Vichy France (63 page)

Not all the French hunger can be attributed directly to German occupation policy, of course. With much food production in the hands of a notoriously small, independent, and secretive peasantry, France suffered as much from maldistribution as from genuine shortages. Moreover, France had depended before the war upon imports of some staples, such as vegetable oils, so that Allied blockade and shipping shortages made matters worse.

There is no sign, however, that Vichy managed to win significant concessions in those areas where German policy added to French hunger. The armistice provision (copied from that of 1918) that French prisoners of war should not be repatriated until the peace produced a serious labor shortage in agriculture, keeping French agricultural production from ever returning to prewar figures. The petroleum shortage prevented the replacement of farm laborers with machines. Moreover, the gigantic German requisitions of French foodstuffs, for the occupying army and for export to the Reich, were among Germany’s most important single sources of nourishment. France supplied more foodstuffs to Germany, both absolutely and relatively, than did even Poland.
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It was indeed explicit German policy that the French should have a lower standard of living than the Germans. Both Goering and Abetz, as we have seen, thought that Frenchmen should have less to eat than Germans. Abetz stated early in July 1942 that French wages must remain lower than those in Germany (which had been the lowest in industrial Europe in the 1930’s) so that French workmen would go to work in Germany.
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It begins to look as if material conditions of life in occupied Europe depended less upon avoiding total occupation and having an indigenous regime than upon Germany’s ethnic feelings about the occupied power and upon simple opportunity. Bargaining by Vichy was quite incapable of preventing increases in Germany’s food delivery quotas in France in the summer of 1942 and in early 1943 or of preventing France, the richest agricultural producer of the occupied nations, from experiencing localized malnutrition.
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The same pattern prevails in other material conditions of life—inflation, for example. Pierre Cathala claimed after the war that if Germany had collected taxes directly, as in Belgium, inflation would have been worse. In reality, the franc depreciated more rapidly in 1940–44 than the currency of any other Western European country except Italy.
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All the Western occupied countries faced roughly comparable inflationary pressures: drastic shortages of goods coupled with high public expenditures. All of them, whether quasi-autonomous regimes as at Vichy or not, retained their local currency. All of them tried to defend it by controlling the market. The Vichy regime, however, was unsuccessful in trying to remove the special inflationary pressures contained in the armistice arrangements. Under the armistice provisions for French payment of occupation costs, support costs, and clearing deficits in Franco-German international accounts, the German occupation authorities were getting 58 percent of the French annual budget. Much of this was being pumped
back into the economy, further inflated by the German use of scrip (Kreditkassenscheinen). Although the Vichy authorities managed to reduce German use of scrip in the Occupied Zone, their attempts to reduce occupation costs are an eloquent example of their inability to negotiate a favored position.

Occupation costs were levied at 20 million marks a day, and the exchange rate set at 20:1 by
diktat
in August 1940. Vichy declared a unilateral cessation of occupation costs on December 1940, in an evident attempt to cash in on the German “new policy” that had been expected at Vichy to lead to conspicuous concessions. The German occupation authorities insisted that the issue was nonnegotiable, and during the German “cold shoulder” of early 1941, Vichy was unable to broach the issue. When Darlan was received at Berchtesgaden in May 1941, Vichy believed it had won a reduction in occupation costs and even announced the fact. The reduction was agreed upon only months later, however, and the French had to agree to pay 10 million marks a day in francs and another 5 million in gold and foreign exchange. Then, after the total occupation of November 1942, occupation costs were raised to 25 million marks a day. Vichy was never able to negotiate a less inflationary armistice arrangement.
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France remained most subject to inflation of the Western occupied nations, second only to Italy.

Nor can it be claimed that Vichy won any territorial immunities by collaborating. With the exception of Belgium, shorn of the few square miles of Eupen and Malmédy-Moresnet that she had gained from Germany in 1919, none of the other Western occupation nations suffered the de facto territorial annexations and amputations that France did. Alsace and Lorraine were placed under Nazi gauleiters and administered as part of the Reich. The rest of northeastern France was also sealed off from returning refugees and from French officials in a “Sperrzone,” and farms “abandoned” there during the campaign were resettled
with German settlers by an agency of the German Ministry of Agriculture called the Ostland Company.
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Finally, the two northwestern channel coast departments of the Nord and Pas-de-Calais were placed under the German military government in Brussels rather than the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich.

It is, of course not possible to know what the territorial disposition of Western Europe would have been in the event of eventual German victory. Holland and Belgium might have been swallowed up entirely. France, it appears from the German Foreign Office’s preparations for an eventual peace treaty, would have survived as an independent if truncated nation, probably excluded from the
Grosswirtschaftsraum
, or German-centered European free-trade zone.
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Vichy cannot claim to have saved the very existence of France, for that existence was not at stake. As for saving France from partition, it is not clear to what extent German sympathy for Breton, Flemish, and Burgundian autonomists (the last virtually fictitious) was ever meant to turn France into some kind of “Confederation of the Seine.” The local German support for such movements never reflected a settled Berlin policy of partition, and that support was quietly withdrawn in the fall of 1940. The most one can claim for Vichy in this respect is that an amenable united France had been proven more useful to Hitler than a series of provinces; even a gauleiter would have hesitated to drive a population to desperate resistance by threatening to carve up the country.
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Moreover, Vichy efforts to halt the de facto annexations of Alsace, Lorraine, and the northeastern “Sperrzone,” mentioned above, were utterly unsuccessful. In the very honeymoon of the “new policy” of November 1940, trainloads of dispossesed Frenchmen from the two provinces were dumped into France with little more than the clothes on their backs. Laval’s stratagem of acquiescing in the loss of Alsace while suggesting plebiscites in Lorraine received no flicker of response from Germans. Darlan reopened the question of both provinces in Berlin in May 1941, but the only concession he obtained was permission for French soldiers on leave to visit their homes in the northeastern forbidden zone. Vichy did manage, by and large, to avoid direct German occupation of the empire until the battle for North Africa began in November 1942, with the major exceptions of German inspection teams in Morocco and Dakar and German use of French airfields and equipment in Syria for support of the Iraqi rising of May 1941. Berlin simply ignored the efforts of both Laval and Darlan to obtain a German guarantee of French frontiers and an equivalent imperial territory in an eventual peace settlement. Collaboration won no territorial favors for France.
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Vichy’s effectiveness as a “shield” has been most persistently claimed in the areas of forced labor for German factories and the Jewish Final Solution. Laval claimed after the war that while the Germans took 80 percent of Belgian workers to Germany, they took only 16 percent of French workers.
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As for Jews,
Xavier Vallat, who had been Commissaire aux Questions Juives in the Vichy government from 29 March 1941 to 6 May 1942, claimed in his trial that Jews were better off under Vichy than under a gauleiter.

So, the basic question is this: was it better that the French government concern itself with the Jewish problem or leave the entire material and moral responsibility for it to the occupation authorities?

As for me, I think it was better that the French Government got into it.…

At a time when out of 4,343,000 native Jews who lived in Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Greece, Holland, Luxemburg, in Poland, and in Yugoslavia only 337,500 survived—that is to say that 92% of the Jews disappeared, the figures given for France [by the Anglo-American Commission of Enquiry on the Palestine Question, 1946] … prove that if, alas, most of the foreign Jews died in deportation, 95% of the Jews of French nationality are fortunately still living. That is my answer.
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Unfortunately the shield was less successful in either case than the Vichy defense claimed.

If few French workers went to Germany in the earlier stages of the war, it was because Polish and then Russian prisoners of war and women were the mainstay of German forced labor. Only when those sources were exhausted by the very brutality of their treatment was volunteer labor replaced by forced labor in the Western occupied countries. In April 1942, Hitler appointed Fritz Sauckel, former gauleiter of Thuringia, to the office of plenipotentiary for foreign labor and authorized him to impose conscription of labor on occupied Belgium, Holland, and France.

It would be a striking justification for the Vichy shield theory if at this point the Germans had asked less of collaborationist
France or if Laval had proven able to win concessions for his new ministry.

The Germans asked no less of the Occupied Zone of collaborationist France than of totally occupied Belgium and Holland, and much more of France than of collaborationist Norway and Denmark (who contributed little to foreign labor working in the Reich).
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Only the Paris embassy, among German agencies, seems to have been worried about the political cost to Vichy of forced labor in 1942. Rudolf Schleier, Abetz’ second-in-command at the Paris embassy, warned Laval on 24 April 1942, through Consul-General Krug von Nidda, of what was coming and urged Vichy to counter the blow by making the volunteer system much more effective. At first Laval took this advice, permitting the establishment on May 1, 1942, of permanent German recruitment offices in Lyon, Marseilles, and Toulouse, enjoying the full support of French labor offices.
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These efforts to increase French volunteer labor for Germany did not prevent the eventual introduction of forced labor in France, however. In fact, France became the largest single supplier to Germany of foreign male labor in all occupied Europe in 1943, east or west. Sauckel’s Anordnung Nr. 4 of 7 May 1942, instituting forced labor in the west, makes no distinction between the French Occupied Zone and other occupied areas. And after November 1942, all of France was occupied. By November 1943, 1,344,000 French males were working in German factories, slightly ahead of the Russian and Polish male contingents. French women workers, at 44,000, came in third place, well behind the Russian and Polish women. Moreover, on January 5, 1944, Sauckel said he planned to draft an additional million Frenchmen to work in Germany. The German government spared Frenchmen none of the agonies of forced labor.
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There remains the possibility that Pierre Laval, working within the quasi-autonomy of Vichy, delayed or mitigated the application of forced labor to the unoccupied zone. His old associate Pierre Cathala tried to prove after the war that Laval had managed to “éviter le pire” with his famous Auvergnat peasant horse-trading: “Sauckel wants men, I will give him legal texts,” Laval is supposed to have said.
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Cathala’s claims don’t stand. Sauckel got legal texts and men too.

Never a man to leave the initiative to others, Laval was ready with a counterproposal when Sauckel came to Paris in mid-June 1942 to apply the new German labor policy to France. France enjoyed a unique tactical position in occupied Europe with respect to manpower. Two million able-bodied young Frenchmen were already in Germany as prisoners of war, and Laval now threw them into the bargaining scales with the notorious
relève
scheme: the release of one prisoner of war for every three French workers who volunteered to work in Germany. Hitler accepted this plan after a telephone conference with Sauckel on 15 June, and Laval worked out the details with Sauckel on the spot.

Laval clearly thought he had gained something, as the volume of French propaganda shows. The return of war prisoners, however few, touched the deepest emotions of both the French public and Pétain himself. Laval marked the political importance of the
relève
by going in person to greet the first trainload of returning prisoners at Compiègne on August 11, with maximum publicity. The other thing Laval thought he had gained was French sovereign control over one more area of threatened German direct administration.

And so the French government worked frantically to meet the quota of French volunteer workers. It supplied the names and addresses of specialists, arranged the closing of inefficient shops, and extended the work week, all measures designed to release a skilled labor pool for the
relève.
More strikingly, Laval asked German authorities secretly for a letter threatening direct
German forced labor if the
relève
did not work. He and Pétain thought this would help convince the reluctant.
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Although the
relève
got off to a slow start, with only 19,000 skilled workers signed up by 7 October, Vichy’s strenuous efforts had recruited 181,000 workers by 21 November, of whom 90,000 were specialists.
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