Family Fortunes Part Two

With France’s defeat in 1940, the firm had to cope with the rigours of working for the occupying powers and supplying forced labour to work in Germany. “We emerged with our honour totally intact,” emphasises Panhard. “We fought like lions to send as few workers as possible, and only a few hundred left for Germany. We were passed an order to make 1000 Borgward half-tracks. That was supposed to be our core manufacturing job. But at the end of 1944 we’d built a single prototype and that was all. We survived on the advance payments for this work. At the end of the day the Germans weren’t all bad. We had the good fortune to have a Borgward engineer as resident German commissioner for the factory. He wanted an easy life and he signed off all our bills. There were components everywhere, but we never got around to building any vehicles.”