Bread Crisis

Fortnight ago, burly German peasants lifted their furrowed, mahogany faces and straightened their creaking backs from harvesting their rye to look into the faces of burly Nazi policemen, lounging menacingly nearby. By a decree styled "A Decree for Safeguarding the Bread Supply," Agriculture Minister Richard-Wralther Darre requisitioned all wheat and rye crops for the Third Reich. To guarantee enforcement, Heinrich Himmler, with a wave of his pince-nez, directed his State police to supervise all harvesting, transporting, and storage activities. Farmers may retain only enough for their personal appetite, feeding hired hands, and seed.

Last week, apprehensive of passive resistance by the peasants, Nazi courts threatened fantastic fines up to 100,000 marks ($40,000) if farmers knowingly disregarded the bread decree, penitentiary sentences if the infraction is "especially obnoxious."

This year's German wheat and rye harvest, damaged by a cold winter and a late, dry spring, will fall about 15% below last year's, which was under average. Minister-President Goering has contracted for about 1,500,000 tons of foreign grain, while June figures show that food imports increased 16%, all of which has to be paid for out of Reichsbanker Schacht's laboriously collected foreign exchange reserves. Aim of the grain requisition is to save for food two million tons of rye and a half-million tons of wheat previously fed to livestock. With Himmler's strong-arm squads on duty to watch for slackers, the farmers shrugged their shoulders, took humorous consolation in the Government's promise to sell them cheap animal fodder at $8 a ton below the market price for rye. and in Voelkischer Beobachter's assurance that "the German peasant should be happy and willing to serve in this high cause."

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