Introduction

Although food supplies in both Denmark and the Netherlands may have been managed relatively effectively through the centralized rationing system, food and agriculture were of course not the only wartime problems. Like foodstuffs and fodder, many industrial raw materials and manufactured goods had been imported from oversees before the war, and many of these consequently became less or completely unavailable after the invasion. Germany, in turn, which was working hard to maximize its industrial output for its massive war effort, set out to curtail civilian consumption in the occupied countries and to exploit their productive capacity and reserves of raw materials. It also laid considerable claims to the labour force of the occupied countries, which also impacted the availability of goods and services. For example, workers who were building German defence works in Jutland or manufacturing grenades in Germany were obviously not available for building or manufacturing for civilian consumption.

As the quotation above illustrates, the low availability of manufactured goods caused a very visible impoverishment in Denmark, as it did in the Netherlands: people went about ever more shabbily dressed, insufficiently housed, often cold and sometimes dirty. Differences in the availability of these goods may well help to explain the marked difference between Dutch and Danish disease environments and mortality rates. Not all civilian consumption, of course, was needed to maintain public health. Fashionable clothing, although nice to have, is hardly one of life's necessities. Some of the increasingly hard-to-get products, notably tobacco, were a threat to the health of the Danes and the Dutch rather than a benefit. Other products, however, were very helpful to or even indispensable for healthy living. Neither the Danish nor the Dutch climate is particularly welcoming without sufficient heating, clothing and shelter, and a lack of such commodities may well have impeded public health.