Gesine Gerhard: Nazi hunger politics: Rowman & Littlefield, London, 2015, 186 pp, ISBN: 978-1-44222725-5

A review of Nazi Hunger Politics by Gesine Gerhard is presented. Nazi ideology was rooted in a vision of global racial struggle over scarce resources, and Gerhard argues convincingly that the resource which preoccupied high-level Nazis, particularly Hitler, was food for Germans and the land required to grow it. This book uses food and agriculture as a lens with which to investigate Nazi policies, pre-war planning, and argues that German anxiety about food provided the main impetus to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. Gerhard succeeds, in the sense that such a narrow lens can explain so much of Nazi thinking and behaviour before and during the Second World War. The Nazis had explicit ideas about what foods Germans should eat and how that food should be produced. For example the Nazis discouraged the consumption of animal products, which were often imported, and promoted the consumption of natural products grown in Germany, such as rye (for bread). Gerhard also details how a complex food rationing system was set up before the war in anticipation of future food shortages.