“The Chief of the Civilian Administration and the services designated by him will decide upon the amount and nature of the compensation. Any recourse to the law on the part of the person involved is forbidden.”
Thus the Tribunal can see in a striking manner the processes and the methods pursued by the German authorities.
The first ordinance, cited earlier, spoke only of safeguarding the property of people who had been deported or displaced. A second ordinance now speaks of confiscations. It still refers only to the notion of enemies of the people and of the Reich.
The third ordinance is more complete, since it comprises confiscation prescriptions which are quite formal in their character, and which are no longer qualified as “safeguarding” property which has become vacant as the result of deportations.
This agricultural colonization of which I have spoken assumed a special importance in Lorraine. On the other hand, it is in Alsace that we find the greatest number of measures involving a veritable industrial colonization. These measures consisted in stripping the French industrial enterprises for the benefit of German firms. On this subject there are protests of the French Delegation to the Armistice Commission.
I submit as documents three of these protests, Documents Numbers RF-758, 759 and 760, which are notes under date of—respectively—27 April 1941, 9 May 1941, and 8 April 1943. I believe that it is preferable for me not to read these documents to the Tribunal and that I merely ask the Tribunal to take judicial notice of them, as proof of the existence of these protests, because I fear that such a reading would be a mere repetition to the Tribunal, to whom the matter of economic spoliation has already been explained in sufficient detail.
I shall say, finally, that the Germans carried their audacity to the point of demanding the seizure in Unoccupied France and the transportation to Alsace of assets belonging to French companies which were by this means stripped of their property and actually “colonized.” I am speaking of assets belonging to companies in the other zone of France, under the control of the regular shareholders of such companies.
I think it is worth while considering just one example of such procedure, contained in a very short document, which I submit to you under Document Number RF-761. This document appears in the Archives of the French Agencies of the Armistice Commission, to which it had been sent by the director of the company mentioned in the document. It is a paper which is partly written in German and partly translated into French—in the same document—and it is signed by the German Commissioner for a French enterprise called the Société Alsacienne et Lorraine d’Electricité. In Alsace this enterprise had been placed illegally under the administration of this commissioner, and the commissioner—as the document will show—had come to Paris to seize the remainder of the company’s assets. He drafted this document, which he signed and which he also made the president of the French company sign. This document is of interest as revealing the insolence of German procedure and also the Germans’ odd conception of law. I quote now:
“Today the undersigned has instructed me that in future I am strictly forbidden to take legal action with regard to the property of the former Société Alsacienne et Lorraine d’Electricité. If I should transgress this order in any way, I know that I shall be punished.