Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris

Abstract

‘Möbel-Aktion’ was the name given to the Third Reich’s policy of seizing the contents of Jewish homes in occupied Western Europe. After hundreds of thousands of Dutch, Belgian and French Jews fled antisemitic persecution, many of their homes were pillaged and their domestic belongings seized for shipment to the East to furnish German homes. But by the spring of 1944, with the war going badly and trains urgently needed for other purposes, this project was abandoned, leaving behind substantial quantities of furniture, clothing, dishes and other household items. This article analyses, from the point of view of both the returnees and the state, the structure put in place by the French provisional government in autumn 1944 to attempt to reunite returnees with their possessions. Using the archives generated by these processes, supplemented by juridical texts and memoirs, this article demonstrates how refugees narrativized their losses and rights and the emotional, psychological and political uses to which refugees put these requests for restitution. This moment is particularly important because it is one of the few, until very recently, in which the French state acknowledged, however obliquely, the particular experience of the Jewish victims of the German Occupation and Vichy Regime.