‘Economic Strangulation’ of Jews in WWII France Put at $1.2 Billion

An official French commission Monday put a price tag on the ruthless and highly organized campaign of looting and expropriation that French and foreign-born Jews fell victim to in France during World War II--the contemporary equivalent of more than $1.2 billion.

“Two things struck us in particular. One was the scale of the despoilment, which was much greater than we originally thought,” said commission member Claire Andrieu, a Paris-based historian. “The other was the scale of the restitution after the liberation. The Republic really did do its duty.”

The government panel’s 3,000-page report, which was handed to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin during the day, marked another milestone in France’s painful coming to terms with its checkered wartime history. Until recently, the official version was that the average Frenchman and woman had been, at the very least, supporters of the Resistance.

When Jacques Chirac was elected president in 1995, he broke a long-standing taboo by accusing the Vichy regime of Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, and the Frenchmen and women who served it, of having actively collaborated in the Nazis’ war against the Jews.

For Henri Hajdenberg, president of the Council of French Jewish Institutions, Monday’s long-awaited report--the work of historians, leaders of the French Jewish community and prominent public figures--marked the “final phase” in France’s facing up to the most shameful episode in its modern history.

“For the first time, they [the nine-member commission] analyze how much the French state under Petain was implicated in the economic strangulation of Jews, which turned them into easy prey to be arrested and deported,” Hajdenberg said.

The World Jewish Congress called the report “an important step” in French moral accounting for official conduct during the war, but Executive Director Elan Steinberg said he would reserve judgment until he could see the complete text.

Last year, the New York-based WJC, which once accused the French commission of engaging in “juvenile statistics work,” charged France’s banks and government with hiding billions of dollars of stolen Jewish assets. The WJC threatened the same kind of boycott it had brandished against Swiss and German banks operating in the United States.

In a transatlantic clash of cultures, French Jewish leaders said they preferred to work with the government-created commission, rather than engage in public confrontation or in U.S.-style class-action lawsuits. But some commission members said a suit against five French banks, brought in a New York court, might have been an effective lever that compelled French financial institutions to open their records.

Looting Made Victims Easy Prey for Nazis

The core conclusion of the commission’s report, three years in the making, was that the vast array of official measures taken from 1940 to 1944 to strip the 330,000 Jews living in France of their homes, jobs, factories, works of art and other belongings was seen as a necessary component of the plan to annihilate European Jewry.

“For simple folk, despoiling them didn’t just harm them, it condemned them,” commission member Ady Steg said.

A family robbed of savings that could have been used to buy false papers to escape, Steg said, became helplessly sedentary and could easily be shipped to concentration camps. The theft of a sewing machine from a tailor, the report said, might instantly make him a pauper.

In May 1941, German authorities ordered the freezing of all assets belonging to Jews. Procedures were begun to “Aryanize” 50,000 Jewish-owned companies in France. About 64,000 bank accounts belonging to Jews were frozen. Three billion shares of stock were impounded, of which nearly two-thirds were sold.

Members of the commission had fully expected to learn much about the Nazi role in the campaign of expropriation. What “profoundly revolted” them, said chairman Jean Matteoli, a former member of the French Resistance and a non-Jewish concentration camp survivor, was discovering how the Petain regime often surpassed the Germans in its zeal.

In a calculation that will probably kindle a good deal of controversy, the panel estimated that 90% to 95% of the seized property had been returned after the liberation, albeit often with long delays.

The panel found, though, that Jews were subject to other forms of theft. About 40,000 apartments were emptied by the Germans so that their furnishings could be given to German victims of Allied bombing, the commission found. An estimated 8,000 pianos--a veritable “ocean” of the instruments, according to the report--were confiscated.

More than 100,000 paintings and other art objects were shipped eastward by the Germans. Of those, only 61,233 were returned to France after war’s end. According to the commission, of 2,143 of these works now in the possession of French museums, 163 were certainly stolen from their owners and 1,817 have a murky provenance.

A total of 75,271 Jews were deported from France during the occupation, only 2,500 of whom returned alive. Jews interned in camps at Drancy, north of Paris, or in the French provinces before being shipped to Germany were habitually robbed of their cash, gold, jewelry and other valuables.

Jean Kahn, president of the Central Hebrew Consistory of France and a commission member, estimated the uncompensated losses because of German pillage and theft from Jewish internees--over and above the organized expropriation--at the equivalent today of $352 million.

Panel Recommends Holocaust Foundation

To make amends, commission members said they would recommend that the government contribute $205 million, the estimated total of Jewish-owned assets still in the hands of the French state, to a “Foundation for Memory.” The foundation would educate the French about the Holocaust and other historical acts of genocide, and help victims in need.

Banks and other financial establishments would be asked to contribute $147 million, the estimated value of the confiscated Jewish property they still hold, according to the newspaper Le Monde.

“If that is supposed to get the banks off the hook from claims, then I say it is absolutely not enough,” said Shimon Samuels, European liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, which is representing 163 plaintiffs in the class-action suit against the French banks.

Hajdenberg also objected that the exchange rate chosen to convert wartime francs into today’s money--and thus to calculate the value of unreturned Jewish assets--was “far too low.”