Calories and the Holocaust

While talking on the phone with a friend, I'm reading up on the caloric intake of concentration camp inmates during the Holocaust. Why am I doing this? Well, I understand I have a fixation on food and calories, and I always noticed that the movies seemed to show near absolute starvation of the inmates. Don't call me a Holocaust-denier, but I didn't think people could last for any amount of time based on the caloric intake implied by the movies. I asked my friend what he thought the daily intake was. He said he didn't know. "300 calories?", he guessed. Well, funny enough, that was the minimum daily ration in the Warsaw ghetto (while Jewish officials received about 1500 calories/day). But in Auschwitz, inmates were mandated to work 10-11 hours a day (by Nazi decree) and they were supposedly fed about 1744 calories/day:

Auschwitz food rations.

Of course, the food was probably very low quality, the SS guards stole from their stores, and there was wasteage in dispensing the meals, so the calorie intake was undoubtedly less. Interestingly, the above reference describes twice weekly supplements given to the hardest worked inmates, which was supposed to be 100g sausage and 700g bread. The report indicates that the actual amount of the sausage delivered turned out to be 70g per person. Also, inmates were supposed to receive about 50g of sausage or margarine or jam daily, but the report indicates they received 25g at best. While they were supposed to receive 1 litre of soup each evening, they probably only received 750 ml. Under their workload, this starvation would start taking its toll in weeks.

Compare this to the 400g of beef I had today on my diet.

I'm not the only one that looks this stuff up. Amazingly, I found that other people with eating disorders (EDs) are fascinated with this data too:

Fat Like Me's starvation page.

So, I'm in the process of reading about EDs, which I never knew about before. Their story sounds oddly familiar.