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Food Supply
While scholars debate whether from September 1939 to June 1941 the mass starvation of the Jewish people of Europe was an attempt to conduct mass murder, it is generally agreed upon that this starvation did kill a large amount of this population. There was a shift in the amount of resources that were being used by the Generalgouvernement from 1938-1940. In 1938, 7 million tons of coal were used but in 1940 this was reduced to 4 million tons of coal used by the Generalgouvernement. This shift is emblematic of the shortages in supplies. Although before the war, Poland exported mass quantities of food, in 1940 the Generalgouvernement was unable to supply enough food for the country, nonetheless export food supplies. In December of 1939, the Polish and Jewish reception committees, as well as the native local officials, all within the Generalgouvernement were responsible for providing food and shelter to these Poles and Jews that evacuated. In the expulsion process, the help provided to the evacuated Poles and Jews by the Generalgouvernement was considered a weak branch of the overall process. Throughout 1939, the Reichsbahn was responsible for many of the other important tasks including the deportations of Poles and Jews to concentration camps as well as the delivery of food and raw materials to different places. In December 1940, 87,833 Poles and Jews were deported which added stress to different administrations which they were now responsible for. During the deportations, people were forced to reside on the trains for days until a place was found for them to stay. Between the cold and lack of food, masses of deportees died due to transport deaths caused by malnutrition, cold, and moreover unlivable transportation conditions.

The prices for food outside of ghettos and concentration camps had to be set at a reasonable price in order for them to align with the black market; setting prices at a reasonable rate would ensure that farmers did not sell their crops illegally. If the prices were set too high in cities there was a concern that workers would not be able to afford the food and protest against the prices. Due to the inflammation which was occurring everywhere in the Generalgouvernement, many places relied on the barter system (exchanging goods for other goods instead of money). “Introducing rationing in September 1940, Marshal Petain insisted that ‘everyone must assume their share of common hardship.’” There was clearly food instability not only in the ghettos, but also in cities, which caused everyone to be conscious about food rationing, and conditions for Jewish people to worsen. While workers in Norway and France protested the new rationing of food, Germany and the UK, where the citizens supported war efforts were more supportive of the rationing so the method was more effective in these areas. It was the cases where a country was being occupied that this method of rationing was not as effective. In December, 1941 it was recognized by the Generalgouvernement that starving the Jewish people to death was a convenient and practical way to get rid of them. In August 1942, the Reich decided to increase the demands for food deliveries from the Generalgouvernement, deciding that 1.2 million Jews that were not completing jobs that were “important to Germany” would no longer be given food. The Nazis knew the effects of depriving the Jewish people of food, yet it continued, and the ultimate revolt was the mass murder due to starvation. The Food and Agriculture Ministry administrated the rations of food in concentration camps. Each camp's administration got food from the open market and depots of the Waffen-SS (Standartenführer Tschentscher). Once food arrived at a camp, it was up to the administrations hands to decide how to distribute it. The diet for the Jews in these camps was “watery turnip soup drunk from pots; it was supplemented by an evening meal of sawdust bread with some margarine, ‘smelly marmalade,’ or ‘putrid sausage.’ Between the two meals inmates attempted to lap a few drops of polluted water from the faucet in a wash barracks.”

Black Market
The black market was important both in and outside of the ghettos from 1940-1944. Outside of the ghettos, the black market existed because rations were not high enough for the citizens to remain healthy. While these people used the black market to remain healthy, in the ghettos of eastern Europe in August of 1941 the Jewish population recognized that if they were forced to remain in these ghettos in Warsaw they would eventually die of hunger. Many of these people that were in ghettos made trades with the outside world in order to stay alive. Jews were forced to stay in ghettos where the economy was isolated and there were large food shortages therefore they were seen as a source for cheap labor and were given food in exchange that was purchased on the Aryan side of the wall. This isolation of the people residing in ghettos caused there to be a disconnect between the buyer and the seller, which added in another player: the black market middleman. The black market middleman would make a profit by creating connections between sellers and buyers, so they did not want them to find each other on their own. While supply and demand were inelastic in these ghettos, the selling of this food on the blackmarket was still seen as competitive.