Jews in Nazi Europe Receive Only Twenty Percent of Diet Needed to Maintain Life

The Jewish population in Nazi-held Europe today receives only twenty percent of the diet required in order to maintain life, while the German population is receiving 94% of the diet established by the League of Nations as essential to the maintenance of health, according to a survey made public today by the Institute of Jewish Affairs of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress.

Of all the conquered peoples, the Czechs and the Dutch alone approach the sound standard of diet, the survey shows. The Dutch get 81% of their required calories, the Poles in Wartheland 72%, the Belgians 67%, the Poles in the General Government 61%, the French 55%, the Italians 53%, the Greeks 29% and the Jews 20%.

A comparative study of the meat rations served to the subjugated peoples shows the following declining ratios: The Czechs receive 86% of the meat ration enjoyed by the Germans, the Dutch 71%, the Poles in Wartheland 71%, the Lithuanians 57%, the French 51%, the Belgians 40%, the Serbs 36%, the Poles in the General Government 36%, the Slovenes 29%. The Jews alone receive no meat rations whatsoever.

In the Reich and German-occupied territory, Jews receive practically none of the essential protective and vitamin foods. They get no meat, fish, poultry, milk, dairy products, fruit or vegetables. They may purchase none of the foods which are still unrationed, none of the items which are distributed on the basis of consumer lists, none of the semi-rationed items. Pregnant Jewish women and nursing mothers, as well as Jewish infants and small children, have never received the special rations of whole milk which go not only to German women and children but in lesser amounts to women and children of occupied countries as well.

JEWISH FORCED LABORERS KEPT ON STARVATION RATIONS IN NAZI MINES

Jewish forced laborers, toiling for the Reich, receive none of the added protective foods and fats allotted on a graduated scale to workers in Germany and occupied territories. Able-bodied Jews of Germany and Axis-Europe are generally conscripted for arduous work in quarries, iron, coal and sulphur mines; on road construction gangs; in saw mills, and in textile factories turning out uniforms for the Whermacht. Yet they obtain only the starvation rations allotted to Jewish normal consumers. In armament factories where milk is supplied to laborers as an antidote for metallic poisons, Jewish workers get none. In Rumanian-held Soviet territory, Jews work sixteen hours a day in penal labor colonies on one-eighth the rations furnished to Rumanian soldiers.

In the Baltic area, in Belgium, Greece, Hungary and Rumania, Jews seldom receive more than half, and often considerably less, the ration quantities allotted to the Aryan population. Specific shopping hours which have been established for Jews have made it most difficult and even impossible for the Jews even to obtain the wretched rations to which they are nominally entitled. In the Polish ghettos, to which are now being deported the Jewish populations of occupied Europe, native Jews and deportees alike get weekly rations of one pound of black bread, two ounces of so-called jams and marmalade, an ounce of sugar and perhaps a few potatoes. At the same time they may not receive food as gifts. Inside the ghettos Jewish markets and retail stores receive their supplies entirely from the hands of the German transfer offices, which measure the rations required by the total Jewish population.

In the Warsaw ghetto during the year 1941, 47,428 Jews perished from so-called natural causes as a result of planned starvation. This would mean about one out of ten. In Bohemia-Moravia the same year; almost 14% of the Jewish population died. In Vienna the Jewish death rate between June 15 and September 15, 1942, was ten times as high as for a comparable three-month period before the war.