Potato peel burgers

„You ate everything that was available. And if you had a friend who gave you a bag of potato peels, you would wash them clean under running water and then grind them in a machine, just like meat. After that, you made something like a hamburger and ate it. Don’t ask me how it tasted. You ate what you had, and if you had nothing – you ate nothing. So people died of hunger.”

Lucille Eichengreen / The Łódź Ghetto.

The Holocaust is an extermination that everyone has heard of. Six million lives simply erased. From the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 through the duration of the war, numerous methods were employed to attempt the annihilation of an entire nation. The systematic, almost industrial-scale murder on an unimaginable level, carried out primarily in Nazi-occupied Polish territories, involved many forms of weaponry, often using hunger. This was a planned, bureaucratic, state-funded process of killing, based on pseudo-scientific, eugenic ideas of a “superior race.” Deaths from starvation were planned and targeted specific groups, but affected nearly everyone—those imprisoned in camps and ghettos, the occupied population, and even the soldiers themselves.