Behind Closed Doors: Spoliation and Restitution in Paris

Abstract

A walk down a Paris street, the rue des Rosiers, between 1940 and 1944, noting the victims of French and German anti-Semitic actions of spoliation and deportation.

Keywords:

• anti-Semitism
• aryanization
• Auschwitz
• banks
• Holocaust
• indemnification
• restitution
• rue des Rosiers
• spoliation
• Vichy

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Archives of the Commissariat général aux questions juives (CGQJ), the main Vichy anti-Jewish economic administration, in the French National Archives: AJ.38.6067.2006. Within the French National Archives or AN (Archives Nationales), there are various collections. AJ.38 refers to the archives and holdings of the French Commissariat for Jewish Affairs under Vichy (1940–44) and AJ.40 refers to the archives and holdings of the German Occupation authorities in France and Belgium (1940–45). All further references to these documents will appear in the text within parentheses.

2. No. 051, 1 March 2015, 4016.

3. Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Strange and Unexpected Love. A Teenage Girl's Holocaust Memoirs (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House Inc., 1993), chapter 6, 22.

4. Jean-Pierre Azéma, ed., Vivre et survivre dans le Marais (Paris: Editions Le Manuscrit, 2005), 370–71.

5. Marieke Konig, Deutsche Handwerker, Arbeiter und Dienstmadchen in Paris (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003), 113.

6. All further references to the Journal officiel de la République française will follow the acronym JORF in the text.

7. Jerzy Debski, Death Books from Auschwitz: Remnants, ed. Auschwitz Museum (Munich: K.G. Saur, 1995), 1289.

8. Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (MII.1426, MII.1427, MII.1428v).

9. Bulletin de l'Amicaledu camp de Gurs, no. 33, March 1989, 8; and no. 48, September 1992, 7–8, and in Serge Klarsfeld’s Memorial to the French Children of the Holocaust (New York University Press, 1996), 779.

10. Identity photograph in the Auschwitz Museum.

11. Paris: Editions Alain Moreau, 1983, 63, 167.

12. Archives Juives (Paris) 38, no. 2 (2005): 65, 73, 82.

13. Debski, Death Books, 1215.

14. Ibid., 1289.

15. Yves Lecouturier, Shoah en Normandie: 1940–44 (Le Coudray-Macouard: Editions Cheminements, 2004), 188.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Alexander Freedman

Eric Alexander Freedman is European advisor and Visiting Professor, Institute in Holocaust and Human Rights, Cardozo Law School, New York. Since 2001, he has been a research consultant to the Wiesenthal Center Europe, attached to the French government Commission on Holocaust-era Spoliation Indemnification.