I skip a few lines to make this shorter. Murdel adds:
“Apart from this, every soldier on leave returning from Germany had the right to bring back with him a certain number of marks (50). The same was the case for any German soldier who was stationed for the first time in France. We exchanged the marks into French francs. I value the total of the sum that we paid out each month in this way at 5,000 million francs.”
One may thus estimate at about 250,000 million francs, at least, the individual expense incurred in France by the Germans, of which amount the greater part was used for the purchase of products and objects sent to Germany, to the detriment of the French population.
To show the size of these costs, I would add that the amount of 5,000 million francs a month, in other words 60,000 million francs a year, is greater than the budget receipts of the French State in 1938, for these were only 54,000 million francs.
After having viewed the individual purchases, I shall enter upon a fourth chapter devoted to the organization of the black market by the Germans in the occupied territories. The population of the occupied countries had been subjected to a severe rationing of products of all kinds. They had been left only obviously insufficient quantities for their own vital needs.
These regulations made available a large quantity of the stock production which the Germans seized by means of operations that were, to all appearances, regular: requisitions, purchases by official services, individual purchases, or those in exchange for vouchers of German priority. We have just seen that these purchases represented for France, alone, an average of 5,000 million francs per month.
But such regulations produced, as a corollary, a depletion of merchandise and the concealment of products with the aim of keeping them from the Germans. This state of affairs gave birth, in the occupied countries, to what was called the black market, that is to say, clandestine purchases made in violation of regulations on rationing.
The Germans themselves were not slow in proceeding, to an ever greater extent, to purchase on the black market, mostly through agents and sub-agents, recruited among the most doubtful elements of the population, whose work was to find out where these products could be found.
These agents, compromised by violations of the legislation on rationing which they had committed, enjoyed absolute immunity; but they were constantly under the threat of denunciation on the part of their German employers in case they should slow up or stop their activity. Often these agents also fulfilled functions for the Gestapo and were paid by commissions, which they obtained in black market transactions.
The different German organizations in the occupied countries fell into the habit of making clandestine purchases that became increasingly important in volume. Indeed, they began to compete among themselves for this merchandise, the chief result of which was to increase the prices, thus threatening to bring about inflation. The Germans, while they continued to profit by the clandestine purchases, were anxious that the money which they used should maintain as high a value as possible.