Lund, Joachim, 2008: ”Hitlers spisekammer, den tyske fødevarekrise og de danske leverancer 1940-1945”, Historisk Tidsskrift 108/2, pp. 505-31 (Copenhagen)

In recent years, Denmark’s food deliveries to Nazi Germany during the occupation of 1940-45 have been a topic for much discussion. The article takes the debate one step further. It critically examines a number of contemporary accounts concerning Germany’s food problem and focuses on Berlin’s perception of the situation. Against this background, it assesses the importance of the Danish agricultural exports to Germany in relation to the bottlenecks in the German food supplies during the war, in particular the serious food crises of 1942. In this picture, with the country’s abundant exports of pork and butter, the findings confirm that Denmark was indeed a significant part of the European division of labour that was increasingly promoted by the Nazis during the war. Notably, the dependence on food supplies from Denmark turns out to be one of the two permanent German interests in the country (the need to preserve security for the German troops in Denmark being the other). The danger of jeopardizing the food deliveries was a continual argument in the German leadership not to make any changes in the occupation regime in Denmark, before as well as after the crisis in the German-Danish collaboration in August 1943.