-72000 apartments were ransacked in Paris and its environs during the German occupation of France;

-30000 claims files were submitted after the war. Of these, 20000 were for material losses and 10000 for financial losses;

– 518 million Euros have been disbursed for material losses;

-58 million euros have been disbursed to cover financial losses. In the eyes of the CIVS, this sum represents only half of such losses;

-The average sums disbursed to claimants seeking compensation for material losses amounted to 50000 euros;

-There has been a 99 per cent approval rate for all claims submitted to the CIVS for some form of compensation;

-The current pace of claims being submitted to the CIVS is 11 per month.

Former Prime Minister Lionel Jospin declared that. for years, French officials had acknowledged that reparations had been inadequate after 1945. Hence, there was a crying need to “do more” but no one did so until the mid-1990s. On July 16, 1995, President Jacques Chirac delivered a landmark speech, breaking with four decades of official French denials regarding Vichy’s responsibility in the persecution, plunder and deportation of Jews in France from 1940 to 1944. His elocution, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the July 1942 mass arrests (rafle) of thousands of Jews forcibly removed from their residences, businesses, arrested in plain sight on Paris city streets and locked up at the Vel d’Hiv. The speech prefigured the need for the CIVS. The “Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah” (FMS) was established three years later with funds from liquidated unclaimed Jewish-owned property and bank accounts.

On September 10, 1999, the CIVS opened its doors to handle claims submitted by survivors of anti-Jewish persecutions in France during the Vichy years. Its main mission was—and still is–to recommend that the Prime Minister approve compensation for claimants seeking relief for material and/or financial losses due to acts of persecution during WWII. Jospin reminisced over the various American “class action” lawsuits that had pitted claimants against the French government in 2000 and 2001. He recalled that the exchanges between French officials and American lawyers and lawmakers had oftentimes been “bitter”.

At the end of his presentation, Jospin, like so many others after him, reiterated the fact that “more needs to be done with regards to the restitution of cultural objects.” “Repair what must be repaired.”

In continuing the mea culpas of CIVS leaders, François Bernard, vice chairman of the CIVS, admitted that he and the rest of the CIVS had a difficult time grasping the true extent to which “people’s lives had been wrecked” during the years of occupation of France and thereafter. In essence, for him and others at the CIVS, the damage to individual victims was impossible to quantify in any satisfactory way. Citing the Matteoli report, Bernard solemnly declared that the mission of the CIVS, from its outset, was steeped in justice and humanity. Bernard turned the discussion inwardly by suggesting that the 20 years of the CIVS had been riddled with ambiguities. In a rather flippant comment, he stated: “we have no idea who we are.” The comment was more juridical than philosophical. He then went on to suggest that the CIVS had behaved like its own jurisdiction or a meta-jurisdiction.

Some of the disconnects and dysfunctions inherent in the CIVS mission stemmed from the decree that established it. The decree was interpreted too narrowly, which led to the following:

-War-related losses were excluded, although losses resulting from wartime plunder were not necessarily ignored.

-Anti-Semitic acts perpetrated by the German occupier outside the scope of Vichy policies may not have been taken into account.

-Lost earnings due to antisemitic decrees forcing people out of their professions were not addressed either. In other words, you were on your own if you thought you could be compensated for lost income resulting from anti-Jewish persecutions.

In spite of this, the CIVS leadership congratulated itself for having had one-on-one meetings with half to two-thirds of the claimants. The CIVS took note of all of the criticisms and insults proffered against it. Only 40 claims were litigated out of the tens of thousands that were submitted and adjudicated.

If not much has been done about cultural losses, the CIVS maintains that it will be difficult for it to change the way it does business. Matteoli once said that cultural losses constituted a “black hole.” They were also referred to as a “lost museum”. If it is lost, will it reappear? And if so, what to do? Meh.

to be continued…