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

As Gesine Gerhard, a professor of history at the University of the Pacific, explains in her book Nazi Hunger Politics, for the Nazis, whose ideology was rooted in a vision of global racial struggle over scarce resources, these harsh lessons of hunger were not forgotten. Gerhard argues, rather 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 ideology, 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.