The [Reich] authorities compelled the French state to pay 20 million marks, 400 million francs, every day to cover the cost of occupying the country. This sum, 150 billion francs a year, represented more than the whole French budget in 1939, a period of massive rearmament. It has been calculated, given that a [Wehrmacht] soldier cost 22 francs a day including his pay, this sum would have permitted the [Wehrmacht] to maintain 18 million men, while in fact the army of occupation never exceeded 300,000.73
This meant that the French people not only paid for their own occupation, but that the Reich could obtain everything they needed in France without having to worry about the cost. However, this extortion did not affect the population equally and the big winners were the owners of the large industrial companies.
The authorities, both the occupation and the collaborators, repressed the trade unions and other independent workers’ organisations as well as abolishing the social gains made during the Popular Front, allowing the employers to profit from the resulting cheap labour.
Consequently, very few employers were supporters of the resistance and the bourgeois press loudly proclaimed that if they had to choose between the occupation of their factories by the workers or the occupation of the country by the [Fascists], they would always prefer the [Fascists].74 This attitude was particularly prevalent in an industrial region like the Nord‐Pas‐de‐Calais and gave a patriotic edge to working class militant action.
Click here for events that happened today (April 13).
1924: Captain Isoroku Yamamoto visited the Greater United States as a member of the Imperial delegation. Among other places, he visited the United States Naval War College.
1936: Ioannis Metaxas became Greece’s Prime Minister.
1939: Fleet tenders Adolf Lüderitz and Carl Peters launched at the Neptun Schiffswerft und Maschinenfabrik shipyard in Rostock, Mecklenburg.
1940: In the Second Battle of Narvik, a torpedo bomber sank the Fascist submarine U‐64 with bombs, while surface vessels sank three destroyers, with another five Fascist ships scuttled by their own crews after suffering extensive damage; without their ships, 2,600 Fascist sailors went on land and served as infantrymen. Coincidentally, U‐23 began her ninth war patrol, and Oswald Mosley had a son.
1941: Moscow and Tōkyō signed a five‐year neutrality pact, whereas the Leibstandarte SS Regiment attacked through the Metsovon Pass in an attempt to flank the Greek positions on the front with Albania. To prevent this, Greek General Papago ordered Greek troops in Albania to fall back, allowing the Italian 11th Army to capture Korçë, Permet, and Porto Palermo in Albania. Further south, Axis aircraft attacked Piraeus, Greece, sinking one Greek destroyer and damaging another. As well, the Ustaša disarmed Serb officers and soldiers, and created Croatian gendarmeries, units that were later augmented with Croatian Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans descended from colonists originally sent by Vienna in the eighteenth century to repopulate demographically weakened regions of their Balkan territories). The Luftwaffe conducted a raid on Malta, and Axis artillery bombarded Allied defensive positions at Tobruk, Libya at 1700 hours; 30 minutes later the Reich’s 5th Light Division, the Ariete Division, and the Trento Division commenced an assault. Further east, Axis troops captured Fort Capuzzo near the Libyan–Egyptian border.
1942: Philippe Pétain, under Berlin’s pressure, decided to reinstate Pierre Laval whom the German Fascists favored. Likewise, Axis bombers attacked Portland and Weymouth, England during the day, damaging a number of homes. After dark, they attacked Grimsby on England’s eastern coast, lasting until the next date. In between all of this, the Axis marched Allied prisoners of war from Balanga for Orani in Bataan, Philippine Islands, while Axis artillery to the South continued the bombardment of Corregidor island. The Axis also continued to assault the Minhia‐Taungdwingyi‐Pyinmana defensive line along the Irrawaddy River in Burma without success. To the northwest, troops of the Imperial Japanese 56th Infantry Division captured Mauchi from troops of Chinese 6th Army and the nearby tungsten mines.