“Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last.”
Winston Churchill urging nations to unite against Nazi Germany (January 20th 1940)
The Third Reich, a regime fixated on the purity of a fictitious Aryan race, extended its ideological grip to the very dinner plates of its citizens.
Nazi agricultural policies, a blend of romanticised peasant idealism and brutal pragmatism, aimed for self-sufficiency, a state known as Autarky.
This obsession with national health, however, twisted into a grim parody of well-being, where the ideal German diet was less about nutrition and more about nationalistic purity.
Yet, for all their rhetoric of a self-sustaining empire, the Nazis faced the stark reality of their economic limitations. The dream of Autarky crumbled against the unyielding need for essential resources like rubber, manganese, and grain.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a cynical alliance of convenience, temporarily plugged these gaps, with the Soviet Union providing the raw materials that fuelled the German war machine for the invasion of their newfound trading partner.
But as the war machine devoured resources, the German home front felt the pinch.
By 1939, Germany became self-sufficient in bread, potatoes, sugar and meat but15 per cent of food supplies were still being imported.
Shortages of fats, pulses and eggs meant rationing; and from early 1939 also coffee and fruit (esp imports like bananas and oranges). This lack of supplies would lead to a flourishing black market of goods – and fuel the Nazi appetite for conquest, as a justification for survival.
The Nazi regime, ever mindful of public morale, understood that a happy populace was a compliant one. Beyond the grim necessities, there was a need for the small pleasures, the everyday comforts that could distract from the ever-present realities of war.
It was in this climate of scarcity and enforced cheerfulness that a new beverage would emerge, a drink born from the leftovers of a crippled economy, a fizzy symbol of wartime invention.
This is the story of Fanta, a drink with a surprisingly complex and often misunderstood past.
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Fanta & The United States Of Orange Juice
“It was Fanta or nothing, it had pretty much market dominance during wartime.”
Tristan Donovan, author of Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a different kind of liquid gold was capturing the American imagination: orange juice. Where else to start but in the orange groves of Florida where the industrialisation of OJ began as an initiative of the US Army during World War Two.
The US government was seeking a source of transportable Vitamin C for troops that didn’t taste like turpentine.
Orange juice is nearly 90% water. So gently evaporating the water off the juice and freezing the concentrate, allowed for transportability of a much better tasting product when water was later re-added. As fate would have it, the war ended before the troops got a widespread taste of this new invention, but the innovation didn’t go to waste.
A new company, which would eventually become the soft drink giant Minute Maid, commercialized the product. Its popularity was cemented by the crooning of Bing Crosby, a significant shareholder, who serenaded radio listeners with jingles about the health benefits of frozen orange juice. Western consumption surged, a vibrant symbol of post-war prosperity and American ingenuity.
Back in the grim reality of wartime Germany, the Coca-Cola GmbH, a subsidiary of the American soft drink behemoth, faced a crisis. The American entry into the war and the subsequent trade embargo cut off the supply of the secret syrup needed to produce Coca-Cola.
The company had previously cooperated with the Nazi regime; with Coca-Cola President Robert Woodruff attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, alongside banners depicting the company logo.
The head of the German operation, Max Keith, a man of formidable resourcefulness, was determined to keep the bottling plants open and his workforce employed.
When Hermann Göring announced a four-year plan, at the end of which all companies based in Germany were to become self-sufficient, sourcing all the elements and components they needed from Germany or its official allies, the infamous secret recipe for syrups available only in the United States immediately became out of reach.
This measure seemed to spell the end for Coca-Cola GmbH, until Keith managed (by paying a considerable bribe to Göring himself) to obtain a special import permit.
Eventually access to the original formula would be cut off in 1942, by which time Keith and his team had already improvised and concocted a new beverage from the dregs of the wartime economy.
This was no carefully crafted marketing exercise; it was an act of sheer necessity.
The result was Fanta.
The credit for the formula for this new drink goes to German Coca-Cola chief chemist, Wolfgang Schetelig, who developed Fanta in Essen.
The name, a stroke of genius from a salesman named Joe Knipp, was a shortened version of the German word ‘Fantasie’, or imagination, a fitting tribute to the creative spirit that birthed it.
The original Fanta was a world away from the bright orange soda we know today. It was a cloudy, brownish liquid, its flavour profile a shifting chameleon dictated by the ever-changing availability of ingredients.
It was, as Mark Pendergrast, author of “For God, Country, and Coca-Cola,” describes it, “made from the leftovers of the leftovers.” Its motley ingredient list included apple fibers from cider presses, whey (a cheesemaking byproduct), and whatever fruit shavings were available. It wasn’t the sweet, citrusy burst of modern Fanta; it was a testament to wartime scarcity, a sweetish, vaguely fruity drink that offered a fleeting moment of pleasure in a world of rationing and deprivation.
Despite its humble origins, Fanta proved a surprising success, with three million cases sold in 1943.
It kept the Coca-Cola factories running, and it provided a small taste of normalcy to a population weary of war.
When the war ended and the American Coca-Cola executives returned to Germany, they were reunited with a thriving business, a testament to Keith’s wartime leadership.
They also inherited Fanta, the strange, ersatz soda that had kept their German operation afloat. For a time, the original Fanta disappeared from the market.
But in 1955, a new, orange-flavored version of Fanta was launched in Italy – created by Ermelino Matarazzo di Licosa – using the abundant local citrus.
This is the Fanta that would go on to conquer the world, a far cry from its wartime predecessor, but a direct descendant of that desperate act of invention in Nazi Germany. Now sold worldwide in more than 200 countries and in over 70 flavors.
Interestingly, despite the introduction of ‘modern Fanta’ in 1955; the kind of orange fanta now popular, that would be distributed first in West Germany in 1964, the Coca Cola Company would decide to mark – in 2015 – the 75th anniversary of the drink by relaunching a ‘classic look’ brown glass bottle and drink with 30% whey content and apple extract.
A rare – and controversial – admission of the drink’s origins in 1940.
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Conclusion
“The onset of the Second World War confronted the Coca-Cola Company with an acute irony. For all their dogged efforts at building an overseas empire during the past decade and a half, [they] could point to only one country that was a complete, unqualified success: Nazi Germany.”
Frederick Allen, author of Secret Formula
So, was Fanta invented by the Nazis? The answer, like the drink’s history, is a complex concoction. The drink was certainly created in Nazi Germany, a direct result of the economic pressures of the Second World War. However, it was the creation of a private company, the German subsidiary of Coca-Cola, not a product of the Nazi party itself.
But the line between private enterprise and the state in the Third Reich was a blurry one.
As David de Jong outlines in his book ‘Nazi Billionaires’, many of Germany’s most prominent companies were deeply enmeshed with the Nazi regime, benefiting from its policies and contributing to its war effort. Max Keith, while not a Nazi party member himself, navigated the treacherous political landscape of the time with a pragmatism that ensured the survival of his company.
The very existence of Fanta is a testament to the strange symbiosis between big business and the Nazi state, a relationship built on mutual convenience and a shared desire to maintain a semblance of normalcy on the home front.
Fanta, then, is not a Nazi invention, but a product of the Nazi era, a sweet, fizzy reminder of a dark and complex chapter in history.
***
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Bibliography
De Jong, David. Nazi Billionaires: The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties. William Collins, 2022.
Pendergrast, Mark. For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. Basic Books, 2013.
Tooze, Adam. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin Books, 2007.
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