LOOTING FRANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 October 1940, Page 9

LOOTING FRANCE

HOW THE NAZIS WORK FORCED CREDITS TAKEN. “SCIENTIFIC” PROCEDURE. Pity the French people. Ruthlessly they are being stripped by their new German masters of their wealth, hard won in generations of toil and enterprise, wrote Sefton Dehner in the "Daily Express” on July 17. Their country is being scientifically looted while they look on. • Not just the traditional loot of victorious German soldiers —pictures, gold bracelets, crucifixes, and the like. No. this is loot on the National Socialist scale—organised expropriation of one people by another. And it is beautifully simple, the way it is done. Did 'you read how the French franc had been pegged to the valueless German paper mark; at a rate of twenty francs to one Reichmark? Well, that’s the secret, for the real value of the mark in terms of francs is eight francs to one mark. The French are prevented by decree from raising prices.Which is the reason why the German soldiers’ and officers’ wives are thronging Paris luxury stores, and shops everywhere in France, buying up silk stockings, shirts and all the other good things they haven’t seen in the Fatherland for a year or more.

EVEN SHARES BOUGHT. Business men are buying up everything of value, particularly stocks of tinned food and clothes. They are even buying up shares in French concerns. But the real beauty of this typically Nazi transaction is that it is costing Germany nothing. For though the French sellers are being paid for their goods in French francs, it is the French State Bank, not Germany, that is paying them. For the French banks are forced to accept the worthless marks, of which the Germans can print as many as they like, which have no value except in Germany—and even there, owing to the famine in products, have only an extremely limited value. But that is only the beginning of the German economic exploitation of France —an exploitation run on the same lines as that of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, and Belgium. The French banks have been ordered to hand over to German banks controlling their business in Alsace-Lorraine all deposits from that region. But they are not allowed to deduct credits, loans and outstanding debts. In Czecho-Slovakia this manoeuvre ended by giving the Germans control of the Czech banks. FRENCH SEE THROUGH IT. But already the French populace are reacting. They have spotted the “marks-into-francs” trick and are rushing to convert their francs into goods. Even their stocking hoards of francs, long and jealously guarded,, they are turning into goods of permanent value, vying with the invader in the race to buy. Soon there will be nothing for the Germans to buy. Rationing, which the Germans have instituted, is not proving effective. For the French are deliberately sabotaging the German rationing orders, which they rightly recognise as a measure for their own exploitation. They are sabotaging also the German endeavour to get the French arms and aeroplane factories working again. In the Renault, Citroen, and Peugeot plants in Paris much of the machinery is still wrecked. The workers who left with the refugee exodus have not yet returned, even though the Petain Government are doing their best to round them up and send them to work for their German taskmasters.

Officials of the Petain junta and German liaison officers are hunting high and low for essential arms and muni-tion-making machinery which was sent lumbering off south on lorries when the Germans approached Paris. The French people need heartening in their double fight against both the German invader and the Government nominated by him. It is to strengthening the French and exhorting the Frenchmen to carry on their brave resistance that the Ministry of Information should devote its efforts —not to tilting at a British defeatism which does not exist.