Leadership Quote by Paul von Hindenburg

A sentence about fat sounds almost comically narrow until you hear the era behind it: Germany in the grinding attrition of total war, where calories were strategy and hunger was politics. Hindenburg isn’t waxing philosophical; he’s issuing a technocratic warning with the cold authority of a head of state who understands that a nation’s “full strength” is literally measurable in bodies that can keep standing at factory machines.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Our working people” is possessive, paternal, and strategic: it flatters labor as indispensable while also claiming it as a national resource. The word “impossible” removes choice and debate, turning food policy into necessity, not charity. And “fat” isn’t culinary preference; it’s dense energy, a blunt shorthand for industrial stamina in an age before modern supplements and automated production. He’s speaking in the language of inputs and outputs: supply, allotment, basis. That bureaucratic cadence suggests rationing as an instrument of governance, not an emergency improvisation.

The subtext is control. If the state can “allot” nutrition, it can also define whose work counts, whose bodies get sustained, and whose don’t. It’s a reminder that wartime leadership often rebrands deprivation as rational distribution, and civic unity as managed scarcity. Hindenburg’s intent is stabilizing the home front, but the context reveals something harsher: the worker’s strength is valued because it feeds the war machine, not because the worker is sovereign.