Citroën, the occupier and the secret little car
Summer 1940. Paris is occupied. The Citroën factory on the Quai de Javel, owned by the Michelin group, is ordered to produce trucks for the Wehrmacht. But the company is also hiding another treasure: the TPV (Toute Petite Voiture, "Very Small Car"), the prototype of a people's car developed in great secrecy in the late 1930s.
The German technical officials, who are themselves developing the future Beetle and its military version, the Kübelwagen, show keen interest in this French project. Several prototypes still exist, scattered across the workshops and test centres.
Boulanger, who refuses any direct contact with the German authorities, must make a decision: allow these prototypes to be examined, hand them over, or make them disappear so that no military application can come of them.
Since the 1930s, Citroën has been secretly developing a prototype for a people's car, the TPV. Under the Occupation, German engineers take a close interest in it. What does Boulanger decide to do with these prototypes?
Boulanger and the management (along with Michelin, the principal shareholder) decided to keep the TPV out of German hands: the prototypes were hidden in secret locations, some buried or disguised, others destroyed, in order to prevent a military version from being derived from them, as had happened with the Beetle/Kübelwagen. The project remained concealed throughout the war; Boulanger refined the concept and the 2CV would not be unveiled until 1948. For a long time only two prototypes were believed to have survived, until the rediscovery of several hidden TPVs in a barn in 1994. Boulanger appeared on the German blacklist of "enemies of the Reich".
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