. NMT05-T0932
Volume VI · Page 932
| this was a matter of the German Government, and this compensation
certainly amounted to only a modest fraction of what the plants were worth to
the expropriated owners and had cost them, but the compensation was given by
the German Government to the previous German owners. All the plants in German ownership had been built by Germans with the exception of the plants of the firm of de Wendel. The family of de Wendel had been in Lorraine for 200 years. It was the oldest industrial family. They were the first to build plants in Lorraine even before 1870. But all the remaining plants, Rombach, Gleidingen, Hamerdingen, and so on, had been built by Germans in the times between 1871 and 1918. During this period the development of the Lorraine industrial district took place in general because of a technical discovery made during this time This was the so-called Thomas process or basic Bessemer steel process, which was the prerequisite for the efficient smelting of the ores which are found in Lorraine. These were ores with a high percentage of phosphorus and these could only be exploited profitably after the invention of the two Englishmen, Gilchrist and Thomas, and this invention, I think, dates back to the end of the 1870s, and this is the explanation why all the works except de Wendel, who used to work on a different basis, were built during the German period. Q. And de Wendel, as a Lorraine family then, kept their French nationality, or rather regained it, and kept their property A. Yes. Q. The only ones? A. Yes. Q. You said the Germans, in the sense of the Germans from the old Reich [Altreich] as one used to say in Lorraine, were expropriated. Excuse me. Lawyers are sometimes a little pedantic. I would not like any misunderstanding to occur. Do you want to say that a formal act of expropriation was carried out by the competent German Government or do you only mean to say that by the annexation of Lorraine by France, in practice the Germans lost their property? A. The latter was certainly the case. How this took place formally I can't say for certain but probably it was also a consequence of the peace treaty, I don't know. Q. Certainly. It was not only pedantry on my part but I had to attach value to this clarification because later on we will come to the question whether the French were expropriated by the Nazi government; that is, whether at any time they ever lost their prop- […erty] |
