The Restitution of Jewish Property Looted during the Occupation. A Social and Cultural Approach

In France, the looting of property belonging to persons considered Jewish during the Occupation lasted four years, and yet eighty years later, the CIVS (Commission d’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations intervenues du fait des legislations antisémites en vigueur pendant l’Occupation) [Commission for the Compensation of Victims of Spoliation due to the antisemitic laws in force during the Occupation] continues to investigate requests for restitution. Indeed, restitution policies have evolved over the years between the end of the Occupation and now. After the policy led by the French Republic from 1944-1954 and supplemented between 1957 and the 1970s by a German federal policy, the restitution dossier seemed closed, only to reappear in the 1990s, when, in the dual context of the end of the Cold War and the importance of the Shoah in the perception of the Second World War, changes took place in the triangle of forces constituted by public policy, social demand and relation to the past.

A first cycle of restitutions: French (1944-1954), then German (1957-1970s)

This first cycle of restitutions was motivated by the presence of those who had been dispossessed and by public policy, rather than by the pressure of a unified, shared memory of the genocide, at the time, still in the making.

For the Republic, it was a matter of reestablishing in their rights those who had been discriminated against and persecuted due to an anti-democratic ideology. It was also a matter of restoring the secular nature of a Republic that recognized only “men” and “citizens,” “irrespective of race, religion or creed.” Besides the essential ordinance of 9 August 1944 on the reestablishment of Republican law, which stipulated the “nullity of all acts” establishing “any kind of discrimination for being Jewish,” the very term “Jewish” was thus banned from restitution texts. This did not prevent a keen awareness of the genocide, though it was secondary to the political and military events of the world war.

Even within the population that had suffered from persecution, there was no uniform memory of the genocide. Jewish society – if this type of globalizing approach can be used – was divided and segmented along a broad arc extending from the legalistic position (under the Occupation) of the Consistoire and the UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France), a creation of Germany and the Vichy regime, to the clandestine Communist party with the UJRE (Union des Juifs pour la résistance et l’entraide), and in between the two, the secular and liberal position of the CDJC (Centre de documentation juive contemporaine), formulated as in 1789 and created clandestinely in 1943. Tensions between positions continued even after the union of these tendencies in the CDJC, then in the CRIF (Conseil représentatif des Israélites [then ‘des Juifs’] de France), early in 1944. The Consistoire, for example, refused to allow the CRIF to call for Resistance.

Despite the diversity of memories and cultures, there was agreement among the different components of Jewish society on the will to return to normality, meaning the pre-war situation. Persecutions by Nazis and the Vichy government did not give rise to any immediate calling into question of Republican assimilationism. Many of those who had been persecuted asked to change their last names to less recognizably foreign ones, and in synagogues, those who had died in deportation were often mentioned as having “died for France,” like front-line soldiers. Nonetheless, with time, a heightened awareness of the specificity of the genocide was developing.

In the post-war period, the social demand for restitution was a consequence of the number of survivors (approximately three quarters of the persecuted population) and of the law in their favor. A number of restitutions took place privately, since there was no doubt concerning the illegality of the lootings, and in case of resistance, procedures could be undertaken with special services in view of obtaining a settlement. In the weeks following the Liberation, this was the case with UJRE interventions in Marseille and Paris, with the Restitution Services of Professor Terroine in Lyon, and of the government in December 1944, by modifying association law in order to prohibit any organization attempting “to prevent the reestablishment of republican legality.” However, the subject did not give rise to any campaign on the part of the press. In 1950, when the restitution process stalled for lack of demands, a law made it possible for Jewish organizations to handle the management of unclaimed property, a provision which was not followed up.

As for the State, post-war restitution policy was based on the same paradox (non-recognition of Jewish identity) and the same determination to re-establish the rights of the victims of spoliation. In 1940, General de Gaulle declared null and void Vichy’s antisemitic policy. In 1943, Free France signed the solemn declaration of 5 January by which the United Nations reserved “the right to invalidate all transfers or transactions related to property” in the occupied territories. The carrying out of restitution policy began slowly – in Algiers (decrees of 14 March and 12 November 1943) – becoming more generalized with the liberation of metropolitan territory and the enactment of a number of measures: the immediate unblocking of bank accounts in August 1944, the decree on the restitution of property sequestered in the Domains (October), the decree on the restitution of property under provisional administration (November), the creation, also in November, of the CRA, (Commission de récuperation artistique), the reactivation of the OBIP (Office des biens et intérêts privés) created during WWI, in charge of receiving declarations of removal by the enemy (December), the creation of the Service des restitutions des biens des victimes des lois et mesures de spoliation (January 1945), the decree on the restitution of property sold by force (April 1945), the law on war damage (which included compensation for the looting of apartments, October 1946), the law on the reimbursement of debits on blocked accounts (June 1948), and the creation of a Commission for the choice of recuperated works of art unable to be restituted (also in June 1948).

In the beginning of the 1950s, this phase of French restitutions seemed over, even if all owners hadn’t recovered their property (the OBIP had received demands for some 100,000 articles “removed by the enemy”) and if some objects hadn’t found their owners. Some 60,000 objects and artworks were recuperated in Germany, but approximately 15,000 did not find owners. The Choice Commission chose 2,000 of the latter to be exhibited for three years (1950-1954) in the château de Compiègne, after which, those still unclaimed would be placed in museums with the status of MNR (Musées nationaux récuperation) or OAR (Objet d’art Récupération) and the remainder sold by the Domains for the benefit of the State.

In France, there was practically no public debate around restitutions, unlike in Germany, where successive compensation laws for property looted in occupied countries gave rise to resistance and heated debate in the Bundestag.  Thanks to diplomatic intervention and in successive phases – in 1957, 1961 and 1964, the BRüG law (Bundesrückerstattungsgesetz) made it possible for dispossessed persons, victims of looted apartments in particular, to receive compensation. The FSJU (Fonds social juif unifié) did most of the claim file management. Compensation was awarded in addition to war damages already received, but for art works and objects it was the first opportunity for compensation, since in France, war damages hadn’t taken luxury goods into account.

In the 1970s, with the end of the German approach, restitutions seemed over. The Rapport général of the Mattéoli mission (see below) estimated that the remaining spoliation represented between 5-10% of the total calculable value of spoliations and around 25% of owners. However, the lootings themselves, rarely listed at the time and their value not recorded, doubtless did not reach these restitution figures, despite Allied action in Germany and later federal compensations, since art works were particularly concerned in these lootings.

The second cycle: mediatized reparations in a globalized world after 1995

It may be surprising that a restitution policy that was far from perfect but determined and carried out as the times allowed, should be taken up again, twenty years after its completion. This return was the result of a convergence of cultural change and new international power relationships.

In the 1990s, the past was no longer what it was in the 1950s. Awareness of the genocide had never disappeared, but it then became a major fact, generally and publicly shared. The national narrative of the war years, centered on combats, on the Resistance and on Collaboration, focused on victims, notably on those who could now be called Jews, without any particular connotation. This displacement of focus had multiple origins, above all in the number of historical works such as those of Serge Klarsfeld. The Eichmann trial and the Six Day War also played a role, as did the events of May 1968. It was in May 1968 that Beate Klarsfeld slapped the German Chancellor Kiesinger, a former Nazi dignitary, active close to Ribbentrop. This generational phenomenon is often summed up in the paradigm of the victim replacing that of the combat hero.

In France, this cultural and generational transformation was all the more noticeable in President Mitterrand’s unawareness of it: every year he would lay flowers on the grave of Maréchal Pétain, “hero of Verdun,” and with his refusal to recognize France’s responsibility in the Shoah, he faced growing incomprehension. It was the next President, Jacques Chirac in 1995 who, on the anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, recognized that, “Indeed, the criminal madness of the occupier was aided and abetted by some French people, by the French State […] and on that day, France committed the irreparable.”

Parallel to this evolution was the transformation of international relations due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the ex-countries of the East or in regard to them, mention was made of “dual victims”– those having suffered Nazi Aryanisation followed by Communist statism. Tensions between the United States and Europe, previously contained by the Cold War, were played out, unrestrained, and from the U.S. emanated a vision of the past that revealed a transatlantic cultural gap that had deepened since 1945. Conceived on the model of occupied Poland, in that vision all Jews had been dispossessed, deported never to return, and survivors never compensated. The French media first took up the subject in 1995 and via the MNR denounced the presence in French museums of works of art stolen from Jews. The press featured indignant articles implicating the banks in holding unclaimed property. In that context, public policy seemed to follow rather than precede demand. In early 1997, a study mission on the spoliation of French Jews, called the Mattéoli mission after its president, was set up to estimate the value of possibly unclaimed property in French administrations and enterprises.

The press’ focusing on art works and bank accounts echoed actions put in place in the United States, particularly by “class actions” threatening the prohibition on American soil of European enterprises. Swiss banks were thus targeted in October 1996, followed by French establishments in December 1997 and December 1998.

An international congress to deal with the subject of art works was also held in 1998, initiated by the World Jewish Congress – whose president referred to the robbed art works as “the last prisoners of war” – with the support of the American government. The participating countries, France among them, agreed to respect these new “Washington principles” by allotting themselves the means to arrive at a “fair solution” concerning art works confiscated by the Nazis and not returned to their owners.

In 2001, the value of unclaimed property as estimated by the Mattéoli mission was paid to a Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah created for that purpose. On the mission’s recommendations, the dossier of individual compensations was reopened with the creation in 1999 of the abovementioned CIVS. Concerning the works of art, resistance in the museum sphere prevented an evaluation of the MNR, but a cultural movement slowly took the direction of provenance research. A committee for the research and restitution of cultural property looted between 1933 and 1945 was created in the culture ministry in 2019 and the CIVS continues to examine requests by descendants. As for unclaimed bank deposits, France and the U.S. agreed to a mode of compensation that combines French and American criteria (preliminary study of facts, attribution of a lump sum).

In 2022, this second reparations cycle seems to be coming to an end. Having peaked in the early 2000s, the number of requests of all types received by the CIVS has regularly declined. Among the 30,000 requests received during its twenty years of existence, two thirds concerned the looting of apartments and spoliation of professional property and the remaining third concerned bank spoliations. However, requests aimed at movable cultural property are becoming more frequent. Since 2018, new legal and regulatory provisions have facilitated dealing with them.¹ Today, these are the preferred dossiers of the media due to the symbolic value of works of art and the evolution of the art market in general.

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