In these times when the weather is turning crap, it's salutary to review history, that of our pre-war capitalists who, even before Hitler was chancellor, chose Nazism. Annie Lacroix-Riz is a historian incapable of leaving history alone. While the story of our past is engraved in stone by historical newsprints, she must erase, add, and shake things up. 

This book won't be a hit. Annie Lacroix-Riz* is sidelined by the Bolloré and Co. media.
When French industrialists and bankers supported Hitler.

Jacques-Marie BOURGET

With a researcher like her—and one who finds—it's difficult to sleep peacefully. Once upon a time, a department store had the slogan "There's always something happening at Galeries Lafayette"... Lacroix-Riz is the same. And, strangely, the boxes of archives in which she sleeps give birth to truths that always attack poor people. Consider the evil spirit, when misfortune still dwells among the rich, when Pétain saved the Jews, and America saved Europe with the Marshall Plan. The latest example is her colossal book "French Industrialists and Bankers under the Occupation"—an expanded version of her previous work, now published in paperback—a work she continues to expand upon as she discovers new material.

It's worth noting that De Gaulle didn't make her job any easier in 1945 by ordering a light purge so that France could continue to exist as quickly as possible and avoid becoming an American bantustan. From the end of the war until 1950, the justice system responsible for the purge was nothing more than a vast laundry. The majority of industrialists and bankers, with the exception of a few egregious cases, emerged unscathed from their time in the black robes. Sometimes punished, but quickly pardoned. As a shared excuse, the collaborators had an alibi: "Under German pressure, we had no choice." French law stipulates that an accused person has the right to lie. The industrialists and bankers lied.

An old lie, since it was well before Hitler's arrival at the Place du Trocadéro, in the 1920s and 1930s, with the rise of Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy, that entrepreneurs and financiers chose Hitler and Mussolini to flee the Popular Front and the Communist cohorts. This was the time when French groups intensified their agreements and cooperation with those in Germany, readily accepting German-Nazi leadership. Sometimes even abandoning markets, like Schneider-Creusot when, in 1938-1939, Skoda, a jewel of the Czechoslovak industrial empire, fell under the clutches of Hermann Göring's Reichswerke. This was a simple anticipation, since this world, in a coming war, had, without knowing it, already chosen defeat. "Hitler is going to put France in order," Georges Lang, a printer and member of the France-Germany Committee founded in 1935, told us. When, after the war, the same people came to complain about the unstoppable Nazi pressure they were under, they forgot their lottery. The one they had played fifteen years earlier with the Reich winning. Annie Lacroix-Riz wrote in this latest opus: "We cannot resist the occupier we called and installed." Often with a faster tempo than the politicians who would eventually collaborate, industrialists and bankers were already shouting "To Berlin, to Berlin!" They were demanding the abolition of customs duties since the project was to build a new capitalism in the style of a New Europe. Let us enjoy ourselves without restraint.

The project goes beyond the hope of quick profit, that of taking the money and leaving. Not at all. The powerful of the French economy dream of a lasting settlement. But some pragmatists, for their part, think first of plundering "Jewish property." An example is a letter that Pierre Taittinger addresses to Darquier de Pellepoix in which he complains of not having enough "Jewish property" to "administer." In "Industrialists and Bankers," the author does not only deliver a vision of this world that fits the project of the New Europe. There is also ordinary villainy. So like that of Taittinger or Coco Chanel plundering the property of "Israelites." For those who collaborated (the majority), the Occupation was a profitable era, the book shows us: the capital of the big banks doubled or tripled. For example, the pharmaceutical group Théraplix quadrupled its profits; The stock market values of many companies soared, reaching up to six times their pre-war value. It was the same old story. Certainly, after the war, there were nationalizations, such as that of Renault, but nothing serious for the capitalists. Euros still lie dormant in bank vaults, small amounts of very dirty money, war fortunes.

IG Farben's plan in the summer of 1940 was to "force French industry to work for the Nazi war machine," Lacroix-Riz tells us. As for the French company Kuhlmann, a report indicates that in August 1940, the company proposed to "place its entire industry at the service of Germany to strengthen the chemical potential for the continuation of the war against England. Kuhlmann would be ready to produce all the preliminary and auxiliary products for IG, which would be desired by the German side. ... a close collaboration, ... integration of French industry into the European economy under German leadership." » Annie Lacroix-Riz reminds us that IG Farben financed the construction of the Auschwitz III death camp with money that included marks and francs. For goodness' sake, let's not even mention the colonial assets plundered by Germany, thanks to the goodwill and zeal of French employers who gave them the keys to the lands of savages.

In this 1,224-page book (including 200 appendices), the list of names cited is exhilarating: it shines a light on the infamous. These collaborators of banking and industry are pinned to the wall of shame. The historian's memory is there to remind us of the lost honor of those who, on August 18, 1944, had time to tear the Francisque from their lapels. But their past is there, indelible in this salutary book that stalks the filth like a white tornado. The eye is from the grave. Those who believe such a book will cause a stir. Provoking divorces on the grounds that grandfather paid for our castle by selling ZyclonB and steel to the Germans are mistaken. Annie Lacroix-Riz, despite being a woman who transmits the truth from the archives, is consigned to the closet by the new propaganda press run by Bolloré and Co. Above all, we must not revive moments of confusion. By joining the Élysée Palace—on a train from Vichy—Mitterrand was the first to silence the intellectual world and the press. He whistled the end of the story with Bousquet as stationmaster.

Jacques-Marie BOURGET

https://www.legrandsoir.info/quand-industriels-et-banquiers-francais-soutenaient-hitler.html

SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD9tARDylrc

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