“But the ultimate Nazi food,” Collingham writes, “was the Eintopf or casserole.” The slow-cooked meal was designed to stretch low-quality cuts of meat and make them more flavorful. Starting in the 1930s, well before the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Reich officials acclimated civilians to a wartime diet centered on bread and potatoes, encouraging people to forgo meat and butter in favor of fish and margarine. On the home front, Germany managed to keep its citizens relatively well fed in part due to the government’s reshaping the nation’s eating habits. They also killed people they considered “useless eaters,” including the Polish Jewish population. We supply ourselves, sometimes chickens, sometimes geese, sometimes pork cutlets.” This placed the burden of staying fed on the conquered in essence, the Nazis found a way to export hunger. “We live well,” one foot soldier wrote during the 1941 invasion of Eastern Europe, “even though we are sometimes cut off from the supply lines. German soldiers on the front lines were encouraged to live off the land, appropriating goods from civilians along the warpath. “It is perhaps the quiet and unobtrusive nature of death by starvation which explains why so many of those who died of hunger during the Second World War are largely forgotten today,” Collingham writes in her introduction. ”During the Second World War at least 20 million people died just such a terrible death from starvation, malnutrition and its associated diseases.” Her book addresses how the major powers on both sides of the war handled food issues, and she shows how food was a major factor in the Reich’s war machine. Where Shirer focused on the political and cultural environment, scholar Lizzie Collingham offers a unique perspective of the war years in her new book The Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food. Author Ron Rosenbaum recently revisited The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer’s landmark book that offered an extensive look at why and how the Nazi party rose to power.