Despite the fact that foreign workers were supposed to receive adequate daily rations of bread and meat, this rarely happened due to large-scale theft by dockers in France and in the Channel Islands, and corruption amongst Organisation Todt staff in Jersey. The consequence for the workers was an extreme shortage of food. 

In reality, workers’ rations took the form of substitute coffee in the morning, thin vegetable soup for lunch and in the evening, served with a 1 kilogram loaf of bread to be shared amongst five men. 25 grammes of butter per person were issued twice a week, and there were occasional allocations of luxuries including sausage, jam, cheese or fresh vegetables. This was surely an inadequate calorific intake for hard physical work. 

Such spartan rations drove forced workers, who were paid, to purchase extras from farmers, despite it being forbidden. In the case of Russian slave workers, they could do no more than beg and steal whenever the opportunity allowed. In 1942, four Algerian workers, driven by desperate hunger, died from eating the poisonous hemlock plant. 

Ukrainian slave worker Vasilly Marempolsky recalled: “We got up at five o'clock and had dirty black water called coffee. After breakfast, we heard the whistle and we had to stand to attention for the Germans; those who were slow were beaten. Between one and two o'clock we had a lunch break and we were given turnip 'soup'; it was water with a tiny lump of turnip in it. We usually worked for twelve or fourteen hours a day.At the end of the day, we all received tiny cards with 'supper’ printed on them. This entitled us to half a litre of soup and 200 grams of 'bread' which had bits of wood in it. Every second Sunday we had a day off and then we didn't get any food because we weren’t working.” 

Spanish Republican forced worker Francisco Font remembers:

“The food - oh my God, we used to call it cabbage soup without the cabbage, so that gives you a rough idea of the low-calorie intake. We got half a loaf of bread a day in the morning, some black coffee. Some days we used to get a bit of sausage, an ounce if that. At noon that soup, practically water and in the evenings the same soup again.”