Paris Under the Nazis: Happy Days?

[Vikki]

Please stick to facts and drop the "what if" scenarios. Also, please drop the personal insults and name-calling. Neither contributes to the original topic of the thread, or helps the poster's argument.

~Vikki

[Ranke]

At the risk of being overly concerned with semantics:

1.

Vichy France enacted anti-Semitic legislation and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the extermination of Jewry.

--Nobody denies that "L'etat francais" enacted anti-Semitic legislation or collaborated with the Nazis.

2.

The Holocaust in France was not a crime committed against the French nation

--But the Holocaust in France WAS a crime committed against the French nation (once again you are denying that French Jews were part of the French nation), committed in large part by "l'etat francais." "L'etat francais" (aka the official name of the Vichy regime) is not the same thing as the French nation. "L'etat francais" is officially considered an illegal, treasonous regime for its crimes against the French nation.

3.

The French state participated in committing that crime and the French nation like the German nation was in the role of a perpetrator, not a victim.

-- This is an amazing generalization. First, the French nation was not a perpetrator, "L'etat francais" was. Second, while many French no doubt were perpetrators, not all were. Third, many French were victims. Now I haven't done a head count, and am not about to, but I feel confident that this stands to reason. Likewise, I don't think any serious historian would accuse the German nation of being perpetrators. Many Germans were not and were victims of Nazi crimes.

4. None of what you write proves that the French were enjoying "happy days" under Nazi occupation and that Nazi occupation was humane.

[ThomasG]

Robert Gildea, Marianne in Chains: Daily Life in the Heart of France during the German Occupation. New York: Picador, 2002. xx + 507 pp. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. $17.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN 0-312-42359-4.

Review by Shannon L. Fogg, University of Missouri-Rolla.

With Marianne in Chains, Robert Gildea adds to the growing literature focusing on local histories and daily life in France during the Second World War.[1] His exhaustive study of the Loire Valley under German Occupation challenges the dominant narratives of the war years emerging after the liberation while recognizing the effects these interpretations continue to have on French society. Through work in French national, departmental, municipal, church, and German military archives, Gildea reconstructs the complex community relationships in the region to argue convincingly that the French were not simply heroic resisters, committed collaborators, or passive victims during the war. Instead, Gildea asserts, “What is most striking about the French under the Occupation is not how heroic or villainous they were but how imaginative, creative, and resourceful they were in pursuit of a better life” (p. 16).

His attempt to “break out of the straitjacket of interpretations based on the Resistance/collaboration version of events” (p. 403) is not new in and of itself. Scholars such as Philippe Burrin, John F. Sweets, and Lynne Taylor have argued for more nuanced definitions of collaboration and resistance.[2] What Gildea does is effectively show the contradictions between traditional interpretations and individual experience, the complexity of local Franco-German dynamics, the existence and flourishing of civil society during the Occupation, and the divisions within French society which all defy simple categorization as resistance or collaboration. His choice of a “typical region of occupied France” (p. 13) allows him to focus on community and ordinary French men and women in ways that cannot be done in a study of France as a whole while recognizing that each region, and even each town, experienced the war differently. The Loire Valley provides Gildea with a diverse geographical region to study including the seaport of Saint-Nazaire, cities such as Nantes, Angers, and Tours, and isolated rural villages. Socially and politically diverse, the region also provides a cross-section of French society for comparison. The result is a nuanced study that shows the diversity of daily experience under German occupation.

Gildea traces the ways the French negotiated with their German occupiers from the first days of the invasion in June 1940 until the surrender of the last troops in the Saint-Nazaire pocket on 11 May 1945, concluding that “Franco-German relations under the Occupation were not always as brutal or even as one-sided as they have often been portrayed” (p. 404). Using the term “cohabitation” to describe the relationship between the French and Germans, Gildea describes the important role of local notables in mediating between the local population, the occupying authorities, and the Vichy regime. His study goes beyond politics and discusses things such as the billeting of German soldiers on French families, commonalities between the French and Germans, sexual relationships between German troops and French women, economic transactions between the parties, and relations between the Catholic Church and the German authorities.

Gildea concludes that in the Loire Valley, where many small towns and villages never saw German troops except at the beginning and end of the Occupation, the Germans were content to allow the French to have some autonomy as long as German security was assured. Collaboration during the war meant “maintaining good relations between French and Germans, whether at the public or private levels, in order to benefit all concerned” (p. 242). By approaching politics on the local level, Gildea discovers that some left-wing mayors remained in office and concludes that initially, “what mattered was open endorsement of the regime and tested authority over the local population” (p. 168) rather than political affiliation. With the Russian entrance into the war and the subsequent rise in Communist Resistance activity, Gildea traces the shift from “indirect rule” to rule by Diktat. While Gildea provides persuasive evidence to support his argument that the shift in the Loire Valley came with the assassination of the Feldkommandant of Nantes in October 1941, his claim that June 1941 was a fundamental turning point in Franco-German relations is not supported fully. A synthesis of local studies and the shift from the negotiation to the imposition of terms in each area is needed to learn when both the Germans and the French became more repressive.

The increase in armed resistance after 1941 not only changed Franco-German relations, but also affected French police actions against the country’s own people. Gildea examines administrative reactions to demonstrations and to “sinners” including Gypsies, foreigners, Jews, Communists, and Freemasons. In order to appease the Germans and maintain “indirect rule,” French authorities initially responded to armed resistance with a stronger commitment to collaboration. As Gildea shows, however, attacks on German troops changed the nature of collaboration and led to more terror. French police forces began doing the “dirty work of the SS” (p. 255) in its attempt to maintain autonomy and Jews were soon included on the list of hostages to be shot in reprisal for assaults on the Germans. Gildea compares the experience of Communists with that of Jews in order to understand administrative and popular attitudes towards both groups. Much of what Gildea outlines is not new information: the French police were “enthusiastic stooges of the German police” (p. 257) during roundups, the majority of the population reacted with indifference to rafles, and indifference turned to shock when Jewish children and parents were separated during the deportation process. His study is more illuminating on the roundups that occurred in the Occupied Zone on 15-16 July 1942, one day before the Vel d’Hiver roundups in Paris. 824 Jews were deported directly from Angers to Auschwitz on 20 July 1942 and 201 of them were French. Rather than exempting French Jews as was done in Paris and many other regions, authorities in the Loire Valley made no distinction between French and foreign Jews, and by the end of October prefects throughout the region reported there were no Jews left in their departments.

Gildea’s treatment of the Jews in his book is a problematic aspect of his study. He concludes that the general public lost interest in the fate of the Jews because the Gestapo began to arbitrarily arrest “ordinary” French citizens. While arrests of prominent community leaders such as teachers, right-wing leaders, or shopkeepers certainly added to the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear, Gildea’s statement that “everybody was at risk: they were all Jews now” (p. 270) ignores significant differences in policies towards Gentiles and Jews. Perhaps the general population no longer publicly voiced their disapproval because they no longer saw Jews being arrested as most of them had already been deported. In the chapter on “Sinners,” Gildea uses a few examples of economic Aryanization to assert, “Anti-Semitism, the evidence firmly shows, was not confined to the Vichy regime” (p. 228). Few would question that there were anti-Semites outside the Vichy administration. A brief mention in the “Terror” chapter of assistance from non-Jews which allowed some Jews to escape the roundups suggests that anti-Semitism also failed to fully take hold. A fuller discussion of anti-Semitism in the region including the forms it took beyond Aryanization, its limits, the difference in attitudes towards French and foreign Jews, and distinctions between ideological, religious, economic, and self-interested anti-Semitism would strengthen this aspect of Gildea’s study.

While the discussion of Jews is missing some details, this may be attributed to one of the strengths of the book. Gildea is careful not to ignore any group living in the Loire Valley, and there is a nuanced discussion of the many divisions within society. Rather than focusing solely on resisters versus collaborators, or local authorities and the German occupiers, the author has also included urban-rural tensions, problems among refugees and host communities, and differences between charitable organizations. The Catholic Church, POWs, women, workers, peasants, Communists, Jews, Germans, notables, and youth are all groups that appear repeatedly in the text. His attention to social groups is commendable, but understandably some experts may find details lacking. Overall, this does not take away from the effectiveness of the book, but rather adds to the texture Gildea hopes to achieve in his “account of what the German Occupation was like in the small towns and villages of France” (p. 12).[3]

Central to the author’s discussion of these groups is the definition of morality during the war. Throughout the book, Gildea demonstrates that the residents of the Loire Valley created their own definitions of morality under the Occupation that differed from the definitions imposed after the Liberation. He concludes that “Informal rules were devised by the French governing what was legitimate and what illegitimate in Franco-German relations. As a rule of thumb, actions that undermined the family, community, or nation were illegitimate” (p. 405). But certain allowances were made. A factory could accept German contracts as long as the employer did not force workers to go to Germany or to work too zealously. Small exchanges on the black market showed the ability of the French to get by while larger profiteering was viewed as immoral. A Frenchman or woman could have a drink with a German or flirt with one, but inviting one to dinner or having an affair was generally frowned upon.[4] By continuing the story of the war years into the post-Liberation period, Gildea is able to trace these differences and the ways morality was defined differently in both periods. He also explores the political ruptures and continuities through post-war election patterns and discusses the joys, disappointments, and continuing memories of the war.

Gildea’s study does not end with his chapter “Liberation” or even with the following chapter, “Disappointment.” One of the many strengths of the book is the lengthy chapter on “Memories.” The use of oral history and interviews throughout Marianne in Chains provides the reader with a richness and insights often unavailable in other sources. Aware of the hesitancy of some to accept oral history, Gildea discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the source in the introduction. Through approximately fifty interviews with French men and women who experienced the Occupation, the author finds the ruptures in carefully constructed stories and it is these ruptures that most interest him. By skillfully combining the interviews with his extensive archival research, Gildea makes a significant contribution to our understanding of civil society during the war.

One of the most interesting places where we see this rupture between the dominant narrative and individual memories is in the discussion of civil society, associative life, and entertainment opportunities. Gildea found associations for sports, games, gardening, reading, music, mutual aid, charity, foreigners, agriculture, and trade unions throughout the towns and villages in the Loire region. The chapter dedicated to these associations (“Circuses”) and other forms of entertainment including clandestine dances, the cinema, and hunting supports his argument that “the monolithic concept of les années noires needs to be nuanced” (p. 408). Rather than seeing the “poor French” suffering from cold, hunger, and fear--a theme that has emerged in recent historiography--Gildea demonstrates the ways in which civil society flourished and “ordinary French life continued under the Occupation” (p. 140).[5] Again, his archival work is supported in this chapter by the memories of men and women who spent their youth under occupation, as well as in the chapter on “Memories.” Gildea is careful to not go too far, however. He shows the nuances and contradictions in daily life without ever losing sight of the brutality of the Occupation and the hardships and deprivations of the war years. Instead, we learn that despite the heartbreak, dangers, hunger, and fear, there were opportunities for creativity and ingenuity, and for life to go on.

The result of Gildea’s research is a well-written, well-supported, and even-handed examination of the war years in one French region. He asks us to go beyond the dominant myths of collaboration, resistance, and victimization and provides a view into daily life that demonstrates the multiplicity of experiences and the complexity of the Occupation. Readers will gain details about life in the Loire Valley and the ways French society adapted to and survived the Second World War.

http://www.h-france.net/vol5reviews/fogg.html

[Ranke]

Thomas,
You must forgive me, but I think I have lost the thread of your argument.
Where in the review of Gildea's book - entitled "Marianne in Chains" - do you find evidence of the humaneness of Nazi occupation policy? How is being "in chains" humane?
A history of everyday life under occupation remains a history of everyday life UNDER OCCUPATION. That life continues should be no surprise.

Gildea is careful to not go too far, however. He shows the nuances and contradictions in daily life without ever losing sight of the brutality of the Occupation and the hardships and deprivations of the war years. Instead, we learn that despite the heartbreak, dangers, hunger, and fear, there were opportunities for creativity and ingenuity, and for life to go on.

- My emphasis.

[Jon G.]

Thanks for providing something of more substance to this thread. Between the calorie level discussion and the issue of wholescale plunder of France, I don't think there is much in Fogg's review to support a notion of a 'humane' occupation.

...Gildea is careful to not go too far, however. He shows the nuances and contradictions in daily life without ever losing sight of the brutality of the Occupation and the hardships and deprivations of the war years. Instead, we learn that despite the heartbreak, dangers, hunger, and fear, there were opportunities for creativity and ingenuity, and for life to go on...

...instead, Gildea's book apparently just shows how life went on regardless, despite the hardships of occupation. Which is of course both valid and interesting in its own right.

Edit after reading Ranke's post. How curious we both chose the same excerpt

[Patzinak]

[…] Vichy France enacted anti-Semitic legislation and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the extermination of Jewry.[…]

Which everybody has known for 30-odd years at the very least -- everybody, that is, who has bothered to read the basic text on the issue -- Paxton's "Vichy France". And which (leaving aside the question of what Vichy was and what it stood for) serves only to demonstrate the anti-Semitic grounding of your effort to detach French Jews from the French nation.

It is perfectly true that Vichy anti-Semitism "was not the emotional and hateful expression of a small fanatical minority, but the reasoned, calculated policy of the Vichy State itself", which "had as its primary goal the elimination of all Jewish economic, political, and cultural influences on French society" (Carroll, pp38–39). What did it mean in practice? It meant that,

[…] under Vichy law, to be French meant not only that one had met the standard minimum criteria for citizenship but also and primarily that one could legally "prove" that one was not Jewish.[…] Rather than continue to struggle militarily with its German occupiers, Vichy France waged a symbolic, economic, cultural, and political war against the Jews in order to enhance its own national status and solidify its identity. The less "Jewish" France became, the more "French" it allegedly would be. […]

[…] Vichy anti-Semitic legislation also had the effect then of determining what it legally meant to be French and who was in fact "truly French." […] In Vichy France's anti-Semitic policies in general, the extreme Catholic, anti-republican and anti-Semitic nationalist right finally took its revenge on the republican France of Dreyfus and his foreign, "métèque" supporters.

The intended result of Vichy's anti-Semitic legislation was, "that the Jewish minority of France [should be] little by little […] transformed into a body entirely detached from the nation" (Carroll, p43).

IOW, the distinction you made between French Jews and the rest of the French nation -- the detachment of French Jews from the French nation -- is precisely what Vichy sought to implement by legislation which you yourself described as "anti-Semitic".

You stand accused by your own words.

Source:

• Carroll, D (1998) What It Meant to Be "A Jew" in Vichy France: Xavier Vallat, State Anti-Semitism, and the Question of Assimilation. SubStance 27(3): 36–54.

--Patzinak

[freelancer]

I'm sorry, but I must say that France in WWII was in fact almost allied country for Germany. It is only french propaganda and big ego (and nose too ) of Charles de Gaullethat there were figting against German. Of course live under "occupation" was not so easy, but you can say the same about German civillians.

[David Thompson]

freelancer -- Your opinion is noted, but do you have any sourced references or fact-based argument to back up the first two sentences of it?

As for the last sentence of your post, military defeat can be a tough proposition, as Nazi-occupied Europe discovered before the liberation, and the Germans discovered during and after Jan-May of 1945.

[TassosTz]

Good evening to all mates. I'm not French, but I feel obliged to reply to such a post - referring to the one by freelancer. I don't think that an allied country could suffer atrocities like the one of Oradour-sur-Glane (10th June 1944), to mention just one (Raymond Cartier, History of WWII). If freelancer refers to Vichy government, as an ally to the Nazis, this, of course, does not cover a whole country and its whole people, as the Tsolakoglou government does not cover a country and its people (referring to occupied Greece) - Marc Mazower Inside Hitler's Greece.
TassosTz.

[MontysCaravan]

Hmmm,
How about this photo which shows just what a cracking time those pesky Jews really had in their camps? Concerts, schools, libraries, sports, gardening, and plenty of healthy work too. Okay the sleeping arrangements were a bit cramped, but you can't have everything, eh?



Actually it's inmates of the 'model' concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) in the 1944 Nazi propaganda film 'The Fuhrer gives the Jews a city'

When initial information about extermination centers began to filter through to the free world, the Nazis decided to show off Theresienstadt to an investigation committee of the International Red Cross. The external appearance of the ghetto had to be changed for this purpose. Serious overcrowding condition was reduced by additional deportation to Auschwitz.

A bank, false shops, a cafe, kindergartens, and schools were set up in the ghetto and the town was beautified by adding flower gardens. Communal bathing facilities were built as well. Had the Committee Members tested the water faucets they would have discovered that none of the faucets were attached to plumbing. They were fake.

When filming was finished, most participants, including the majority of the ghetto children, were deported to the Birkenau gas chambers.

This film can be viewed here (sans subtitles); http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 8743875704

It's saddening to see such a revisionist original post taint this fine history forum, but it's heartening to the extreme to see it so wholly discredited and defended against. Full marks.

cheers,

[michael mills]

It is important to realise that the German occupation of France, initially over part of the country, from the end of 1942 over all of it, was always only a military occupation, never a political one.

That is to say, there was never a German administration in France that ruled over the country. At all times, except at the very end when the German military position in the country collapsed in the late summer of 1944, there was a legitimate sovereign native French government that had political power over the entire territory of France (except for Alsace and Lorraine that were de facto annexed by Germany, albeit not formally). That government was offically and openly recognised by the United States until the latter country chose to invade French North African territory in November 1942. Although it was not recognised by Great Britain, which had given recognition to the rebel regime of de Gaulle, it nevertheless had secret agreements with that country according to which France would remain neutral and not engage in hostilities with Britian, unless attacked.

The German military occupation of part of France came about by agreement between the German Government and the existing government of France, that is to say the government of President Petain, who had been elected by the French legislature after it had moved to Vichy from Bordeaux, and who had then been granted full legislative powers by that body.

Under the agreement between the German and French governments, the purpose of the occupation was to enable the German armed forces to have a base on French territory from which to pursue the conflict with Britain. The German Military Administration that was then set up had no political power in France; its sole purpose was to manage the German armed forces stationed in the country, and its police powers were limited to measures to ensure the security of the German armed forces. That is to say, the German Military Administration could take police action against French citizens or other persons in France who attacked or otherwise posed a threat to the security of the German armed forces, but otherwise it had no governmental power over French citizens.

In short, there was never a time when there was a German equivalent of Bremer in France.

Of course, the German Government, via the Armistice Commission in Wiesbaden and its Embassy in Paris, exerted enormous pressure on the French Government at Vichy to provide economic support for its war effort. Probably the major contribution which the French Government made to the German war effort was in the form of occupation costs, which vastly exceeded the actual costs of maintaining the German military forces in France, and constituted an appreciable addition to German national income. Eventually, a large part of the French economy was working on behalf of the German war effort, both within France itself and through the export of labour to Germany.

The French Government was prepared to co-operate economically with Germany, particularly with the Speer Ministry, but it did strenuously oppose German economic demands which it saw as opposed to its own vision for a new France based on conservative principles. One demand that the French Government sought to oppose was to keep wage levels in France low, so as to provide an incentive for French labour to move to Germany where wage levels were higher.

Atrocities committed by German forces in France, such as the destruction of the town of Oradour-sur-Glane and the massacre of a large part of its inhabitants, were a feature of the collapse of the German military position in France after the Allied invasion in June 1944. They were disproportionate responses to attacks by the French Resistance on German forces, or sabotage or other attempts to interfere with the movement of German forces in response to the Allied invasion.

At the same time there was something of a civil war between the French Government and various French insurgent groups which sometimes resulted in atrocities by French Government security forces, in particular the notorious Milice, against insurgents and their supporters. The German forces stationed in France did not generally get involved in that civil war.

Of course, the conditions of life for most of the inhabitants of France during the war were not all that great, but the cause of those conditions was not harsh and oppressive German rule, which did not exist, but rather the general hardships of war ,including the Allied blockade which came into full force against France after the Allied invasion of French North Africa.

[michael mills]

Jon G. wrote:

The Germans had strong retributive aims in France indeed. Why do you think the armistice was modelled so closely on the 1919 Versailles treaty?

Perhaps Jon G could tell us the clauses in the Framco-German armistice agreement of June 1940 which required France to:

1. Hand over its colonies to Germany;

2. Hand over its fleet and merchant marine to Germany;

4. Reduce its armed forces to a nominal level;

3. To accept total responsibility for the war and agree to pay reparations;

4. To agree to hand over parts of its territory to other countries.

Concerning the comparison between the occupation costs levied by Germany on France between 1940 and 1944, and those levied by the Western Allies on their zones of Germany after the war, $20 million RM perday x 365 days = 7.3 billion RM per annum. The amount levied by the Allies was, so it has been stated, 7.2 billion DM per annum. Which of the two amounts was higher would depend on the relative values of the RM and the DM, which would be very difficult to assess. When the DM was introduced in 1948, it was worth a lot more than the RM, but the latter had lost most of its value due to post-war inflation.

There have also been references to the "slave labour" of French workers deported to Germany. In fact, the term slave labour is a misnomer. Although many of the French workers were conscripted under the "Service du Travail Obligatoire", a measure introduced by the French Government, they were paid wages, and were by no means slaves. The total amount remitted to France by French workers was substantial.

The German Government, which throughout the war was confronted by a labour shortage, of course wanted to utilise the French labour force for its war effort, and it had two ways of doing that. One was to give contracts to French firms, which would then carry out production in France, using their own labour force, and exporting the finished products to Germany. At one stage a scheme was floated of relocating to France all German production of consumer goods and converting all of German industry to armaments production.

The other way was to bring the French labour to Germany and put it to work in German factories.

What happened in practice is that the former method was tried first, but it soon became apparent that the productivity of French labour in France was far lower than in Germany, partly because the input of capital was lower in France, and partly because of high absenteeism and lack of work discipline. As a result, the German Government went over to the second method, and began to import French labour into Germany. At first voluntary recruitment was tried, and when that failed to produce the number of workers required, the German Government leant heavily on the French Government to introduce labour conscription. But the labour conscripts were in no sense slaves, any more than conscripts into a military force are slaves.

As it turned out, the productivity of French workers in Germany was the highest of all the wartime foreign workers in Germany, matched only by female workers from the Occupied Eastern Territories.

Patzinak referred to the wages paid to foreign workers in Germany as being up to 40% below the wage-levels of Germans doing equivalent work. Bringing workers to Germany from another country and paying them a wage 40% below the German level is exactly the same as setting up a factory in a country where wage levels are 40% below the German level and paying that lower wage to locally-recruited workers. The latter practice is the norm today; for example, US firms set up factories in Mexico and pay local workers Mexican wages. The alternative would be to bring the Mexican workers temporarily to the United States and still pay them Mexican wages; but I doubt that US law would permit that.

In fact, wages paid to French workers in Germany were higher than wages for the same work in France, and the German Government exerted pressure on the French Government to prevent any increase in wage levels in France, so as to maintain the wage-differential as an inducement for French workers to volunteer for work in Germany.

There has also been a lot of uninformed discussion about Germany "taking" food from France. As a matter of fact, French exports of food to Germany increased markedly between 1940 and 1944. However, those food exports were paid for by German importers. To be sure, a large part of the French currency used to purchase those imports was derived from the occupation costs imposed on France, which were paid in francs and financed by the French Government through taxation and borrowing from its own population. However, there were no German requisition teams wandering through the French countryside seizing grain and livestock from reluctant French peasants. From the point of view of the individual French food producer, it made all the difference in the world whether his production was bought and paid for in francs by agents working for Germany, whether legally or on the black market, or whether it was simply requisitioned in return for worthless promissory notes.

John G has made the point that food rationing was "left to" the French Government. That is a rather bald way of putting it; there was no German administration in France that could have carried out rationing. The German occupation authorities in France had no administrative power in France at all. The level of ration per person was set by the French Government, based on its reckoning of the amount of food available, which because of the British blockade was essentially limited to French home production, particularly after the end of 1942 when importation from French colonies became impossible.

[Jon G.]

Jon G. wrote:

The Germans had strong retributive aims in France indeed. Why do you think the armistice was modelled so closely on the 1919 Versailles treaty?

Perhaps Jon G could tell us the clauses in the Framco-German armistice agreement of June 1940 which required France to:

1. Hand over its colonies to Germany;

2. Hand over its fleet and merchant marine to Germany;

4. Reduce its armed forces to a nominal level;

3. To accept total responsibility for the war and agree to pay reparations;

4. To agree to hand over parts of its territory to other countries.

Well, I should have endeavoured to make a clearer distinction between the 1918 Compiegne armistice and the 1919 Versailles treaty. That said, an obvious difference between the 1918/1919 armistice/peace treaty respectively and the 1940 armistice is that only metropolitan France was within German reach, which affected the relative severity of armistice clauses. For occupied France, your item #3 (assuming you mean 3 and not 4) was certainly in effect; other items were explicitly postponed to a future peace treaty, which never materialized.

Concerning the comparison between the occupation costs levied by Germany on France between 1940 and 1944, and those levied by the Western Allies on their zones of Germany after the war, $20 million RM perday x 365 days = 7.3 billion RM per annum. The amount levied by the Allies was, so it has been stated, 7.2 billion DM per annum. Which of the two amounts was higher would depend on the relative values of the RM and the DM, which would be very difficult to assess. When the DM was introduced in 1948, it was worth a lot more than the RM, but the latter had lost most of its value due to post-war inflation...

Another point which should be taken into consideration when measuring the relative severity of the German occupation of France is the artificially set (and artificially low) exchange rate of 5 Pfennigs to the franc and the forced introduction of the Reichsmark as legal tender in occupied France. That is discussed upthread.

...There has also been a lot of uninformed discussion about Germany "taking" food from France. As a matter of fact, French exports of food to Germany increased markedly between 1940 and 1944. However, those food exports were paid for by German importers....

...and the exhange rate meant that German importers had far greater purchasing power than domestic French consumers.

To be sure, a large part of the French currency used to purchase those imports was derived from the occupation costs imposed on France, which were paid in francs and financed by the French Government through taxation and borrowing from its own population. However, there were no German requisition teams wandering through the French countryside seizing grain and livestock from reluctant French peasants. From the point of view of the individual French food producer, it made all the difference in the world whether his production was bought and paid for in francs by agents working for Germany, whether legally or on the black market, or whether it was simply requisitioned in return for worthless promissory notes.

See above about the exchange rate; Wehrmacht war booty - which included many horses originally requisitioned from French agriculture - was not returned upon the signing of the armistice.

John G has made the point that food rationing was "left to" the French Government. That is a rather bald way of putting it; there was no German administration in France that could have carried out rationing. The German occupation authorities in France had no administrative power in France at all. The level of ration per person was set by the French Government, based on its reckoning of the amount of food available...

...and of course the amount of available food was affected by transfers to Germany. An easy way to examine that relationship is in the differing average calorie intakes in France and in Germany during the war; the forced low exchange rate basically turned plunder into an option to anyone fortunate enough to receive his salary in Reichsmarks, while passing the cost of rationing on to the French nation. Leaving the headache of rationing to the French also meant refraining from setting any limits to how much food could be transferred from France to Germany.

[David Thompson]

Michael -- You wrote:

Perhaps Jon G could tell us the clauses in the Framco-German armistice agreement of June 1940 which required France to:

1. Hand over its colonies to Germany;

2. Hand over its fleet and merchant marine to Germany;

4. Reduce its armed forces to a nominal level;

3. To accept total responsibility for the war and agree to pay reparations;

4. To agree to hand over parts of its territory to other countries.

You're confusing the concept of an armistice with a peace treaty, like the Treaty of Versailles. The Armistice of 11 Nov 1918 didn't require any of the conditions you list here. See:

Conditions of an Armistice with Germany November 10, 1918
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Condit ... th_Germany

For purposes of comparison, see:

FRANCO-GERMAN ARMISTICE, JUNE 25, 1940
http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1940/400625a.html

There are a number of other conceptual and factual problems with your post at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 8#p1210158 , which I'll try to address when I have a little more time.

[michael mills]

...and of course the amount of available food was affected by transfers to Germany.

The use of the term "transfers" conveys an impression of seizures or forced deliveries, which did not occur. A more accurate term would be "exports" which were paid for.

The occupation costs paid by France, and the artificially low exchange rate imposed by Germany (artificially low by comparison with the pre-war values of the Reichsmark and the franc expressed in dollars) did give German importers enormous purchasing power in France, more than they otherwise would have had. But the point I was making that food acquired by Germans in France, including purchases on the black market, was paid for, which was a decisive consideration for French food producers.

From the point of view of a French peasant, it did not matter whether the agricultural produce purchased from him was shipped to Germany to be consumed by Germans or remained in France to be consumed by his fellow countrymen. What mattered to him was whether his produce was paid for at market prices, and not simply seized or compulsorily acquired at a fixed low price. Thus, for French food producers, the time of the German occupation was still a "happy time" in many ways. If there was a flow of food from France to Germany, it was because French producers were willing to sell it to German purchasers for hard cash, not because the German occupiers forced the producers to hand it over.

A reduction in the total amount of food available in wartime France was more probably due on the one hand to a fall in the productivity of French agriculture, which was had a very inefficient structure consisting mainly of small peasant farms, and on the other to the Allied blockade which restricted imports, particularly after the invasion of French North Africa.

As for the difference between an armistice and a peace treaty, it was Jon G who initially ignored that difference by claiming that the provisions of the Franco-German armistice of 1940 were based on those of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Any comparison of the two sets of provisions show that the armistice was not as punitive as the Versailles Treaty.