Occupation was a Poison Effective within European Societies – An Interview with Tatjana Tönsmeyer on Everyday Life under German Occupation in WWII
Jürgen Finger, GHI Paris, in conversation with Tatjana Tönsmeyer

Tatjana Tönsmeyer is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Wuppertal. She is one of the most prominent scholars on the history of the Second World War and of occupation in Europe during that period. She also works on the history of memory and the post-history of National Socialism, as well as on questions concerning statehood, supply, and security. She is particularly committed to developing an integrated history of Western and Eastern Europe in their transatlantic relations.
She is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Warsaw and a long-standing cooperation partner of the German Historical Institute in Paris (GHIP), especially its former Deputy Director, Dr. Stefan Martens, one of the co-editors of the edition discussed in this interview. In 2024, she opened the conference Wartime Occupation in Europe (20th–21st Centuries): Socio-Historical Perspectives—organized notably by the GHIP and the Max Weber Network for Eastern Europe in cooperation with EHESS—with a keynote lecture entitled Re-Considering Occupation: On How It Impacted Societies and Individuals During World War II.
On September 29, 2025, Professor Tönsmeyer will take part in the “Divan historique” at the Goethe Institute in Paris to discuss her monograph Unter deutscher Besatzung. Europa 1939–1945 (C. H. Beck, 2025) with Jean-Luc Leleu (CNRS/Histemé), Corine Defrance (CNRS/Sirice) and Ulrich Pfeil (University of Lorraine). You can find more information about the round table discussion as part of the “Divans historiques” (event in French and German) on the GHI Paris’ website. You can register for the online broadcast directly on Zoom.

Jürgen Finger (JF): Professor Tönsmeyer, together with an international team of specialists from twenty countries, you have produced an edition devoted to hunger and food shortages under German occupation in Europe. The volume is now available both in print and online. Was there a particular trigger for this project—a moment when, as a researcher, you thought: something is missing here, we need to take a closer look?
Tatjana Tönsmeyer (TT): In fact, I began this project with my Marburg colleague Peter Haslinger at a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that the history of Nazi crimes could no longer be written primarily as the history of German perpetrators and their home society; it needed to be complemented by a perspective focused on the occupied populations. Added to this was the conviction that in Germany, research and higher education often maintain a separation between Eastern and Western European history, which can obscure certain European-level similarities. These were the foundations for a project built on broad international cooperation, addressing shortage and hunger as central experiences of German occupation from a European perspective, and documenting both similarities and differences.

JF: The printed edition Fighting Hunger, Dealing with shortage brings together strikingly different types of texts from a multitude of archives. That is one of its major strengths, which also has been recognized by the American Library Association, which has included the edition in its list of “Best Historical Materials 2022”. What was the biggest challenge in assembling this corpus? Could you outline your selection criteria?
TT: It was important to us that the sources convey a concrete sense of the massive impact that occupation had on the daily lives of millions of people. On the one hand, we needed documents that showed the conditions imposed by the German and local authorities: these might include materials on food rationing systems, market regulations, interrogation records, or notices announcing the execution of individuals for “economic sabotage”—a term often used to refer to black-market transactions, which in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, for example, could still carry the death penalty as late as spring 1945.
On the other hand, we wanted to show how people coped with the shortages imposed on them. We therefore included recipe collections aimed at housewives, essays by French schoolchildren describing what was eaten in villages when there was almost nothing left to buy in the shops, as well as reports from hospitals, retirement homes, and orphanages. This allows us to show, for example, that “shortage” in Denmark might mean going without meat on major holidays, whereas in Soviet cities there was sometimes not even bread, and people queued for mouldy tomatoes.
We also wanted to cover the whole of Europe, while ensuring some coherence in the selection. That is why we developed, together with experts from and on the various countries, a questionnaire for archival research. This broke down our core question—“How does occupation change everyday life in terms of supplies?”—into concrete thematic fields. The selected sources needed not only to cover daily life, European breadth, and coherence, but also to shed light on the specific features of occupied societies—for instance, demographic compositions altered by the absence of millions of men, which affected gender and generational structures. The sources therefore had to make women, children and adolescents, and also elderly people visible, although the latter are often difficult to document.
Finally, we wanted to include Jews as full members of occupied societies, and not exclude them until the German genocidal policy did so. French ration cards offer an example: the letter “J” stood for “jeunes” (“youth”) and not for “Juifs” (“Jews”), unlike in Eastern European territories where Jews received smaller or no rations at all. We can show that Jewish populations were doubly affected: by the shortages shared by the non-Jewish population, and in a specific way as targets of genocidal persecution. We also highlight how shortage could affect the ability to help: those in hiding, for example, were not entitled to rations, they and their helpers had to rely on the black market, which was expensive and dangerous.
JF: By focusing on hunger and shortages, the edition explores central experiences of societies under German occupation. It offers multiple points of entry for researchers with varied interests and regional specializations. Looking back, is there a finding that surprised or particularly impressed you—something that could only be seen through the comparison of so many countries and experiences?
TT: We understand European history as a history of diversity, and there are good reasons for that. Comparing many countries makes differences visible. But I find it remarkable how strongly structural similarities also emerge—to such an extent that one can speak of occupation as a “dark legacy” of the whole of Europe.
On a substantive level, what struck me was how deeply occupation—returning to that “dark legacy”—affected people’s lives, often even before they were directly exposed to German violence. Spending hours every day queuing for food was enough to exhaust people. One sees how different life was from the peacetime years, every time when real shortages prevailed, while people still had to walk long distances to work because buses and trains were not running, and shivered at home for lack of coal (energy supplies being prioritised for the German war effort rather than the occupied civilian population). Added to this was often worry for mobilised men, the lack of medicines for children, the elderly, or the sick in general—and the fear of being denounced if one complained about the supply situation or blamed the Germans. In Eastern Europe, people faced all this under conditions of extreme violence.
JF: The online version of the edition offers multiple intuitive points of access: a dynamic map, a timeline, filters… In your view, what was the greatest challenge in creating the digital platform?
TT: The shift to digital was both exciting and challenging. Where the historian tends to present things in a nuanced way, the digital humanities specialist and programmer ask for “if… then…” relationships and clear categories. This had consequences for indexing: we therefore created thematic “clusters” and assigned our roughly 1,000 keywords to them. It also affected search algorithms, which must remain intuitive, even if the topic is complex and users tend to apply “Google-like” search habits. Discussions with “critical friends,” including Mareike König from the GHIP, and with students who conducted usability tests for us, taught me a great deal about the complex design and user requirements of historical online-portals.



JF: Looking at your list of publications, it’s clear that this edition is just one element of a larger research agenda on occupied societies in Europe—a topic that has preoccupied you for more than a decade. You have now published a comprehensive synthesis, Unter deutscher Besatzung. Europa 1939–1945 (C. H. Beck, 2025), which includes a chapter with the striking title “Consumption of Cat Meat is Discouraged.” This chapter incorporates findings from the edition. When you decided to write this book, what did you want to convey to your readers?
TT: My central aim was to convey what occupation was. Over the course of my research, I became increasingly aware that, from a German perspective, “war” is the key concept for approaching the 20th century. This is understandable, but it obscures the fact that in many countries, the actual combat was relatively brief—less than two months in Poland in 1939, about a week in the Netherlands in 1940—and that these short periods of fighting were followed by much longer periods of occupation. German rule also claimed more victims than the fighting itself—and above all civilian victims, including in Western Europe, whereas in Germany military losses predominated. Showing that occupation was not something that “also” happened, but a reality that massively disrupted daily life—figuratively speaking, leaving “no stone unturned” in people’s lives—was my main concern. This is also intended as a contribution to German memory culture, where the impact of Nazi occupation remains a major blind spot.

Closely linked to this is a second point: the Shoah. The responsibility for it lay unequivocally in Berlin. But understanding the Shoah as a crime committed under occupation and within occupied societies provides new insights. Take a French example: Hélène Berr, a young French Jew, describes poignantly in her diary what the introduction of the “yellow badge”, the “Judenstern” meant. This has often been read as the story of an administrative act and its bureaucratic implementation. In my book, I use it to show the courage it took for her to leave her home wearing this badge and to face the reactions of her surroundings—her French surroundings. For the German ordinance on the yellow badge concerned not only Jews in France, though they were, of course, its primary targets. The star also concerned the entire surrounding population, which now had to decide how to react: would they mock, look away, greet, integrate, encourage, and so on? And it was not a one-off decision: each time one encountered someone wearing what Hélène Berr called “this brand mark,” one had to decide anew. It is episodes like these that led Jean-Paul Sartre to say that occupation was a poison working within society. I hope my readers will take away an awareness of these “toxic mechanisms” of occupation—in connection with the Shoah, but also beyond it.
JF: If you had one wish and I had a magic wand to fund a project, which dimension(s) of the history of European occupation would still need to be explored? Where is European cooperation essential because the phenomenon is so vast and complex?
TT: If I could wave your magic wand in the context of the occupations of the Second World War, I would wish to study how occupation strips away state sovereignty and creates hardship. What we now call (nationally organised) social protection systems were severely undermined by it. We still know very little about this in a European perspective. In this context, it should also be noted that people lost appeal bodies—from social services to trade unions, to name just two examples. These institutions might still have existed, but under occupation their scope for action was very limited. Individuals therefore depended much more than before on family networks, neighbourhood assistance, or solidarity within village communities—but these solidarities were often subject to social pressure, fear, intimidation, and even denunciation. I see a great need for further research here.
Finally, I want to make a plea for European cooperation. I found our editorial project both highly insightful and personally enriching. It is true that it is time-consuming to organise and expensive (if only because not all meetings can sensibly be replaced by online sessions), but in my view, it is essential—especially in these times of growing nationalism—to keep our shared features in view and to learn to understand our differences and particularities.
Thank you very much for this conversation!
Citation: Tatjana Tönsmeyer; Jürgen Finger, Occupation was a Poison Effective within European Societies – An Interview with Tatjana Tönsmeyer on Everyday Life under German Occupation in WWII, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 16.09.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/61372
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (September 15, 2025). Occupation was a Poison Effective within European Societies – An Interview with Tatjana Tönsmeyer on Everyday Life under German Occupation in WWII. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved January 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14nx0


