Introduction

Buying on the black market was always risky, both because of the efforts of law enforcers to eradicate illegal trade and, especially, because of the often unreliable salesmen. As in the case quoted above, one could spend a fortune on coffee, only to find it not to be coffee at all – and get arrested into the bargain. Despite such risks, virtually everybody in occupied Denmark and the Netherlands engaged in black marketeering as buyers or sellers (or both), at least occasionally. For many citizens the black market was an integral part of daily life during the occupation. The attractiveness of black marketeering lay in the fact that the illegal economy operated precisely in the manner that the controlled economy no longer did: prices were freely determined and purchase was unrestricted. On the downside, there was no careful management of supplies, no setting or even publication of prices, and no government inspection of quality. Being utterly uncontrolled, the black market was the antithesis, but of course also the product, of economic controls. As soon as the controls were dismantled, in the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, much of the rampant black marketeering of the previous decade disappeared.

That said, the black market never disappeared altogether, and in fact still exists in every modern economy. Whether to evade taxation, to buy and sell illegal goods, or to avoid registration, wherever there is legislation banning, taxing or regulating certain transactions, illegal markets flourish. In Denmark and the Netherlands today, cigarettes and alcohol are smuggled to evade taxes, heroin is sold on Copenhagen's Istedgade and the Amsterdam Wallen alike, and a clandestine sex industry thrives in both countries, all despite extensive efforts to curb these activities. During the 1940s, when various economic activities were far more regulated, black marketeering was much more common and directly affected the lives and livelihoods of millions. It seems that the degree of economic regulation in a country overwhelmingly determines the extent of black marketeering in that country, whereas the level of repression against it, however draconian, usually has much less impact.