Template-type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Mary Elisabeth Cox
Author-Workplace-Name: St.Antony’s College, University of Oxford
Author-Email: mary.cox@history.ox.ac.uk
Title: War, Blockades, and Hunger: Nutritional Deprivation of German Children 1914-1924
Abstract: At the beginning of the First World War, the British imposed a blockade against 
Germany intending to prevent all imports from entering the country. Germans began to call 
the British naval action the Hungerblockade, claiming that it seriously damaged the well-being 
of those on the home front, namely women and children, through lack of adequate nutrition. 
These German claims that Britain used hunger as a weapon of war against civilians have sometimes
been dismissed as propaganda. However, newly discovered anthropometric measurements made of 
German school children during the war gives credence to German contentions that the blockade 
inflicted severe deprivation on children and other non-combatants. Further, these data show that
the blockade exacerbated existing nutritional inequalities between children of different social 
classes; working class children suffered the most profound effects of nutritional deprivation 
during the war. Once the blockade ended however, working class children were the quickest to 
recover, regaining their pre-War standards in weight by 1921. They surpassed their own pre-War 
height standards by 1923, and approximated the weight of middle class children by 1924. 
This recovery of working class children is likely due to the outpouring of international 
aid targeted at poor German children. These data also indicate significant gender inequalities 
starting at age fourteen in nutritional status, with male adolescents suffering far greater 
deprivation from 1914-1924.
X-Classification-JEL: 
X-Keywords: 
Length: 37 pages
Creation-Date: 2013-02-02
Number: _110
File-URL: http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/12623/Cox 110.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Handle: RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_110