Fighting Vulnerability: Child-Feeding Initiatives During the Dutch Hunger Winter

Abstract

During the final months of World War II, the occupied Netherlands experienced a severe food and fuel shortage, in which over 20,000 people died from starvation or the fatal combination of malnutrition, lack of fuel and infectious diseases. How did a highly developed country such as the Netherlands cope with food shortage and famine? This chapter, focussing on child-feeding initiatives during the winter 1944/1945, argues that new networks emerging between state and household levels effectively took over food provisioning from government authorities in order to save society’s most vulnerable group: children. These community efforts are likely to have averted the worst consequences of famine, as supported by new insights into child mortality rates. The chapter seeks to alter dominant perceptions concerning food and starvation politics of the German occupier in the Netherlands as well as of the alleged social disintegration during the Dutch famine.

This chapter is based on my PhD thesis “The Hunger Winter: Fighting Famine in the Occupied Netherlands, 1944–1945,” completed at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.