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170 CHAPTER 5 scale" (Massenexperimente), but they also show that physicians were willing to protest the sale of carcinogens to the highest levels of the Nazi health apparatus--in this case to Paul Rostock, the right-hand man of Karl Brandt and a man who, after the war, faced charges of having helped to organize murderous human experi ments in concentration camps. What is most remarkable about this campaign against the false blonding of butter, again, is the fact that influential Nazi physi cians saw themselves as duty-bound to eliminate life-threatening contaminants from German foods. The campaign against coal tar dyes is only one example: lead-lined toothpaste tubes were banned fifty years prior to a similar move in the United States, and in 1937, Reich Health Office president Hans Reiter banned the bleaching of flour. Efforts were made to improve water quality173 and to curtail the use of artificial sweeteners such as saccharine (some said this was a carcinogen!).174 By the 1940s, few nations were as conscious of, and willing to root out, hazards in the healthy citizen's food, air, and water. Ideology and Reality It is difficult to assess the overall impact of Nazi food reforms, dif ficult to separate boasts from facts, ideology from reality. There are biases that have to be reckoned with: Nazi-era scientific literature is not always to be trusted, since there was often a desire to high light good news and suppress bad. Even the bad news cannot always be trusted, though, since apocalyptic prognoses were a regular feature of Nazi rhetoric before and after 1933--part of the ongoing Nazi "revolution." There is bias even in the accounts by emigres like Martin Gumpert, who painted a dismal but probably exaggerated picture of declining health, rising hunger, and de graded intellectual life in the Thousand Year Reich prior even to 1940.175 One thing we must never forget, though, is that Nazi food re forms have a dark and sinister side, accompanied as they were by efforts to eliminate "useless eaters" from German society. Hitler at THE NAZI DIET 171 the start of the war declared that "the food supply does not allow for the incurably ill to be dragged through the war"176--the impli cation being that something would have to happen to make them stop eating. Prior even to the onset of "active euthanasia," patients at psychiatric hospitals had been placed on near-starvation diets: at the Eichberg asylum near Wiesbaden, for example, patients were living (and dying) primarily on root vegetables.177 Food be came a political lever, forcing some into starvation while keeping others alive and happy. Bavaria's "starvation diet decree" of No vember 1942 made this explicit, allowing patients capable of per forming useful work to be given higher rations. No one knows ex actly how many people were deliberately starved to death; the total number of those "euthanized" (a large portion by starvation) is close to 200,000.178 There is also evidence, though, that certain kinds of food deteri orated even for the large majority of ordinary Germans outside the camps or "euthanasia" institutions. Martin Gumpert in his 1940 Heil Hunger! pointed out that infant mortality in 1937 was 40 per cent higher in Germany than in neighboring Holland. Many dis eases were on the rise, among them rickets and dysentery, linked to malnutrition and contaminated food, respectively. Gumpert ar gued that the increase in such diseases stemmed from the stock piling of food for use in the event of war; stockpiles would be sold just prior to spoilage, flooding markets with a lot of inferior food. His conclusion: Hitler's program of health restoration was "a crime against the health of 80 million people in the heart of Eu rope, a crime against the civilization of our world." He also pre dicted that the Nazi machine might continue for a time "to register high performance under pressure" but that "one day it will be nothing but a heap of scrap iron."179 Gumpert obviously could not comment on the impact of the war, but some of his predictions do appear to have come true. Food rationing started on August 28,1939, only four days prior to the invasion of Poland.180 The variety of foods was reduced (a sin gle Einheitsmargarine replaced the three different grades of butter substitutes previously available, for example), and Jews were al lowed only a fraction of the food given to non-Jews. Food rations