Quoting Industrial Collaboration in Nazi-Occupied Europe: Norway in Context, page 176:
[Albert] Speer’s officials, for example, failed to control the placing of contracts with French companies as [Axis] companies and agencies continued to engage in what one official described as a “wild chase”. But another and more basic problem concerned Speer’s administrative system. As is well known, the latter centred on industrial “self‐responsibility”, in which leading industrialists would manage production programmes in various sectors, subject to some governmental oversight and guidance.
The Hauptausschuss Kraftfahrzeuge for the automobile industry offers a prime example. Underpinning the system was the belief that the best results would be achieved by permitting free enterprise considerable room to function. From the outset, the [Fascists] applied a version of the system of industrial “self‐responsibility”, together with its underlying assumptions, in France (and in occupied Western Europe more generally).
Hence the considerable freedom accorded to the COA and, through it, to French automobile companies. In many ways, the [Fascists] had no choice: if nothing else, they lacked the resources and expertise to run French industry themselves. Recent research has called into question the success of Speer’s system in Germany, refuting the earlier belief that [the Reich’s] industrial tsar engineered a production “miracle”.
But at least in Germany Speer could count on the national‐patriotic sentiments of industrialists and workers, both of whom had reasons to desire [an Axis] victory. The obvious problem for the occupation authorities was that such sentiments appeared to be in increasingly short supply in France.
(Emphasis added. The ‘increasingly short supply’ of pro‐Axis sentiments were mainly due to the Axis slowly losing the war, not a sudden change of heart.)
The example of Ford SAF suggests that, during the second half of the [Axis] occupation, automobile companies enjoyed a considerable say in determining the terms of industrial collaboration. Indeed, given the growing desperation of the occupiers for French production, the French automobile industry as a whole found itself in a stronger position vis‐à‐vis the [Fascists] than during 1940–42.
[Addendum]
Pages 185–6:
To be sure, companies could not reject all collaboration with the [Axis]. An outright refusal risked the imprisonment of company directors, the loss of workers and the confiscation of productive capacity. Automobile companies thus had to produce enough to keep their factories running and to appease the [Axis] authorities.
But they did not have to do much more than that. Companies had no incentive to work wholeheartedly on behalf of the [Axis]—to make extraordinary efforts to locate scarce supplies, to pressure suppliers, to drive their workforce or to improve the quality of their products. To under‐produce, they did not have to do something actively; they merely had to manifest less débrouillardise than they could have and that they appeared to have done during the first half of the occupation.
Equally pertinent, under‐production in this sense ran little risk of provoking sanctions for the simple reason that [Axis authorities] could not say with any certainty what French companies could produce with the best of wills.