This was a national, geopolitical policy of economic self- sufficiency. The goal was to eliminate all imports by growing or manufacturing all economic necessities at home.
The policy of “autarchy” began in the 1930s to make Germany blockade proof. They created “ersatz” rubber, oil, butter, coffee and many other products including wool, cotton, and gasoline. They also had an extensive recycling program, to the extent of even using food excesses to feed farm animals.
Governments in the modern day act to ensure the exact opposite. Through complex trade agreements and sublime political manipulations, every nation on earth acts to protect its dominance – of oil, coal, cocaine, sugar, forest products, cotton, wool, and soybeans.
It all depends on a vast infrastructure of shipping by rail, barge, and seagoing vessels – moving enormous quantities of coal, oil, grain and forest products around the globe from the haves to the have-nots.
Drought in America’s heartland, the breadbasket of the world, is as disastrous as an oil embargo in the Persian Gulf.
An Old Fashioned Economy
Germany rose from the ashes of World War I to become an economic superpower by virtue of its infrastructure. Food, materiel, and machines moved effortlessly through an intricate, finely tuned web of superhighways and railroads.
Allied bombings in the last three years of the war “to destroy the German war industry” targeted virtually the entire rail and road network because virtually everything in Germany had been geared toward “war industry” or could be so construed.
Nothing was more fragile to disruption than food supplies. Every military strategist knows “an army runs on its stomach.” Thus food supplies and food transport routes were at the top of the list to bomb.
Starve the German soldier, and they lose their will to fight.
Starve the German population, and they lose the strength to man the assembly lines and the will to fight.
Starve the German nation as a whole, and you force them to make choices: whom to feed from drastically limited resources. Jews in work camps who became unable to do an honest day’s work simply starved to death.