Citroen: ‘The Jewish Henry Ford’ And Was Maurice Chevalier A Nazi Collaborator?

Photo Credit: Saul Jay Singer

André-Gustave Citroën (1878-1935) was a French industrialist best known as the man whose innovative and bold engineering and business ideas were singularly responsible for bringing Europe into the technological and consumer age. He is particularly renowned for introducing mass manufacturing to the European automobile industry through the car named for him – ironically, the name “Citroën” is Dutch for “lemon,” perhaps not the best name for an automobile manufacturer.

Seeking to change the automobile from a vehicle affordable only to the very wealthy, Citroën’s 10 HP Type A car (1919), his adaptation of Henry Ford’s Model T, was purposely designed to be within the financial reach of a wide range of consumers. Citroën’s vehicles were also celebrated for designs and features that focused on durability, practicality and comfort rather than style, and his innovations include front wheel drive and adjustable front seats. Perhaps equally important, though marketing and public relations were concepts that would not be developed for many decades, Citroën brilliantly employed these novel techniques, including:

1. Employing professional artists and designers as an integral part of his factory and management staff and photographing his vehicles in authentic outdoor venues.
2. Advertising a name brand rather than a specific product (again, the first to do so) and arranging to have his name displayed with 250,000 light bulbs on the Eiffel tower during the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts (1925). (The gigantic ad could be seen at a distance of sixty miles.)
3. In a masterstroke of genius, introducing toy models of the car, which not only proved enormously popular but also drew children – and, of course, their parents – into toy stores throughout France and overseas, where the adult car buyers were exposed repeatedly to the Citroën name and products. These models were followed by toy garages, service depots and fire stations, all bearing the Citroën name.
4. Becoming the first to offer prospective purchasers test drives, thereby securing the trust of buyers and their confidence in his product, and pioneering warranties and “after-sale” service.
5. Becoming the first to use direct-mail marketing; the first in Europe to advertise using skywriting; and, in an act of civic responsibility, deploying over 150,000 traffic signs through France – each (not at all coincidentally) marked with the Citroën brand.
6. Employing vertical acquisition techniques and economic integration, he opened his own auto insurance company and offered low premiums to Citroën owners; created the first finance company in France specifically to finance automobile purchases; and developed over 1,000 of his own car dealerships.
7. Designing a car (the 5HP Clover Leaf) and an advertising campaign particularly aimed at women.
8. In great international publicity coups, persuading England’s Queen Mary to ride in one of his vehicles during British army maneuvers (1923) and establishing a Citroën Hospitality Center that was the talk of the 1933 Berlin Motor Show. (Hitler, who had just taken power, ordered that this “national embarrassment” perpetrated by a Jew was never to happen again.)
9. Establishing medical and dental facilities, a gymnasium, and childcare and kindergarten on the work site, and providing for annual leave, paid maternity leave for new mothers, and company retreat. He was renowned for his general interest in improving the working conditions of industrial workers.

Perhaps most famously, Citroën staged exciting stunts and tests of his automobiles to publicize their high quality, including:

1. Being the first to send a car over a cliff and to photograph the damaged, but intact, vehicle, which had survived the impact.
2. Lowering a 20,000-pound weight atop a vehicle to demonstrate its incredible resilience.
3. Undertaking a sequence of stunts involving expeditions over arduous terrain, including:
4. A group of Citroën-built caterpillar tractors completing the first ever crossing of the Sahara Desert by motorized vehicles, covering 2,000 miles in 20 days (December 1922).
5. In a nine-month journey covering over 15,000 miles, Citroën-built tractors crossing Africa, beginning in Algeria and ending through Cape Town, Mozambique, and Madagascar (1924). During this journey, vast numbers of photographs were taken of mostly unfamiliar regions in Central Africa.
6. A group of Citroën vehicles, following Marco Polo’s route along the Silk Road and crossing the challenging Himalayan mountains to Beijing, traveled over 8,000 miles from Beirut across the Asian continent (1931).

Through all his ideas and efforts, Citroën led the company to become one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world, but he always maintained an open mind and remained receptive to new suggestions. For example, in this January 28, 1919 correspondence on his personal letterhead, Citroën writes to one Albert Houlgard, in French:

Being currently very absorbed by the transformation of my factory, I will be very obliged to you to communicate to me by letter the exposition of your project in order to see if it is of interest to me.

Citroën was the son of well-to-do Jewish parents, diamond dealer Levie Citroen from Amsterdam and Masza Amelia Kleinman from Warsaw. The last name “Citroën” comes from his grandfather, who sold fruit for a living in the Netherlands and was known as Limoenman (“the lime man”), which Levie changed to Citroen (“lemon”). André Citroën became an orphan at age six after his mother died and his father committed suicide in response to a dramatic failure in a risky business venture involving a diamond mine in South Africa.

Upon witnessing the construction of the Eiffel Tower, Citroën decided to become an engineer and went on to graduate from the renowned École Polytechnique (1900), France’s most prominent engineering college, and joined the French Army as an engineer officer.

During a visit to his late mother’s Jewish family in Poland, Citroën observed a carpenter working on a set of gears with a fish-bone structure that were stronger, less noisy, and more efficient than the standard set of gears then in use in cotton mills. This led him to invent the double herringbone helical gears and to open a small shop to produce them (1904); in a mere six years, he boasted annual sales of over a million francs and opened a new factory in Paris.

Citroën’s success drew broad public notice, including attention from the Mors brothers, owners of an important automobile company, who hired him as a consultant (1909). Employing assembly-line techniques introduced by Henry Ford, whom he visited several times in the United States, Citroën increased Mors’ sales tenfold in only five years and led the company to become one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world and one of the great drivers of the French economy (1913).

In 1915, while serving as an officer of the French Army during World War I, Citroën noted the unrelenting shortage of mortar grenades and, drawing on his knowledge of mass production, he initiated an ammunition facility that ultimately employed 35,000 men and manufactured about 55,000 shells a day. His further contributions to the French war effort included locating a stable supply of coal to run French factories and organizing civilian food distributions using ration cards, and his organizational abilities and design skills are credited with playing a major role in the Allied victory.

Citroën went on to parley his skills and international renown as France’s leading production expert into becoming one of the dominant figures in French industry after the war, beginning with his appointment as one of the directors of the Société Française Doble, which built French steam cars, and later founding his own Citroën automobile company (1919). Much as Henry Ford, he believed that automobiles should be affordable to the general public and that efficient mass production and standardization were necessary to facilitate price reductions that would achieve this moral goal. Accordingly, he undertook to follow Ford’s technique in producing only complete vehicles with the bodies attached to a single chassis type and, though retooling existing presses proved incredibly costly, he quickly boosted production to 35,000 vehicles annually.

As the world experienced its first global economic recession, banks were reluctant to lend money needed for product development and the public could not afford spending money on luxuries like cars, even at the reduced prices made possible by Citroën’s efficiencies. His enthusiasm for “the next great idea in automobiles” led him to bleed money, as he made significant investments in purchasing patents and designing new models, and he came under unremitting pressure from the banks and lenders to deliver his “Petite Voiture” (PV) automobile, forcing him to launch the project before the vehicle had been completed and tested. Moreover, increased competition, personal depression, and his significant gambling debts ultimately forced him to turn his business over to creditors, including particularly the Michelin tire company.

In 1931, the French government awarded Citroën the badge of Grand Officier of the Legion of Honor for exceptional service to the cause of civilization and world progress. Though the PV ultimately proved to be a great success, he did not live to see it, as he became despairing at the loss of his business and the death of his daughter and died of stomach cancer a year later. Though he never participated in Jewish affairs in any meaningful way, he apparently married a Jewess – the mother of his wife, Georginia Bingen, was Laura Giuditta Cohen. But Georgina and André’s son was baptized before marrying a practicing catholic. His funeral was conducted by the Chief Rabbi of Paris and he was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

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Exhibited here is a handsome portrait photo of Citroën, which he has dedicated to French singer, actor, and entertainer Maurice Chevalier (1888-1972), who is perhaps best known for his signature songs, including Thank Heaven for Little Girls, and for his films, including The Love Parade, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor (1929). Regularly attired in his trademark tuxedo tails and straw boater, the veritable exemplar of the gallant French monsieur, he was beloved by his audiences for his sparkling Parisian charm and he became one of the first Frenchmen to achieve great success in the United States.

Captured by the Germans after being seriously wounded fighting for France during World War I, he was interned in a POW camp for two years, where he learned English from a fellow prisoner. However, he could never escape his thick French accent – which, as it turns out, was a fortunate development because it made him irresistible and only added to his fame. (To this day, many commentators insist that the Looney Tunes character Pepé Le Pew was based upon Chevalier.) However, many authorities maintain that he was fluent in English; that his accent was actually just a ploy, and that, according to a well-known gag in the film industry, the quintessential Frenchman had to periodically return to France to polish up his famous accent.

On June 10, 1940, Chevalier was dining with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in southern France when they heard that Italy had declared war on France and Britain. Understanding that the fall of France was imminent, and with Nazi troops only a few miles outside Paris, he acted expeditiously to protect his Jewish actress wife, Nita Raya (nee Yurkovich), whom he had married in 1937, and her parents. Although he and his family sought refuge at his villa in the neighborhood of Cannes in the French free zone, this did not constitute a particularly safe haven for his Jewish family because, while technically unoccupied by Germany and “free,” the French Vichy government was a German collaborator, if not its puppet, that essentially coordinated its actions with the Nazis.

Chevalier was long considered to be a Nazi sympathizer, and he generated broad public antagonism regarding his “betrayal” of his country, which included performing for German audiences and willingly serving Nazi propaganda, and he was named on a list of French collaborators to be killed during the war or to be tried after it and sentenced to death in absentia. After the liberation of Paris in 1944, he was arrested and formally charged with collaboration.

Even after being acquitted by a court in Paris by representatives of the Provisional Government of the French Republic – he was supported by many French luminaries, including General Charles de Gaulle – Chevalier was still considered guilty by large swathes of the public. Even after making his triumphant return to the Parisian stage in 1945, the English-speaking press remained antagonistic, with many alleging that the Nazis had successfully turned him into a collaborator after his initial refusal and that he reaped the rewards of performing in Germany. He was particularly loathed by many American Jews.

In 1951, six years after the end of World War II and Chevalier’s acquittal, the U.S. State Department declared that he was “potentially dangerous” to the security of the United States because he had signed on to the “Stockholm Appeal,” a petition against nuclear weapons, and he was refused an American visa for several years. He became even more unpopular in the United States during the McCarthyism period when it became known that he had participated in a Communist demonstration in Paris in 1944 and that he had performed in a Communist benefit in Stockholm in 1949. (He was finally welcomed back to the U.S. in 1954 after the McCarthy period had run its course.)

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In fact, Chevalier agreed to perform for the French Vichy collaborators only in response to pressure from the Nazis, who saw propaganda value in promoting French culture and knew that he was harboring several Jews, including his family. Nonetheless, he maintained his refusal to perform on the collaborationist station Radio Paris, and he agreed to perform for prisoners of war at the prison in which he had been incarcerated during WWI only after negotiating for the release of ten French prisoners. He and his associates established a company to tour the free provinces, visiting hundreds of towns, but the Nazi/Vichy media criticized him for enjoying “a luxurious vacation.” Moreover, the Nazis broadly disseminated false claims that he had toured Germany, which played an important role in his wrongfully being labeled a collaborator by the French Resistance, and even a London paper reported that he had sung everywhere in Germany (except, ironically, in the prison camps), and it unambiguously concluded that he was pro-Nazi.

Chevalier refused to comment on politics, saying only blandly that “I am against the war like everyone else, and I think there should be better understanding between different peoples.” In response, the newspaper Le Petit Parisien published an article entitled “Maurice Chevalier preaches collaboration between the French and the Germans” and, even when it later became known that the German Propaganda Bureau had taken control of the publication, Chevalier’s name and reputation remained sullied in the minds of many.

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In early 1943, he pledged to himself that he would never perform again until after liberation, but the Nazis blackmailed him with warnings that he, his Jewish wife, and his refugee friends would pay a steep price if he refused to return and perform in Paris. Nonetheless, he was able to avoid performing by claiming that he was ill. However, adding insult to injury, in February 1944, Radio-Londres, the voice of the French Resistance broadcasting from London, added Chevalier to the names of notorious French collaborators. One of the heads of the Resistance delivered a message to the broadcaster that Chevalier was, in fact, a loyal Frenchman, but the additional damage had already been done.

History has proven that all the allegations against Chevalier were false. In fact, as it turns out, he was not only not a Nazi collaborator, but he was also a French patriot and an authentic Holocaust hero who risked his life and reputation to rescue Jews. In one such instance, a March 8, 1947 article in the New York Daily News reported that Chevalier “hid and protected Mitty Goldin, Romanian-born owner of the ABC Theatre in Paris, on whose head there was a price by the Germans.”