A viewer of my talk about Dutch-Paris on WW2TV made an intriguing comment. I was talking about the difficulty of getting food for fugitives without ration cards. He or she quipped that it seems like crime syndicates would have been the go-to place for your shopping needs under the occupation. The answer to that is a very complicated sort-of.

The basic fact during the war was that food was in short supply. Governments tried to ameliorate that fact by imposing ration systems that were meant to make sure that everyone got his or her fair share of what was available at controlled prices. That attempt worked better in some countries than in others.

Let’s look at France only here. The ration system creaked along there but it did not provide sufficient calories for anyone to live on. A few sticklers tried but ended up literally starving. So the French people created their own supplemental “Système D”, meaning whatever you and your family came up with to get more food.

Système D was inherently illegal, but some parts were more criminal than others. There was certainly a serious black market, which is where you’d find your criminal syndicates. They tended to go for the more high profit luxury items such as wine, jewelry, art and hard currency. And they had rivals and partners from the ranks of the occupying forces.

Fortunately, your average housewife did not have to deal with the darkest parts of the black market because there was also a gray market. The gray market was still illegal but its practitioners were not organized criminals or even habitual criminals. They were people either in need of food or producers who (rightly) thought that the government wasn’t paying them enough to produce the food that the government requisitioned for the rationing system. This goes all the way from shopkeepers charging a little extra for something special kept under the counter (a dark shade of gray) to a country cousin setting aside a dozen eggs for family in the city (a very light shade of gray).

Here’s an example of the gray market in action from Dutch-Paris. A Catholic brother living in the heart of Paris took on the task of feeding Allied aviators hiding in a Dutch-Paris safe house until they left for Toulouse and Spain. The brother took the train to a village outside the city where he knew some farming families. They sold him food for the aviators at a price that was certainly higher than the official price set for rations but much lower than the black market price for the same items. He then carried them back into the city under the voluminous robes of his habit. He once carried several kilos of fresh meat that way. If the French police had caught him red-handed with that much meat he would have been imprisoned and tried for black marketeering.

So the short answer to the viewer’s comment is that everyone broke the laws about food, so everyone ended up being a criminal in that regard. But crime syndicates were very far from having a monopoly on that type of crime. So shoppers had a lot of non-organized criminal options for their purchases. Unless the shopper wanted a case of champagne. That’s the kind of thing that would have led someone to a crime syndicate.