France expands efforts to find Nazi-looted assets

PARIS, March 10 (JTA) — France has adopted new measures to track down millions of dollars worth of bank accounts and other financial assets looted from Jews during the Nazi occupation of the country. A “surveillance committee” will be created to oversee the work of banks and other financial institutions in exploring their archives for evidence of such assets, according to an announcement by Finance Minister Dominique Strauss- Kahn and Bank of France Governor Jean-Claude Trichet. The committee will have oversight responsibilities, but it will be up to bank employees to plow through their archives to uncover the assets, which were either abandoned by Jews fleeing persecution or seized by France’s collaborationist Vichy regime. “It will be a long and difficult task, but I am not at all worried about the banks’ willingness to cooperate with the state,” said Strauss-Kahn, who is Jewish. But French Jewish leaders disagreed, charging that the committee is not an independent body and that the actual sifting through bank archives will not be done by outsiders. “What you have is a group of former banking officials looking into French banks,” said Henri Hajdenberg, president of CRIF, the umbrella group of secular Jewish organizations in France. He added that the inquiry should be led by an independent investigative body, pointing to what is being done in Switzerland, where a special commission headed by the former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, is searching for missing Jewish assets deposited in Swiss banks during the World War II era. The surveillance committee will report to a state commisssion that was appointed a year ago to investigate the extent of Jewish property stolen by the Vichy government or by the Nazis. The commission plans to make an inventory of such goods — ranging from jewelry and bank accounts to artworks and real estate — and suggest ways to compensate the rightful owners. That commission, headed by Jean Matteoli, a concentration camp survivor and former Resistance fighter, said in a report issued in January that it still had the daunting task of going through hundreds of thousands of files and documents before it could track down all the property and put a price tag on it. But it said that France should not wait until its work was completed to begin compensating the rightful owners of confiscated property. Some 76,000 Jews — about a quarter of the country’s Jewish population — were deported from France to Nazi death camps. Only 2,500 returned. Much of the stolen assets were confiscated from Jews as they entered the Drancy detainment camp outside Paris — the last stop before Auschwitz. Recently opened archives from the camp indicate that French police meticulously listed all the valuables they stripped from Jews before deporting them to their deaths. The archives show that millions of dollars in jewelry, stock and bond certificates, gold pens and other valuables were systematically deposited into state banks and credit institutions. For decades, hundreds of thousands of documents from the period were kept locked by state laws, prompting Jewish leaders to charge that government ministries were dragging their feet in confronting the extent of the looting.