In 1915, due to World War I food restrictions and rationing, the German bureaucracy decided to regard pigs as co-eaters with humans and tried to preserve supplies. As a result, five million pigs were massacred in the so-called Schweinemord (German: pig massacre) to both make food and preserve grain. However it did little to increase the supply of grain, as officials did not take into account the use of pig manure as fertilizer on small farms. Because of this, killing the pigs actually decreased crop yields in the region.

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. (October 2019) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the German article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 9,092 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Schweinemord]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|de|Schweinemord}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (December 2016)

• Roger Chickering: Das Deutsche Reich und der Erste Weltkrieg, C.H.Beck, ISBN 3-406-47592-2, P. 57 Online
• Cove, Dennis and Westwel, Ian ed. History of World War I: the Home Fronts, Technologies of the War, ISBN 9780761472315, P. 653

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