Milch: But there is a simple remedy, let us cease supplying the troops from Germany, but tell them to provide the food for themselves from France. Then in a few weeks they will have everything eaten up, and then we can start distributing the food to the Frenchmen.
Koerner: In France there still is for the time being a rationing system. The Frenchmen had his ration card on which he receives the minimum. The rest he provides in other ways, partly by receiving food parcels which we cannot touch at all. Every year we increase our food demands to the French Government who always satisfied them, though very frequently yielding to pressure, and in proportion to the harvest results, were they good or bad. In Italy the situation is that food is not rationed at all. The Italian can buy and eat what he wants, and since an Italian always has money and deals in the black market, he is in a much better situation than our German worker who practically has nothing but what he gets on his card.
Milch: But don’t we even send food to Italy?
Koerner: We are exchanging certain goods.
Sauckel: Moreover we are now at the point that the families of French and Italian workers are no longer in a better position owing to the money transfer if their bread-winning members are working in Germany than if they remain abroad; now nothing remains to induce them to go to Germany.
Milch: Unfortunately, Reich Minister Speer is not present today. He certainly must have had an opinion about the whole system. His agreement with Bichelonne was to activate an additional labor supply in France itself for our armament with the aid of existing French capacities. We cannot compute the result here of what was achieved by that action. Whether the result he dreamed of has been achieved cannot be decided just yet; that is, have the S-plants given us an increase of armaments which is greater than what we would have achieved if the people had worked in Germany? I would propose that Minister Speer himself one day clarify this problem again. Because if only a negative result had been achieved, he would automatically change his point of view too.
The first question is: Is the percentage of trained people in the S-plants so great that all the others are to be regarded as rubbish? And the second question is: Is it possible at all, with the lack of so-called executive power and differing opinions on this question, to seize and transfer to Germany the remaining 80 percent who are not in the S-plants? So, in view of the general political and organizational conditions in France, would you be able to transfer some 10-15 percent of the best of these 80 percent?
Sauckel: I’ll have to get them.
Milch: Can you do it at all?