Germany 1945 June - A small Girl with her "Dinner" (The picture is colored by me)

The German Red Cross, which during the war had become thoroughly Nazified with its head Ernst Grawitz a major figure in medical experiments on Jews and "enemies of the state", was dissolved, and the International Red Cross and the few other allowed international relief agencies were kept from helping Germans through strict controls on supplies and on travel.

During 1945 it was estimated that the average German civilian in the U.S. and the United Kingdom occupation zones received 1,200 calories a day. Meanwhile non-German Displaced Persons were receiving 2,300 calories through emergency food imports and Red Cross help.

Fearing a Nazi rising, U.S. occupation forces were under strict orders not to share their food with the German population, and this also applied to their wives when they arrived later in the occupation. The women were under orders not to allow their German maids to get hold of any leftovers; "the food was to be destroyed or made inedible", although in view of the starving German population facing them many housewives chose to disregard these official orders. Nevertheless, according to a U.S. intelligence survey a German university professor reportedly said: "Your soldiers are good-natured, good ambassadors; but they create unnecessary ill will to pour twenty litres of left-over cocoa in the gutter when it is badly needed in our clinics. It makes it hard for me to defend American democracy amongst my countrymen."

In early 1946 U.S. President Harry S. Truman allowed foreign relief organization to enter Germany in order to review the food situation. In mid-1946 non-German relief organizations were permitted to help starving German children. The German food situation became worst during the very cold winter of 1946–47, when German calorie intake ranged from 1,000 to 1,500 calories per day, a situation made worse by severe lack of fuel for heating. Average adult calorie intake in U.S was 3,200–3,300, in UK 2,900 and in U.S. Army 4,000.

The precise effect of the food crisis on German health and mortality has been a matter of some contention. Speaking of the Anglo-American zones, Herbert Hoover reported that in the fall of 1946, starvation produced a 40 percent increase in mortality among Germans over 70. However, John Farquharson cites statistics indicating that the incidence of hunger oedema was low in 1946–1947. According to the British Medical Journal, mortality in the British zone was above its pre-war level until June, 1946, when the death rate fell below that of 1938.Also, once it became clear there would be no rising, as threatened by the Nazis during the war, food controls were relaxed.

The historian Nicholas Balabkins notes that the Allied restrictions placed on German steel production, and their control over to where the produced coal and steel was delivered, meant that offers by Western European nations to trade food for desperately needed German coal and machinery were rejected. Neither the Italians nor the Dutch could sell the vegetables that they had previously sold in Germany, with the consequence that the Dutch had to destroy considerable proportions of their crop. Denmark offered 150 tons of lard a month; Turkey offered hazelnuts; Norway offered fish and fish oil; Sweden offered considerable amounts of fats. The Allies were however not willing to let the Germans trade.^[

Another consequence of the Allied policy of "Industrial Disarmament" was that there was a drastic fall in fertilizer available for the German agriculture, further decreasing the food production.

German infant mortality rate was twice that of other nations in Western Europe until the close of 1948.

The adequate feeding of the German population in occupied Germany was an Allied legal obligation under Article 43 of The 1907 Hague Rules of Land Warfare