Sauckel: This indeed is the decisive question, the one we are dealing with now. If half of the program for 4 million workers to be brought to Germany—in other words 2 million—cannot be fulfilled, the employment of labor in Germany will fall off this year. The more useful workers, however, are in France, and of course in Italy too, employed in the protected factories. Therefore if I am not to touch the protected factories which are situated in these countries, this will have the effect that the less valuable workers instead of the more valuable type will arrive in Germany. And here we have to ponder about what is in fact more important and expedient. If we give up using these people in Germany, where we effectively rule the factories, where moreover we keep to a different labor discipline and reach better labor results than in France proper, then we give up the valuable kind, and then I shall only be able to transport to Germany the less valuable kind of people who still can be found on the streets of France or Italy, or people like waiters, hairdressers, small folk from tailor shops, etc.
Milch: What is the percentage of protected factories in Italy compared with the whole of Italian labor?
Schieber: I think 14 percent, but I don’t have the figures here.
Milch: Would not the following method be better: We could take under German administration the entire food supply for the Italians and tell them: Only he gets any food who either works in a protected factory or goes to Germany.
Sauckel: True, the French worker in France is better nourished than the German worker is in Germany, and the Italian worker too, even if he does not work at all, is better nourished in the part of Italy occupied by us than if he works in Germany. This is why I asked the German food authorities over and over again to improve also the food of the German worker introducing the “factory sandwich”. When I am in Paris, of course, I go to Maxim’s. There one can experience miracles of nourishment. The Fuehrer still thinks that in these countries only very rich men who can go to Maxim’s are well provided with food. Thereupon I sent my assistants to the Paris suburbs, to the estaminets and lunch restaurants and was told that the Frenchmen who eat there did not feel the shortage caused by the war to any degree comparable with what our nation has to experience. The average French citizen too can still buy everything he wishes.
(Interruption: This is still more so in small places!)
Yes. Moreover, the Frenchman can pay for what he can get. Therefore he has no reason for wishing to go to Germany in order to get better food. This unfortunately is the case.
Milch: Is there nothing we can do? True, we might not be able to control the distribution to the customer, but we ought to be able to intervene at an earlier stage of distribution.
Koerner: We have requested from France really immense amounts of food; these requests have always been fulfilled; often after some pressure, but they have been fulfilled.