Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [99]
Finally, the vital military areas, non-Vichy France until late 1942 and all of France after that, Belgium, Greece, and much of the conquered Russian territory, remained basically under the control of the military forces, though subject to incursions by all the other competing authorities. The navy controlled ports, the SS hunted Jews, the labor organizers rounded up forced labor, and on and on.
Through all the conflicts engendered by these competing authorities and diverse relationships, there ran several common threads of exploitation. The German planners, to the extent that they had a consistent philosophy, believed in the self-sufficiency of Europe, and in the creation of an independent closed system, in which Europe’s resources would enable it to live by itself. Though this was never entirely achieved, they did do fairly well at it, and in terms simply of resources and materials, they managed to sustain their war effort much longer than might originally have been expected.
A corollary idea was that in any considerations of priority, Germany was to be supreme, and all the other areas were to serve merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Master Race. Non-German Europe was to be exploited as a colonial area for Germany. How much France or Holland or any other state might be left depended upon how much surplus it could produce over German needs. As the war turned increasingly sour, the demands of the German economy became more voracious, and by late in the war, even the supposedly favored territories such as Holland and Denmark were being ruthlessly looted and exploited to meet German quotas.
The financial underpinning of all this was provided by a series of agreements between Germany and the conquered states, in which the currency value and exchange rates were arbitrarily fixed in favor of the German mark. The mark was pegged artificially high, and competing currencies were fixed artificially low; the result of this was that Germans could buy foreign goods at ludicrously cheap prices, while German goods were far too expensive for non-Germans to afford. This created a one-way flow of manufactured items and luxury goods into Germany, with no corresponding outflow. The Germans also, in the time-honored tradition of conquerors, assessed the occupied countries for the maintenance costs of the armed forces. Thus, Belgium not only was occupied by German troops, the Belgian government had to pay for the privilege.
Setting aside the jugglings of high finance, the Germans resorted to a form of legitimized robbery under the name of requisitioning. In all combat areas, the German forces simply commandeered what they needed. In eastern Europe, with a relatively low-level economy, and a Slavic population, they left a desert behind them in many areas. In western Europe, they were at great pains to be more “correct” in their approach, which meant for practical purposes that they robbed more politely. As the war went on, the veneer of correctness became progressively thinner. Eventually, they were skimming off most of the products of non-German Europe. They took over the Hungarian grain production, Danish dairy products, Dutch garden crops, Norwegian timber. They requisitioned iron ore from Lorraine, oil from Rumania, coal from Poland, copper from Yugoslavia. They took virtually all the French bauxite and all imports from the French Empire while Vichy was still afloat: iron, phosphates, oil—everything they could get.
They also took over businesses and factories. French firms built German aircraft and tanks under license; Czech firms built German guns. The business infrastructure of Europe was overlaid with a web of German control, with all normal considerations subordinated to German