Pack of Thieves by Richard Z. Chesnoff

Author:Richard Z. Chesnoff [Chesnoff, Richard Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76694-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

1 Under the terms of the Franco-German armistice, France was divided into two unequal parts: the occupied zone, under Reich military rule, and an unoccupied “free” zone under the rule of the new Vichy-based regime of Petain. The German zone included Paris, the entire Atlantic coast, and most of the more fertile regions to the west, north, and east; Petain was in füll control of the remaining two-fifths of the nation, including Lyons and Marseilles. German military decrees took precedence in the occupied zone, but French Vichy law remained valid throughout the entire country, and French police functioned in the occupied zone under German direction.

2 Marrus, together with another American, Columbia University’s Robert Paxton, would become the first to thoroughly examine the Vichy regime’s anti- Semitism (Vichy France and the Jews, New York: Schocken, 1981). Until recently, the subject was not one any French academic wished to tackle.

3 The German occupation also brought the inevitable Nazi plunder brigades: the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). Their four-year orgy of avarice would set new records for looting.

4 These French branches continued operation even after the United States entered the war, which in the case of the Vichy regime was only in 1942.

5 Some 10,000 Jews on the roundup list managed to escape arrest thanks to advance warning-in some cases from sympathetic French officials. But even some of those warned ended up in the net; they had no place to hide.

6 As in other parts of occupied Europe, an unconnected network of brave souls also did its best to hide and save French Jews—and sometimes smuggle them to safety in adjoining neutral countries. Among them: underground Resistance groups, individual Catholic nuns and priests who opened monastaries and convents to Jewish children, and frequently farm families who either helped for pay or out of conscience. Among the most noteworthy in the latter category: the tiny Protestant farming village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, which successfully hid more than 2,000 Jews during the war.

7 On June 8, 1944, two days after the Allied D-Day invasion at Normandy that heralded the fall of the Reich, Rosenberg issued a comprehensive report on the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s achievements. “After four years of operation, dear Führer, I can report that we have executed your orders to the best of our ability.”

8 Gutmann and his wife remained in Holland. Promised safe passage through the efforts of an Italian diplomat, they left by train for Florence in the spring of 1943. When their luxury car stopped in Berlin, German officials removed them and shipped them to Theresienstadt. The Nazis still wanted that part of Gutmann’s collection that remained beyond their reach. When Gutmann refused to “legally” sign it over, he was beaten to death. Two of his looted paintings, a Renoir and a Degas, would show up fifty years later in American collections.

9 Several of the greediest had been discovered by German officials, arrested, and were themselves sent to concentration camps for “stealing from the Reich.”

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