Nazi Labour Camps in Paris: Austerlitz, Lévitan, Bassano, July 1943-August 1944 by Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger (review)

In this fascinating book, Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Sarah Gensburger have rescued from the "memory hole" the intriguing story of three work camps that operated from July 1943 through August 1944 in the heart of Paris. The task of the internees in Austerlitz, Lévitan, and Bassano (technically sub-camps of Drancy) was to unload, sort, and crate for shipment to Germany property the Germans pillaged from Jewish apartments in Paris and (to a lesser extent) other cities in France. As the authors point out, German National Socialism was "in part an immense looting project, carried out on a pan-European scale" (p. 7).

Officially designated Möbel Aktion ("Operation Furniture"), this December 1941 effort was supervised by Alfred Rosenberg, Nazism's unofficial "philosopher," appointed by Hitler as Minster of the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg had been active in Paris since July 1940 as the head of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), which had looted paintings and other works of art, as well as libraries and musical instruments, from private (mostly Jewish) owners. The most valuable objects were brought to a depot at the Jeu de Paume museum in the Tuileries gardens, where Hermann Göring famously came to select works for his private collection. Rosenberg's activities in France under Operation Furniture flowed directly from precedents in Germany, where in the fall of 1941 the regime began to deport German Jews to ghettos established in Poland and the Baltic. The Nazis amended the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws so that all property belonging to Jews who had left Germany—whether through migration or deportation—now belonged to the Reich. Meanwhile, the Vichy regime established a single organization, the Union Générale des Israélites de France (UGIF) to "represent" all of France's Jews before the French government and the Germans. In December 1941 General Otto von Stülpnagel, head of the occupation forces in France, ordered the UGIF to arrange payment of a one billion franc "fine" by the Jews of France's Occupied Zone in response to the first attacks on German occupation troops that summer and fall. Later the UGIF would be made responsible for provisioning the internees in the three Parisian camps. Stülpnagel also ordered the assignment of 1,000 Jewish "hostages" to a prison at Compiègne, the execution of 100 hostages at Mont-Valérien (including the Communist writer Gabriel Péri and fifty-three Jews), and deportations of Jews and Communists to "work camps" in the East. Some of the arrestees were sent to the Parisian work camps, and their experience illustrates the authors' emphasis on the direct link between expropriation of Jewish property and eventual murder in the Holocaust. It was in this context that Operation Furniture was launched, following an appeal by Rosenberg to Hitler, requesting that his Paris staff be allowed to take furniture in the western occupied countries for use in the eastern territories.

The original idea was that furniture looted in Western Europe would supply the offices and residences of German officials in Eastern Europe. But with the opening of the Allied bombing campaign over Germany, notably the massive bombing of Cologne in June 1942, the stolen goods were diverted to replace German property destroyed in the air raids. "As a direct consequence of Operation Furniture," Dreyfus and Gensburger argue, "every German victim of Allied bombing raids became a potential beneficiary of the plunder and murder of the Jews of occupied Western Europe" (p. 17). However, the authors demonstrate that almost half of the stolen goods were actually siphoned off via "special shipments" to German police, military, or political figures, often patrons of Kurt von Behr, chief of Rosenberg's Dienststelle Westen (Western Service) in charge of operations in France. Von Behr looked like the classic caricature of the Prussian Junker. "He would wear a corset, highly polished...