Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucracy, Business and the Organization of the Holocaust (War and Genocide) by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

PERPETRATOR NETWORKS AND THE HOLOCAUST: THE SPOLIATION OF JEWISH PROPERTY IN FRANCE, 1940-1944

Marc Olivier Baruch

The memory of the evils of anti-Semitism strongly marked France in the mid-1990s. Public observance of 100th anniversary of Captain Dreyfus' ordeal, culminated, by the end of the decade, in the centenary commemoration (1998) of the publication of Zola's J'accuse. The fate of the Jews living in France during world war ii was, and still is, very much discussed and analyzed, so much so that some historians have come to see it as an obsession. The main shift in perceptions came from the state itself. On 22 July 1995, at the very place where Parisian Jews were detained in July 1942, the newly elected president Jacques Chirac acknowledged France's responsibility as an accomplice of the Nazi occupier in rounding up and deporting some 73,000 Jewish men, women, and children. Some two years later, an impressive ceremony of “repentance” was publicly held by the French Catholic Church in Drancy, from where most of the trains filled with human beings left France for Eastern Europe's extermination camps.

The question of compensation for the spoliation of Jewish property arose a short while later as both a symbolic and a material issue.1 In March 1997, a “Study Task Force on the Spoliation of Jews in France” was officially set up. It was chaired by Jean Mattéoli, a member of the French Resistance and former Gaullist minister, and is hence referred to below as the “Mattéoli Commission”; it included historians and prominent members of the French Jewish community, and was set up “to study the conditions under which movable and immovable property belonging to the Jews of France was confiscated by fraudulent means, violence, or theft, both by the occupying forces and by the Vichy authorities between 1940 and 1944.” Three years later, in April 2000, the commission presented its findings, i.e., an overall report along with seven specialized subreports (to which were added three further reports containing statistics and financial data), a guide to archival research, and a collection of official texts on both the spoliation and the restitution. This represented an impressive piece of work in terms of its volume and precision.2 The general report gives a detailed view of the legal organization behind both the spoliation and the restitution processes. The main subreports deal with economic “Aryanization,”3 the spoliation of financial assets,4 and the looting of people arriving at the Drancy concentration camp.5 A vast store of information and analyses was thus created by the Mattéoli Commission, which may help us evaluate the degree of cooperation between German and French state apparatuses in spoliating the Jews living in France. Since those apparatuses were made up, both on the French and on the German side, of numerous decentralized, occasionally antagonistic agencies and departments, it is necessary to describe them in some detail.

The first part of this contribution depicts the general setting of the occupation regime and the type of autonomy left to the theoretically independent French government. A masochistic

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