Frozen Food and National Socialist Expansionism

Abstract

Fast freezing, developed from the 1920s, preserved food quality, taste, and appearance better than earlier techniques. After 1933, the National Socialists encouraged fast freezing in Germany because it promised to solve wartime supply problems and aligned with their ideas about modernity, efficiency, and centralization. During World War II, they used freezing to integrate the agricultural products of occupied and allied areas into a continental European economy (Grossraumwirtschaft) under German control. Although occupied populations might have been expected to reject the German-led spread of fast freezing, French responses to these initiatives suggest that some occupied people interpreted them more positively. French experts saw German fast freezing as a continuation of pre-war projects and an investment for the post-war, when they hoped to see France use new infrastructures to gain a pivotal position in a broader European food economy. After surveying alignments between National Socialist expansionism and fast freezing, this article examines reactions to German initiatives in the La Rochelle area on the western coast of France. The French case suggests that local reactions to German involvement in fast freezing were more complex than simple collaboration or, alternately, a juxtaposition of expansionist ambition and local resentment. Wartime formed part of longer patterns of transnational development, transfer, and exchange, and interactions during World War II may have opened the door for the spread of freezing in subsequent years.