow. Tulip bulbs? Wow!
Other things we ate where sugar beets, wood flour or in simple terms bread made of sawdust, acorns, wallpaper glue, animal feed and more things
italy, france, sweden, and norway would be interesting to me as well
My wife's grandmother was a child near Dresden during World War 2. They were lucky enough to have a pear tree, and essentially subsisted on slightly rotten pears from the cellar through the whole war. The rest of her life she refused to eat another pear.
She left for America as soon as the war ended to escape the soviets, and said she gorged herself on chocolate bars for the entire boat trip.
My mom used to sprinkle flour over the layers of potatoes...
Layer potatoes, onion, flour, then salt, pepper & dabs butter evenly spread across the top, repeat.
Then she would pour milk to the bottom of the top layer of potatoes.
Then she would put sausages on top. Cover with foil.And bake covered until the potatoes was tender at 350° for about an hour. Remove the foil once you've checked the potatoes for done this and continue baking until the potatoes are browned
This recipe is very similar to homemade au gratin potatoes
Yeah, sprinkling the flour over the potatoes is the only other place I could think of where it could go.
butter flakes on top for the crust thats what i knew and somethimes butter and breadcrumps browned and put ontop of the dish
Yes, it seems to be a variation on au gratin potatoes common to German-speaking cultures and their neighbours. We have a variety specific to my home country, too, which has been in close contact with German-speaking Austrians for centuries. But this (the Hungarian) variety is made with boiled potatoes, boiled eggs, smoked Hungarian sausage and sour cream instead of the béchamel-like flour and milk combination.
350°C = 662°F
350°F = 175°C
This is similar to a recipe passed down in our family, except ours included slices of apples. Apples are not a surprising addition, since the family had apple trees in their back yard.
Austrian here. My grandma was a child during WW2 and she used to tell us stories about the time. She lived in a very rural part of the country, far away from any front. Her parents were farmers and comparatively well off, since the farm was pretty big. Cow's milk was confiscated, so pretty much everybody in the village had a goat. She and her family never had to go hungry. They also had prisoners of wars helping them on the farm and they were treated like family. They ate at the same table and got the same food. A local boy once helped during harvest and was of course fed lunch by my great grandmother. They had Knödel and the boy started crying because he'd never seen so much food in his life. He got to take some home to his family and was overjoyed.
i somehow doubt soviet prisoners were treated like family
@@angelcabeza6464
I think he mainly refers to the food. Like he said, eating the same food at the same table (instead of just getting their tiny ration).
It was similar with my great grandparents. They were farmers and also had a Ukrainian forced laborer during the war. At lunch, everyone ate together, family as well as farm workers. Which included the Ukrainian guy. He got the same amount of food as everyone else.
However, I'd say that calling it "he was treated like family" is definitely an exaggeration. And it's trivializing the situation, and mainly used to downplay individual guilt. Because even if you did treat the forced laborers decently and like humans, that still doesn't change the fact they were effectively slaves. Of course treating them like regular humans was better than many did, but it's a stretch to call it "treating them like family".
However, in a very cynical twist of fate, treating the Soviet forced laborers well often meant unknowingly signing their death warrant after the war. Because the Soviets treated everyone who came back well-fed as a traitor and sent them to the gulags. Which was known by the end of the war. Said Ukrainian guy didn't want to go back in 1945, but the British sent every Soviet POW and forced laborer back, whether they wanted or not.
My father was in his teens in Poland when he was slaved out. He was with a buddy who was able to bribe an official to send them to a farm, rather than to a factory, where they figured they might be able to sneak some food if they didn't get fed. Which they did have to do.
My great grandfather had a similar story he grew up on the Polish German border at the time so he spoke German better then most and during the war was sent to work in a shop under a guy named Speer, yes like the artitechet no idea if related but he was treated human but the older shop keeper while the shop keepers son was fully into the ideology and when ever would visit my Great Grandfather would have to basically be on his best. Luckily he was able to survive the whole war just working in the shop.
My Grandmother was taken by the Germans in their double pronged attack against Ukraine: 1) Deplete the farms to starve the people. 2) Enslave the people to enrich Germany. She worked at a hotel during the day and at an estate cleaning the house in the evening, then slept in a bunkhouse attic with other slaves at night. She had stories of going into the sewers to catch snails so the hotel would have meat to feed officers (high class chefs could face criminal charges for denying service to military officers), and of being allowed the privilege of licking the flour from her fingers after making rolls for the kitchen all day. She sadly also had stories of girls vanishing because a civilian German man offered her an entire potato or a piece of bread...
Mr. Miller you have indeed paid your dues and are among some of the best history and food channels I have ever seen. Keep on being the best you can be.
I am of German descent and my grandparents would tell me of how it was pre-war. After attending one singular N*** rally with their next-door neighbors, my grandparents saw the writing on the wall and fled the very next week to Scranton, Pennsylvania. Thank you for the video!
Smart
I grew up in the Mountains outside of Scranton, Pa. Lots of German folks .
It's cool to know your ancestors were anti-Nazi. Most Germans have Nazi ancestors.
I understand Max can’t say Nazi for the algorithm but no reason we have to censor ourselves in the comments.
@@HutchIsOnYTno reason Max has to either. I’ve seen videos ABOUT nazis with millions of views lol
Honestly one thing that always impresses me is the effort you go to to pronounce foreign words (I assume) accurately
I've lived in Germany for over 20 years and am fluent in the language. Max's pronunciation of German is indeed quite good (not perfect, but quite good).
I can’t speak for how accurate the German pronunciation was in this video. But as a swede, in the videos he has done before with Swedish dishes and names, the pronunciation was surprisingly good.
Not perfect, but quite good. And many many times better then what you normally see in English speaking media.
His pronunciation is good enough that I can always understand which word he is saying, which is better than 99% of english speaking youtubers (I just this week had to turn on subtitles of a history video because I for the life of me couldn't figure out what the youtuber was saying in MY native language 😂).
For someone who I assume does not actually speak german, that is quite impressive.
As a native speaker, the pronunciation is great! :)
I believe Max is of German descent
Fun facts: It's called the English disease in Sweden also. No, the British didn't deliberately cause rickets anywhere, but they sure had a lot of it during the industrial revolution, where it was so prevalent in the mill towns that other European countries took note. London especially was a real hotbed for it, as many people basically never had access to direct sunlight or fresh vegetables.
Tbf here in the UK we learn about it as something that happened a lot here in the industrial revolution times as well. It's interesting to hear it's called that in several places!
Yeah, that's what I learned too - I'm from England, and we also learned that rickets was called 'the english disease' because during the industrial revolution, London produced a lot of smog; This smog would cause children to not get much sunlight and lead to rickets, as well as malnutrition if you were a poor person, who probably couldn't get a lot of fresh veg.
@@dinolil1474 it was so bad that the at the height of Empire military recruiters had to turn away about 30% of potential enlistees due to rickets
Rickets is linked to a lack for vitamine D and therfore to a lack of sunlight. It was first described in GB and there allocated to certain regions. My Grandmother and my mother got when nthey were kids as a kind of a proactive treatment god liver oil (Lebertran, in German). Parents were obsessed with this desease.
We also call it in a similar way in Hungary (Angolkór-Angol=English, kór=disease)
I remember talking to my adopted grandma who lived in berlin during the war. She told me storys of how her family had to boil the wall paper off of the wall so they could wat the slower from the wallpaper paste. And how hard just surviveing through the end of the war was so brutal. And how basically the thing that keep her going was the chocolate bomber. Who would drop chocolate to the german people after the war. Her family escaped from east Germany as the wall was being built into west germany by buying a map from a farmer who had marked where the land mines were in his field as they were building the berlin wall. Really a fascinating woman and really gave me a perspective on what it was like to be there.
My grandparents were in their late teens when WWII broke out in Greece. I grew up with their stories about the war and the extreme hunger they experienced, first under Italian occupation, then under German occupation...They were farmers and soldiers would storm their homes, confiscating the majority of anything they had harvested, leaving them very little to get by on...And yet they still considered themselves to be lucky as living in the countryside, they were able to gather the odd wild greens to boil and eat, while people in the cities would literally look through garbage heaps in hopes of finding even the smallest scraps of food...It's no wonder that an entire generation of Greeks after the war could not and would not waste food and were obsessed with having enough food stored at home and making sure that their children and grandchildren were always well-fed...
I wrote a paper on this. Cool to see the topic here randomly. Yes the rural people of Greece were much better off, starvation was commonplace in the cities.
The people that suffered the most were the refugees who got no aid from the government.
Fun fact: The Germans living in Greece (many of them, anyway) were happy with the invasion at first. Until they found out they would suffer just as the Greeks from lack of food etc. Karma.
My parents lived in Germany in the 1950s; they say that people planned meals around potatoes, not meat. My folks copied their neighbors and bought a hundred-weight of spuds for the winter and couldn't figure out how to eat so many. They became very popular because they gave away potatoes to their neighbors.
Goring: Guns make us powerful; butter will only make us fat.
Also Goring: (stuffs another chocolate eclair down his fat gullet)
As they say, under fascism, hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug.
i mean he's not a hypocrite
The guy was both morbidly obese AND severely addicted to morphine, at the same time. It's almost impressive
@@ChapuleTaylor I've heard some talk of guns and butter. It's the cause of all my shaking.
@@ChapuleTaylor is this your defending Nazis arc Taylor?
Our family made this "Casserole" on a regular basis throughout the 70's and 80's with a few changes (no fennel, but onions or leeks).
Regarding the flour, either toss your potato rounds in the flour or add a sprinkle from a shaker in each layer. We would also add grated butter sprinkled in each layer as well.
We would also use rosemary instead of caraway seeds.
Removing the fennel would change the flavor profile very much as well as using rosemary. It is a completely different potato casserole and not the same dish. Otherwise every pasta with sauce are the same dish.
Great video thanks! My grandma was from Bavaria, Germany. She always talked about the rations of the food when she was a child. Her grandmother would make “put and scrape” which was where you smear some meat onto the bread and scrape it back off. You had to make the meat last for many days! Sugar was very hard to come by also. She said her grandmother was baking a cake when Americans started bombing her village…Her grandma refused to go down into the basement until her cake was done because sugar was that rare! Bombs were going off all around and she stubbornly waited for her cake to cook!
My German grandparents grew up during WWII in Eastern Germany, I have heard so many of their horror stories from that time. I remember them explaining just how little food they had: one loaf of bread for the entire family made from grains of wheat they collected one by one from the ground in farmers’ fields after the crop had been harvested, or my Opa being so starving in the middle of the night he would sneak the only potato they had left in the house and selfishly eat it raw like an apple. So heartbreaking, how the different regions of the country were affected with rationing and food shortages. I’m glad they survived!
Sometimes I forget just how recent all this really was, like yeah I know it wasn't all that long ago from reading about it, but seeing relatively young people still say their parents remember the war is different. For me, it was my great great grandparents I never met who fled poland during the war so I guess there's more temporal distance for me if that makes sense
What part of Germany are you talking about? The former GDR was "Middle Germay" in WW2, as there were more eastern parts (Ostpreußen, Schlesien etc). Also, the real time of hunger started AFTER the end of the war for the Germans as during the war the Germans stole food from the occupied countries. Yes, there were rations in the war but people starved afterwards.
My nanny and great-aunt with their kids where driven out by the Polish and only survived by gathering potatoes and left-over crops until they reached a safe haven in north germany. I think the wellbeing of germans is highly overstated
@@Mara-fk4vc I only learned about this part when visiting Wroclaw about a year ago. Few people talk about this, although I have known about the descendants of Early Modern German-speaking settlers in Hungary, who were also forced to leave after WW2.
Everytime my sister and I left food on the plate my Grandpa would say: "Ihr habt noch nie gehungert", (You have never felt hunger before) He would say that every single time😂
23:29 I'd say Italy, Finland, France Greece, Bulgaria, China and Romania would also warrant an Episode.
And Aotearoa!
India, with the largest ever voluntarily raised army in history and one of the most brutal artificially induced famine, is ignored as always.
@@rajath275 IKR?
I would love to see finland
You did a very good job tackling such a difficult time and subject. Your skills as an approachable historian really shine through in this video. Well done.
Just a little clarification on the "turnip winter": the vegetable in question ("Steckrüben" in German) were rutabaga, a.k.a. swedes, not what's usually called "turnips" in English.
My mother lived thru Ww2 in Berlin. Ate too many rutabagas, bread with sawdust. Dead horses after surrender.
Growing up, we called these rutabagas “yellow turnips” vs the regular white/purple ones. I disliked their strong flavor as a kid, but love them now, especially mashed with butter, cream and potatoes…
They are called turnips or "neeps" in Scottish English though.
@@sheepewe4505 It depends on the Scot in my experience. Sometimes neeps are turnips (the white ones), sometimes swedes (the yellow ones). Tbh it's a little frustrating as someone that likes turnips but isn't keen on swede.
A video on Japanese homefront food would be very interesting. I know things got pretty desperate over there by war's end and even before Midway, soldier's rations were lacking badly, and considering the soldiers got the bulk of the food stuffs, I can only imagine what the civilians were putting up with. I had great uncles who served there in the post-war occupation and even that was a touchy subject they rarely spoke on.
It was basically no food. Ironically the situation of Japanese peasants was pretty damn similar to that of Chinese peasants on the other side, despite the Japanese army "winning" for much of the war.
If it wasn't for the American occupation, Japan would have almost certainly had a Communist revolution after the war.
"The grave of fireflies" is based on the true story of two Japanese children dealing with food shortages at the end of WWII. The animated production of this book was certainly worth watching.
A friend of mine shared some stories with me about his experience as boy toward the end of the war.
A half cup of rice and half a pickled plum was a ration for a day sometimes.
He used to catch grasshoppers with a piece of bamboo and a paper bag.
They would stir fry them if they needed food. Or if they had food would run a needle and thread thru them to dry and feed the chickens for the eggs.
That you have to censor yourself because TH-cam no longer supports its mission of educating and sharing ideas and performance, is silly. Being afraid of words, and making content producers afraid of words, is just disappointing. Miller does an excellent job, despite the constraints.
Talking about how Germans ate was important: understanding how Germans approached the problem of food and food supply under their ideology of success adds a great layer to our understanding of the War. Thanks, Mr Miller!
The TH-cam algorithms lack nuance and don’t differentiate the word not mentioned in this video between educational use or if it’s used as propaganda for the neo fascists. Unfortunately there’s a lot of that on here, they manage to sidestep the algorithm with dog whistles
To be fair, did youtube ever claim to be anything but a machine for maximum profit at minimum effort?
There is no reason for any customer (advertiser) would want their ads on any specific video, but there is incentive to *not* want it on some videos. Rational max-profit solution is to demonetize with the widest net possible with no recourse.
I wish I could call it peak capitalism, but I see no reason it can't go.... peak-er.
I don't think TH-cam ever had such a mission and I'm not sure where you got the idea that they did.
@radekc5325 And the channels that are demonitized as advertiser unfriendly still get ads played on their videos, but the content creator does not get paid their share of ad revenue.
When did TH-cam ever have such a mission? Ever since it became possible to monetize anything on this site, and certainly ever since Google bought it, TH-cam has been about profit, not education. It is outrageous that people feel compelled to censor themselves to this extent, but it's not exactly out of line with what TH-cam has been for a very long time now.
My dad had rickets, born 1934. Glasgow, the diet was crap, still was when I went to live there 55 years later.
The "Wartime Farm" series did a segment on German bread. By the end of the war, ingredients like silage - fermented animal food - and sawdust were being used to stretch the grain supply. Surprisingly, the hosts said the taste was okay, even if it was hard to chew. I imagine that didn't help morale any.
As to why the South and West had food - there are entire video series that explore all the issues with transportation and logistics within Germany. It's a complicated situation that the leaders created. It's amazing Germany managed as well as it did considering who was making decisions.
In WWI, Britain had the largest number of men rejected for military service on medical grounds than any other nation. The reason - diseases like ricketts and others caused by vitamin deficiencies were rampant in urban areas. It was one reason why the British government promoted victory gardens so heavily.
Rickets was a big problem for the poor people in cities like London.
You either need to eat food rich in vitamin D, like milk and eggs, supplements or sunshine. Food and supplements were to expensive for the poor and the working poor.
Cities like London had a problem with air pollution, so sunshine was a problem as well.
Today, rickets is a rare disease in developed countries. Unfortunately, due to food insecurities and lousy fast-food diets, it might find it's way back.
@@andreabartels3176they are finding it again in young men who always wear their sweats with the hoodie up at all times. They virtually get no sun .
I'm a history undergrad and I actually really like how you gave quick mention to the atrocities happening at the time and that even the people who weren't involved benefitted. I think the food history you provided gives context that most people don't see. A lot of people have no idea what german domestic life was like during the second world war. I was reading an interview with a housewife named Frau Fischer, and she refers to having some "wonderful years" around the war, and talked briefly about sort of making a challenge out of making do during. With the context from this video, I can see how people could sort of attach an identity to the collective struggle, even if that struggle is for something terrible. The ways that the German government manufactures consent for war through domestic life is really interesting.
If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by "manufactures consent for war"? I never had the opportunity to study history in an official setting but I've always loved learning about it
@ basically there are things that states do to make it so that people aren’t outraged and instead support states going to war or waging wars on other states that are not showing any military aggression towards their state. A lot of it is done through news media nowadays, and has a lot to do with rhetoric around certain groups of people. There’s a book called Manufacturing Consent that is more political theory but builds its arguments on historical events. But in the case of WWII, demonizing other peoples and creating reasons for people to cheer on war efforts is pretty blatant. Like the propaganda isn’t subtle. What is subtle is how they get people to accept the conditions of everyday life that have been impacted by the state waging war with other states. So in Britain for example, the state framed a lack of house-making materials as an opportunity to rally for your country and fight the nazis from your home. Media about domestic life had a lot of “mend and make do” type slogans. Churchill would periodically go on the radio and cheer people on to eat their vegetables so that they can be “fit and in fighting form,” but really it was to encourage the public to grow their own food and not make such a big fuss over rationed items like meat and butter. Nowadays, most of what we see in the discussion of manufactured consent is before wars start rather than after, since our domestic life doesn’t really get rocked the same way that it did during the word wars, at least as long as war doesn’t happen on our soil.
I totally agree - things like the pot luck meals, emphasis on family life and health with promises of greater prosperity, the Hitler Youth (effectively like a Scouting movement with added propaganda) all served to persuade the populace in Hitler’s rise and maintenance of power. Actually looking in to this and the psychological and sociological conditions gives much more insight into what happened (and a better chance of averting another situation in future) than simply equating the German populace at the time with what was done in their name. I love the labelling of this as ‘manufacturing consent for war’. It should be a reminder for us that when politicians are promising us some of what we as individuals and families find important it is also necessary to look at their wider agenda and actions (which we might not be in agreement with).
@@kjarakravik4837 He means by Germans stating "wonderful years", the German people benefited from German invasions and looting of other nations. Essentially endorsing the war for material gain through propaganda without engaging in direct coercion. German domestic life was dependent on the course of the war.
Manufacturing consent in a Chomsky term
I think your tasting history should be a Television show because includes history as well as recipes
But who would air it? The History Channel or the Food Network?
Ugh... no. Fastest way to ruin a small-scale internet production like this is to hand it off to professional producers. Besides, more people watch sites like YT now every day than cable TV ever got. Commercial television is a dying medium.
It is already a “television show” and likely the best it can be without outside interference or dictates - this is the program here and now!
My grandma was the child of one such "self sufficient" farms in Austria and even before the war, they were not well off. She always said her mother was the best at preparing frog legs from frogs they caught on the riverside. Eggs, butter, meat and all the good stuff was usually sold for money - she never said if any of their goods were requisitioned for the war. For a while she even lived with the local midwife because her family couldn't afford to feed her and she was the oldest and would be ok living by herself and helping out with work.
Can add a bit to the topic, both my parents where children in the eastern regions during that time.
This is according to my father:
His father was a chief milker, which apparently was a "skilled labor" and in high demand on the farmsteads. He was very picky regarding his workplace, often when things where not to his liking packing up things and heading with his family to the next farmstead, strongly disliked the milking machines. Food was alsways good on the farmsteads, no shortage on meat (not the prime parts of course), milk and eggs.
He also had PoWs and also force recruited civilians from russia working under him. It was forbidden for them to even eat the same table, he still allowed it - my father remembered that there was one time where a officer from the police demanded for him to stop it he just replied "They work with us, they eat with us." and the matter was settled (this would likely have gone different if it werent a local (town) police officer). When the forced labourers were to be taken away to "work in the factories" he managed to get them back by claiming them essential for the farmsteads operation and later helped them to get away when the eastern front was drawing closer and closer.
This is according to my mother:
She lived in a small village where people were given a house and a small plot of land which was supossed to make them self sufficent - but that was only manageable with additional work on the fields of rich land owners. For the families relying on unskilled labour that usually meant the children also having to work from an early age to get by. Food was sparse, often having to be stretched heavily.
---------
My father remained highly fit and without much of health worries until his death, my mother on the other hand was afflicted with lots of troubles, many bone related. I do believe, without proof of course, that their nutrition as children had a hand in that.
Overall I was really suprised how almost "medieval" life in the villages was, just as a few examples:
The smith in my mothers village handled dentistry.
Shoes where usually wooden clogs, usually oversized for you to grow into as a child, wearing layers of socks at first to make them fit.
When the rich land owners approached their estate with a carriage the workers were supposed to head to the roadway and bow.
My grandma was born in 1936 in Germany. She lived in a rural area in the middle of Germany. She often told us how she and her two siblings were hungry and just bad one pair of shoes for the winter. They shared it, so only one of the kids was able to go to school when it was cold and had to teach the other two what they learned. They took turns, so everyone of them was able to learn as much as much as possible. Nearly all food they grew was taken by the officals/military. So they had to search food in the forests and collect beechnuts and other seeds to make oil out of it.
Feel this, since I am silesian of heritage and a lot of my people die d of Hunger. But you are not allowed to talk about this 'unofficial' history.
Beechnuts are so small, how were they able to make oil?
@@erzsebetkovacs2527They sometimes had to use deez nuts😢
@@erzsebetkovacs2527 They had to collect as much as they could and used an oil press, according to her old stories
@@Mara-fk4vc I can imagine this must be hard. In Germany there's rarely talked about this part of history. From my grandparents generation most people didn't talk about this part of their life at all. My grandma is the only one in my big family who ever started to talk about it. I think it's a pity. Learning about how she and her siblings grew up helped me a lot to understand her habits and views.
My father was born in the country in Germany in 1941. My grandmother lost her husband in 44 and she remarried and moved to the good ole USA. I know some of the recipes but she passed at an early age so when I find one that remi ds me of her cooking I go nuts! Thank you. I am making this for my father tonight.. I am sure he will love it with his pork chops. Lol
I've just started watching your videos. Love your research, and deft handling of the topic.
History, as hard as it is to look at sometimes, is important to observe so as to not repeat. Thank you for this video, Max.
We don't have to look at history anymore, it's currently repeating. There are pogroms happening in Europe as we speak. Observe the present, and if you ever said "I would never support nazis" as a child, make good on that promise today.
@titaniumvulpes I know, right? It's scary stuff. Feels like WWIII is right around the corner.
Could you imagine 20 years ago, being told that you can't mention words that are historical terms so your video can be played?? Aside from that, amazing video as always, love your channel!!
20 years ago was still right after 9/11 so no, absolutely nobody would be surprised about censorship...
People forget how TH-cam works. They pay Max a portion of the advertising money they receive from the ads that play during the episode. Advertisers don't want to pay much (or be associated with) complicated topics like the Nazi party. Max avoided the terms to ensure he got the best return on his time and effort for this video.
I was about to say TH-cam didn't exist 20 years ago, and then immediately realized it almost has. 😅
@@kjdude8765 For sure, not judging Max's choice, don't blame him one bit!
@@kjdude8765 No, it's not just about advertisement money. Videos that are not monetized are buried by the algorithm. It's another type of shadowbanning. TH-cam uses the advertisements as pretext to shadowban.
You could use milk cut with water and save some of that whole milk for another recipe. Or when rinsing out milk bottles, use the milky rinse water for a recipe. that's what they did during ww2. Just a thought. And no housewife during ww2 would ever peel a potato. use the whole thing, just scrub it good.
Potato skins are the best part in any potato dish from mashed to fries. I never understood why people peel them.
could be a texture thing or even just something that simply urks people. kinda like how people cut the crusts off of Sliced bread.
Growing up in germany I was always taught that you only ever peel potatoes AFTER you cook them, because then the skin comes off without wasting any of the potato with it. Germans don't like potato skins for some reason.
@@Roddy556 I hate it when people make dishes with the skin left on. From mashed to potatoes salad. We generally eat less potatoes these days and opting for rice and other root vegetables.
@@oomflemThe skins do have more solanine in them so if you are eating a truly massive amount of potatoes then eating all the skins as well may make you ill.
Ein richtig gutes Video,über das Essen im Krieg hab ich mir nie richtig Gedanken gemacht. Bin bei meiner Großmutter groß geworden(Jahrgang 1926).Sie hat mir erzählt das sie mit sieben Jahre angefangen hat im Haushalt zu helfen, das war damals so üblich. Es gab immer einfache aber sehr gute Küche. Schön das ihr auch mal die deutsche Seite betrachtet.
Thank you for using caraway, which is the correct spice.
Online dictionaries and specifically google often translate Kümmel into cumin, which has a totally different taste.
I'm born in the south of Germany where fennel definitely wasn't a common vegetable. In fact it first got popular in the beginning of the 70's - thanks to the growing Italian population. Potatoes and onions would have been our choice.
Wow! The video is great, like all of them. The disclaimer was moving. Trying to navigate such a sad, disgusting, time in history was hard but Max handles it very nicely. I was moved watching and listening to him. That being said, I am very glad you are showing all sides. Bravo!
From German (Bavarian) family recipes that I remember.. the flour is most likely meant, 1. for coating the pan after greasing it, and 2. to coat the cut potatoes to help them form a crust. Cut potatoes are often tossed in flour in several recipes, similar to some French fries
That was my thought too, to crisp up the edges.
I also wonder if the flour might create a little bit of a barrier while cooking so the potatoes don't get overpowered by the sauce
Ukrainian here. my great grandma was around 15 when she was taken to Germany as a forced worker. she was given to a relatively wealthy family and she was treated kind of well, more like a household staff than a serf/slave. that family despite being well off, was also on strict rations but they always shared food with her equally. she used to remember children of that family with fondness and never complained about the time she spent in Germany, despite how clearly traumatized she was. however after the war ended, Ukraine was stricken with a famine of 1946-1947 due to the country’s resources being so depleted by the war and tyrannical soviet regime, and our whole family barely survived that. WWII didn’t just end. it had long and painful consequences for every country affected by it.
I mean honestly, if u made hour videos. We wouldn't mind the extra history on all the topics, from b.c to 20th century. Ur channel is interesting and fun. And u always give us a good laugh or two.
It's awesome to see that you're not intimidated to take on the difficult parts of this series. History is always offensive if one tells the truth, so we may as well watch and learn.
Yap, always offensive... and mostly sadly not the truth, but we should keep looking for it.
@@Mara-fk4vcso Mr smarty pants over here
Enlighten us what parts of history are not true?
The ones that hurt your feelings? The ones that are against your agenda and ideologies? ❤
Facts are only ever offensive to delusional and stupid people.
@@Mara-fk4vc If you offend everyone at least a little, you're probably closer to the truth than not.
@@R.P-e2z 😂 yes
Hey Max! I am actually from germany and my grandma made similar dishes when I was younger :) So this definitely kept on going even later (she was born in 1940). And I just wanna say thank you for your efforts in your videos. Found your channel just a few months ago because of the Victoria Pudding. Greetings from germany ✌🏻
Excellent job Max on handling this delicate topic.
If Margarine were banned, it would be a butter world.
Jokes aside, Yvaltal sighting! Also the Aegislash from last week's video is one of my favorite pokemon.
It used to be the other was around... Margarine was banned in Dairy States in the 1950s. One could buy a white margarine like food and color it with a food coloring packet enclosed. We used to go to Iowa to buy margarine.
A great uncle was interned at a POW camp in Germany and I remember my grandmother stating that potatoes and water was his diet there. For the rest of his life, my great-uncle couldn't stomach eating potatoes and only rarely ate them.
If this is from '41, I wonder how/what was eaten in '44 by the average person.
Also, it amazes me what can be put on TH-cam w/ no problem, but a word USED IN PROPER HISTORICAL CONTEXT is a problem.
@@Kymmee2100 Right. I had to laugh at that, given all the BS I see on TikTok and TH-cam. And hunger was a real thing in Germany though many of the occupied countries sent their harvests and food to Germany so it wasn't as bad as in NL, Poland, etc.
@MsTimelady71 I will always remember the story of how Audrey Hepburn's family (like everyone) was reduced to eating flour made from tulip bulbs by the end of WWII.
I had a man in Assisted Living speak of Turnip Soup as a POW. There was a black bread I recall hearing about that wasn't very nourishing?
@@georgiafrye2815 Bread alone is not a proper food. It lacks certain vitamins and fats. Black Bread (Schwartzbrot) in itself is healthy but tends to encourage bowl movement
A story from my mother, who grew up during the war in germany
she and my grandmother went to pick up their rations one day. on this day, the rations have been shortened again, due to the length of the war.
my grandmother complained how she should feed my mother and her 4 brothers, as most of the food was shipped to the eastern front.
another woman overhard the complaint, and this woman was the wife of a high party member. she told my grandmother to shut up or "she will be removed"
luckily my grandparents had a garden and some animals like chicken and rabbits to ensure the nutrition of the family
As someone who is a current immigrant in German, when you said “the German rationing system was notoriously complex” that made laugh. Cause it’s so very very German nothing can ever be easy in this country
As a native German, I completely agree with you.
Cudos for getting the translation of "Opfersonntag" right ("sacrifice sunday" instead of "victim sunday").
Is that...a thing somewhere? "Opfer"'s definition in everywhere I looked included "sacrifice" first before "victim", and more importantly "victim sunday" makes no sense whatsoever?
yeah, but what about 'evil-tasting margarine'
@@Tinil0 "victim" is the main response when you enter "Opfer" into google translate. And often content creators take the google translation unreflected, if it makes sense or not. I give him credit for being more thorough.
Good episode. I also used to think that potatoes had no flavor of their own, but then I went to Peru, home of potatoes. Their potatoes have so much flavor! No butter, sour cream, or other flavoring required.
Hats off to you for that very thoughtfully worded disclaimer at the start of the history section. You are a very eloquent person who understands the impact of his words.
One of the things I enjoy the most about these videos is actually the comment section! It's so eye-opening to read people's family history. My grandfather lived in Italy during WW2 and told stories of having to eat cats to survive. When you're little you just think wow, that's gross but the older you get, the more you realise how insanely hard it was to go through this and how much it took to survive!
Love your channel. You navigated this difficult territory in a thoughtfully pleasant way. Keep up the great work.
I appreciate that!
Fascinating stories as usual. I am the grandson of Norwegians who came to America right before & after the war. I would love to see an episode on what recipes/food was eaten in occupied Norway.
I love how the Yveltail looks like it spotted that basket of potatoes from afar and is about to jump in it and have a snack.
You did a nice job on this episode, Max. I'm sure it was tricky! 👏👏
Thank you for making this video. I wondered if you'd cover germany. I'm german myself and it is a heavy legacy that we inherited; but it is part of our history. And I find it dangerous to ignore it or not exploring things like cooking during that time.
I got some stories from my Grandma who was born in 1940 into a farmer family in the Spreewald-region. She could really cook and had some great recipes, like bread-soup. I really loved this as a kid.
My Maternal Grandmother was a Polish Christian Holocaust Survivor. She was slave labor. She worked for a German Farmer and his wife. They told my Nana and the other slaves not to tell the Nazis what they were eating. Herman and his wife refused to do the starvation diet on the slaves, Herman and Katie feed the slaves whatever they had to ate. I am so grateful for the care and compassion that they gave my Nana and the others.
@@dianestafford6968 Your poor grandma may have been displaced and been under forced labor, but Polish non-Jews were NOT being gassed and exterminated. She is NOT a holocaust survivor.
I don’t blame the average German for the Holocaust. Those in power lied to them & controlled them. I’m sure there were millions of Germans who didn’t agree with the Nazi’s policies & beliefs.
It's crazy how we got to the point where people deny genocide of Poles during WW2. You need to create "Polish Christian Holocaust Survivor " to get your point across.
@@mixererunio1757 If we can have people denying the deaths of 6M+ Jews simply because religio-political differences... You bet your ass we would have Polish/Slavic/French/North African Genocide Deniers
@@mixererunio1757 I noticed that odd phrasing as well.
My great-grandfather was taken prisoner in May 1940 when the Germans invaded Belgium and then was used as forced labour in Austria until the end of the war. I haven't heard any specific anecdote about food other than he used to get extremely angry when my grandparents and later my mother wouldn't eat their whole meal. It goes to show how lack of food was a deeply traumatizing thing back then.
A Belgian by birth and living in Australia here. My paternal grandfather was sent to Leipzig as forced labour. Oddly, he was right-wing and passed that on to my father. It's easier to tell you what nationalities Dad likes, rather than the ones he doesn't like. My maternal grandfather was in the Belgian resistance, was betrayed, and last was seen in Buchenwald. The man I knew as my maternal grandfather was a Czech deported who refused to go back after the war because he hated the Russians :P
My grandma's mom lived to 106. I knew her well. Grandma passed last year at 103, spry as they come. I'm so grateful for the intimate first hand accounts of their youth.
My mother was in her 30s when I was borne in the early 1950s. Conversations about WWII would come up occasionally. I remember my mother talking to me about the difference between the SS and majority of German soldiers. She explained that many, if not most, of German soldiers were just like my dad, brothers, and uncles. They were people just trying to live their lives, put food on their families’ tables, and were often drafted into service. The soldiers’ families were just as sad as US families when they died. She encouraged me to avoid painting everyday hard working people with those in power who do horrendous things. I always enjoyed our conversations, including the one about her friend who struggled with battle fatigue (PTSD). She taught me to think more critically about the world around us. Thank you for this video.
@@kathrynbaker7278 Very well said. 👍
ah yes the myth of the pure wehrmacht. classic misinformation. the wehrmacht did plenty of war crimes, look it up. wasnt just the SS
I'm polish but did a lot of reading of my own, as opposed to just believe what I'm told. Telling people that SS and the rest of the army were two very different things is never easy
When I was a kid I remember my grandma talking about Rickets and calling it the English disease. Her explanation was that England was always gray and rainy and that a lack of sun caused Rickets. She was always reminding me of this when I resisted her pushing me to go play outside. (We had plenty of sun here in the US.) Come to find out that the main cause of Rickets is a vitamin D deficiency and that indeed, sunlight helps prevent it.
I never really got this as rickets doesn’t just automatically spawn in when it’s not really bright, it’s for people who don’t go outside not for countries which aren’t particularly sunny.
@@RyanGoslingthestonecoldsigmaif you don't have enough food sources of vitamin D (which if you're having issue getting food at all you probably aren't, bc most dietary vitamin d is from animal sources), a country that lacks strong sun is going to also have issues with rickets because it's that much harder to get enough if you're already deprived. The lack of sunlight is a compounding issue for the disease.
As far as I know the name comes from industrial revolution times. In big cities like London there was so much smoke, the sky was grey. Also, poor children had to work in factories and even mines from a young age. It’s called the English disease in different European languages.
Rationing was world wide no matter what country you were in. Food is a universal thing that binds us all together. Thank you for taking the time and energy to cover all countries and for the disclaimer. Times were and are hard atm but we are all here to enjoy your videos and of that I am graciously appreciative. This isn't much but I give it with a glad heart.
Actually, this whole series was(still is kinda) hard to watch for me. But, thank you for tackling such a painful topic. May we all heal from the wounds of war.
You did amazing with this video, Max. As someone with German roots (my grandmother escaped the war during the 40's) I thank you for this coverage.
My great-grandma was already in her twenties when the war broke out, she used to tell us stories about that time and how even in Switzerland where she lived they had to plant victory gardens because they were surrounded by the Axis and mostly cut off from the rest of the world so food was in short supply. She also told me stories about Germany where she visited before the war but when a certain man was in power. Really interesting but also chilling stories about that time.
22:00 In other words. Scalopped Potatoes.
Lol basically
I do appreciate to see both sides of the cooking in this. Many tend to do one side of the internal parts of the War mainly in the allies. i love this channel and learning more of the niche side of food! Keep it up!
Can I just say how much I appreciate your consistency. I always have trouble deciding what to watch while I’m on lunch, but every Tuesday at 12pm there’s another fantastic video waiting for me.
Same lol
He hasn't missed a Tuesday in years. It's quite remarkable.
HA! finally something I can share a bit of personal Info on.
See i am from germany (and id be happy to show you around if you ever decide to visit my general region) and so is my family, and indeed, has been for quite some time, including the days of the 2nd world war.
My Grandfather was a social democrat who got expelled from his school for "lacking political maturity" and had to spend most of the war fleeing from the Nazis,ending up in his hometown of Halle where he met a young Prussian Refugee Girl from Königsberg (Current Day Kaliningrad) who herself had fled the advancing red army. She... it probably comes as no surprise is my Grandmother, and she suffered tremendously during those years.
She had to bury her own Grandmother in the snow (she froze to death), as well as her infant sister who succumbed to starvation. She later recalled having to survive on potato peel for weeks on end, begging everyone and anyone for even the smallest bit of food, sometimes digging her hands bloody trying to get some root in the frozen soil.
On the other side, my family was quite well off, that part of my family was something close to the modern equialent of feudal aristocracy, they owned a lot of land, which they then exchanged for fishing rights to avoid wartime confiscation. My family - in effect me - still holds those fishing rights, which actually are for all intents and purposes ownership rights of a stretch of the Werra River in Lower Saxony.
The river is ecologically dead though, but thats another matter.
Anyway on that side my Grandfather was a teen at the time of the war and, like so many others, was drafted and thus joined the SS. He then went to "clear" the Ghetto of Warsaw, where he was ordered to shoot a child. He refused and got sentenced to death for it, with the sentence "commuted" to minesweeper duty, where he spent the rest of the war dismantling mines.
He somehow survived and later became a train driver, though he never got promoted because - even after the war - he had technically been sentenced to death.
During the War, his Father (who sold the land) lived in "our" current day country home where he also ran a fishing restaurant of local renown, though it too had to eventually grind to a halt under the increasing war effort. In those days, they surived mainly on the fish they caught, with other means of sustenance - for example eggs, milk and even potatoes - being to exception. They were lucky they had the fishery, other people in that area did not fare nearly as well.
Matters were made worse when a stray shell hit their barn, in effect destroying all but a brick wall (that still has the hole in it) and making most of the supplies stored within all but worthless.
I confess that here, I have to stop. The latter end of the war and the immediate aftermath have, sadly, not been conclusively documented and my own efforts to conserve have only picked up recently (as my Grandmother passed, allowing access to a lot of family artifacts and documents, such as the Party Membership Book of my Great-Grandfather, etc.), but I will try my best - I am a historian after all, though usually for Greek Antiquity - but it will take some time.
Please write a book or short story. You definitely have enough information for a historical novel.❤
Thank you for sharing your family story. As a historian of Ancient Greece, what is your research topic?
@ Oh I specialized in pre-antiquity, anything between the "Dark Ages" (sketchy term in current academia as I’m sure you’re aware, but probably the most evocative) and the period known as classical antiquity, which, for my intents and study purposes begins after the second invasion of Persia.
Having studied in Leipzig, Germany, the main focus of my research was Diplomatics and Papyrology, the city has a truly amazing wealth of Papyri and Ostraca which lend themselves very well to analysis.
Keep in mind though I was only a rookie researcher, as it were, and regrettably I had to stop a year ago for financial reasons, now essentially reduced to researching in my leisure time.
I can't hit "like" because it is a hard story. So happy that your family survived! Do you believe there is a reason for that? A purpose for you to be? An amazing story.
Vielen herzlichen Dank für diesen Einblick in Ihre Familiengeschichte!
Recently, I try daily to be thankful for everyday that I get to have delicious breakfast and dinner, roof over my head, and family that is in good health.
🙏
Remember, someone would give EVERYTHING to have your blessings. Do not take your life for granted!
Awesome video today, really helped me appreciate what I do have. ❤
I was very glad that you mentioned the famine in Greece during the second world war. While there are a ton of ancient Greek recipes on the channel, and lots of history to boot, seeing my own family history featured on the channel made me feel a swell of emotion. Modern Greece has such a fascinating history that's often overshadowed by history from ancient times, and I'm glad that you were able to shine some light on it.
Been a World War II history fanatic for 30 years… Love these Max … I’ve watched and read so much about all facets of the war including the homefront and even so I’ve learned things from your videos on the subject thanks for the diligent research
In Hungary we also call rickets english diseas and some fun fact: we have a jam originating from WWII that we eat to this day and called Hitler-bacon which is basically a firm jam containing pumpkin, but it is fruit flavored and mostly used in baked goods nowadays
As a historian from Germany I'd say you dealt quite well with this tough topic, Max.
What one could perhaps point out particularly in this specific and in a broader historical context, would be the power and biopolitical aspects of food control. The atrocities connected to food is one aspect of the Nazi's project of dominating countries they conquered. But the controlled access to food on the homefront is also quite a powerful tool to increase domestical power over the population and to drive people into the war machine.
That makes sense of the part in the video about industrial workers getting more rations than everyone else.
"Work in our factories, and you'll get to actually eat".
Would you like to comment on the aspect that you mentioned?
Congratulations Max on a very thoughtful, nuanced and well- balanced episode. This is a difficult topic and I think you handled it beautifully (as always). I particularly admire the way you separated the party from the nation while still showing that the nation as a whole benefited (for a while) from the theft of food. Your touching on the hunger of the first world war was also very clever. Thanks so much for the effort you put into these videos!