Were there food shortages in Germany at World War 2?
German agriculture ran on slave labor during the war. The Germans drafted so many men into the armed forces that labor had to come from elsewhere – people taken from nations the Germans had invaded and prisoners of war. POWs did not mind so much because they generally got better access to food when working on a farm and were treated well. The slaves from the eastern European countries were not fed or treated well. Every German farmer with a farm of any size had these laborers assigned to work for him. As allied troops advanced into Germany in the first months of 1945 these workers left these farms as soon as Allied troops arrived. Thus, nobody planted crops in Germany in 1945, and widespread deaths from actual starvation resulted in 1945, after the war was over. The Germans had conducted a very successful submarine campaign during the entire war which sank thousands of ships, and what ships there were had to be used to bring the still ongoing war against Japan to a close, so there were
