ABSTRACT
It is necessary to make clear the kind and extent of the financial charges which Germany had imposed on France as a result of the occupation …
France was to place at the disposition of the German military command in France as a deposit for each day of occupation the sum of 20 million Reichsmarks, calculated as 400 million francs, payable in advance every ten days …
And that was not all. Entirely in addition to these payments, every ten days France had to settle and pay directly the expenses of lodging and quartering the troops stationed on French territory … The total of such expenses varied during the occupation; in 1942 they came to about 500 million francs per month; in 1944 they were 1,000 million francs per month.
Entirely outside these military expenses the French Treasury had to meet another charge which resulted from the operations of the Franco-German clearing. Under a special agreement reached in November 1940 the French Treasury advanced to the French exchange office in francs such sums as were necessary. In 1942 the monthly charge was on the average about 4,000 million francs; in 1944 it reached 7,000 million francs. At the end of the occupation in July 1944, the grand total of these advances was 165,000 million francs.
To complete the picture it should be recalled that under decision of the German military command, taken in the days just after the occupation of Paris, the value of the Reichsmark had been set at 20 francs. It bore no relation to the true value of the two currencies at that time, the mark being worth barely over 10 or 12 francs (Statement of Pierre Cathala, Minister of Finance and National Economy of France, 1942–4, in France during the German Occupation, 1940–1944, 1957, Vol. l, pp. 79–81)
