Introduction

This Danish cartoon on page 132, which appeared in 1942 in the satirical magazine Blæksprutten, depicts a rather fat farmer comfortably seated on the back of a pig, bank book in pocket, the two of them held aloft by a crowd of emaciated Danes. Windfall agricultural profits and the consequent rising cost of living for the rest of the population had clearly had an effect on public opinion. Such profits had also had an effect on political discourse: on returning from exile in Britain, the first postwar prime minister – Christmas Moller – bluntly stated that farmers could ‘not reasonably expect to maintain a price level they had obtained during the war at the expense of society as a whole’. High food prices had enriched farmers at the expense of both the Danish treasury and their non-agrarian compatriots. In the Netherlands, similar sentiments existed and, as indeed in Denmark, continued to exist after the war. Lou de Jong, long the dominant historian of the occupation, wrote in scathing terms of the poverty visited upon the urban poor by rising food prices, depriving them of their legitimate share of the dwindling food supplies in the country. In the light of the previous chapter, this moral indignation is easy to understand: the cost of living rose considerably in both Denmark and the Netherlands, threatening the real incomes of many consumers and driving up profits in agriculture as well as in various other sectors. To many wartime and postwar commentators, inflation was not merely a consequence of impersonal economic circumstances, but a failure of producers to muster sufficient solidarity with their poorer compatriots.

One may question, however, whether the popular image of a suffering underclass of impoverished workers is quite correct. After all, not only prices but also wages rose during the war, and unemployment all but disappeared. Gruesome accounts of wartime poverty can be found in Dutch and Danish archives, but most contemporary depictions of Danish and Dutch working-class life do not fit the image of persistent economic misery, or do so only inconsistently. True, people were often cold, insufficiently dressed and otherwise negatively affected by the war, but their incomes generally rose.