Hotchkiss (car) - Second World War

Second World War

The armament side of the company and the body stamping plant were nationalised in 1936 by the Front Populaire government. The car company in 1937 took over Amilcar. With re-armament speeding up they also started making military vehicles and light tanks. When France declared war, in September 1939, Hotchkiss were sitting on a army order for 1,900 H35 and H39 tanks powered by six-cylinder motors of respectively 3.5 and 6 litres capacity, and at the time of the German invasion in May 1940 they were still working through the order. However, as the military situation deteriorated the decision was taken, on 20 May 1940, to abandon the Saint-Denis plant which by now was fully concentrated on war production. There was a disorderly evacuation, initially towards Auxerre and then Moulins and then further towards the south, as employees desperately tried to keep information on the military production out of the hands of the Germans. However, the national capitulation implicit in the signing of the armistice on 22 June left these efforts looking somewhat irrelevant, and most of the employees drifted back in the ensuing weeks. Two exceptions were the Commercial Director, Jacques Jacobsen and the English born General Director, Henry Ainsworth, both of whom managed to avoid capture and to leave France. During the war, like many businesses in the occupied (northern) zone, the company was obliged to work for the occupiers and was engaged in the repair of military vehicles.

In 1941 François Lehideux, then a leading member of the government’s economic team, called Jean-Pierre Peugeot and his General Director Maurice Jordan to a meeting, and invited them to study the possibility of taking a controlling share in the Hotchkiss business. The suggestion from Lehideux derived from a German law dated 18 October 1940 authorising the confiscation of businesses controlled by Jews. The Peugeot business itself had been operating, grugingly, under overall German control since the summer of 1940. In any event, in July 1942 Peugeot took a controlling share in the Hotchkiss business and towards the end of 1942 the names of Peugeot and Jordan were listed as members of the Hotchkiss board. There is no evidence of any attempt to combine the operations of the two businesses, however: after the war Peugeot would in due course relinquish their holding in Hotchkiss.

With liberation in 1944, Ainsworth returned and production restarted in 1946 with the pre-war cars, a light truck and a tractor.