Shades of Collaboration: The French Automobile Industry Under German Occupation, 1940–44

In the economic realm, the dominant impression of the German occupation of France is exploitation. Thanks to a variety of tools—massive occupation costs, a highly distorted exchange rate, the manipulation of clearing arrangements, widespread pillaging of material, the placing of contracts with French companies, and the conscription of French men and women for labour in Germany—the occupiers succeeded in extracting considerable resources. In what remains the best overall study of the subject, Alan Milward estimated that in 1943, Germany was using at least 40 % of French resources. A more recent study estimates that the transfer of wealth to Germany amounted to slightly over one-third of France’s GDP in 1941–42, before peaking at over one-half in 1943—levels the authors term “stunning”. Focusing on German contracts to French industry, Arne Radtke-Delacor calculates that 34 % of French production went to the Germans in the first half of 1942, rising to 40 % in the second half of 1943 and 45–50 % in early 1944. Equally striking is the increase in delivery rates of French industry, climbing from just over 50 % of the total value of contracts between September 1940 and December 1943 to 70 % in 1943. During the last two years of the occupation, Radtke-Delacor argues, French industry became an “indispensable element of the German war economy”, accounting for some 40 % of the industrial production that Germany obtained from occupied Europe as a whole. Contemplating such figures, it is little wonder that Peter Liberman, a political scientist, concluded that “conquest still pays”.