Branches of American banks implicated in wartime looting

PARIS, Feb. 7 (JTA) — American banks are figuring prominently in a report on the looting of Jewish property in Nazi-occupied France. The report has also prompted French Jewish leaders to call for prompt restitution to Holocaust victims. The report, issued last week by a commission of experts named by the French government to investigate the looting, indicates that the Paris branches of American banks willingly handed lists of Jewish account-holders over to the Vichy regime and the Nazis long before U.S. involvement in World War II deprived them of the right to refuse. The commission leveled the accusations as it submitted its second intermediary report to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. The 300-page report detailed the findings it had reached during the past year on dozens of issues, including the wartime activities of French banks and insurance companies. The report also detailed the seizure of property from Jews arriving at the Drancy transit camp outside Paris, their last stop before Auschwitz. 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. The Matteoli Commission, which will deliver its final report before the end of the year with recommendations on how to return or make compensation for the stolen property, evaluated the total amount of looted Jewish assets held by financial institutions at $900 million. The sum does not include the confiscation of businesses, real estate, furniture, jewels and paintings. Regarding furniture looted from Jewish homes, the commission said 44,000 train cars filled with the booty were taken to Germany during the war. The commission is headed by Jean Matteoli, a concentration camp survivor and former Resistance fighter. CRIF, France’s umbrella group for Jewish organizations, praised the commission’s work. But it said in a statement that the Jewish accounts and stocks turned over during the Occupation to the state savings institution, the Caisse des Depots et Consignations, should be quickly returned to their rightful owners. “The CRIF demands that the unclaimed funds, re-evaluated according to the cost of living 55 years later, comprise the first donation to a new Holocaust Commemorative Foundation,” to which the government pledged $9 million last November. The government recently announced the creation of a separate body to handle individual restitution claims. In its report, the commission singled out five U.S. banks, using their wartime names — J.P. Morgan, Chase Bank, Guarantee Trust, the Bank of the City of New York and American Express — among 400 mostly French financial institutions that seized or sequestered Jewish accounts after the Nazis invaded France in 1940. “The French banks immediately received a visit” from Nazi officials, commission member Claire Andrieu said. “But the U.S. banks didn’t, and yet they obeyed just as much as the French banks, declaring Jewish accounts at a time when they could have abstained.” Andrieu, a history professor at the Sorbonne, said the French subsidiaries of U.S. banks and their managers were protected by the presence of an American ambassador in Vichy.