Daniel Uziel worked at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and for the Israeli Air Force and the German Foreign Office. He spent a year as a research fellow with the U.S. National Air and Space Museum. He published Arming the Luftwaffe: The German Aviation Industry during WWII in 2011.

German Exploitation of the French Aviation Industry, 1941–1944

Among the occupied countries that fell under German control after 1940, France stood out as the most important source of outsourced aviation production. Its aircraft industry was large, technically capable, and already well developed before the war, and once the Vichy government and the German authorities reached an understanding in the spring of 1941, French firms became deeply entangled in the German war effort — producing complete aircraft, components, and design work for firms such as Focke-Wulf, Messerschmitt, Junkers, and BMW. What follows traces how that relationship developed, the firms and personalities involved, and why, despite years of effort, the overall results fell far short of German expectations.

From Neglect to Full Cooperation

In the first months after the conquest of France, German aero-engine manufacturers showed only limited interest in exploiting the country’s industrial base directly, largely because of the practical difficulties of running branch operations so far from their established centers in Germany. Jumo, the engine division of Junkers, was an exception: within months of the armistice it opened an engine plant near Strasbourg in Alsace, installing its own machinery in an abandoned Ford car factory. The plant, staffed initially by local Alsatian workers considered politically reliable, eventually reached a monthly output of hundreds of overhauled and newly built engines, and later drew on Soviet prisoners of war as additional labor.

Airframe manufacturers took a different approach, generally preferring to contract existing French companies rather than establish their own branch plants. The decisive turn came with a speech Erhard Milch gave in Paris in January 1941, which signaled a shift from lukewarm German interest to a policy of full industrial cooperation — always, of course, on German terms. By spring 1941 Berlin and Vichy had agreed in principle to revive French aviation production, with France permitted to retain a modest share of output (around one-sixth) for its own use, and only for aircraft of French design. Orders soon began flowing from the German air ministry (RLM) and from individual German firms to French plants. By the end of June 1941, French aviation companies had received contracts worth some 765 million Reichsmarks, work that employed roughly 63,000 French workers. Some factories initially kept producing French-designed aircraft and engines using components already in stock, with the Germans requisitioning much of this output for secondary duties or handing it to allies such as Vichy France itself; French Gnôme et Rhône engines even found their way into German designs like the Me 323 transporter and the Hs 129 attack aircraft.

Contracting, Not Partnership

The pattern that emerged was one of controlled dependency........

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