Wartime France stripped Jews of £1bn

Property and cash approaching £1bn at modern values were systematically and "savagely" stripped from French Jews during the Second World War, an official inquiry reported yesterday.

Property and cash approaching £1bn at modern values were systematically and "savagely" stripped from French Jews during the Second World War, an official inquiry reported yesterday.

The French state apparatus and leading financial institutions, such as banks, took part enthusiastically in "a persecution whose ultimate goal was extermination", the report said.

Most of the property was restored to owners, or their relatives, after the war, but many valuables and much money are still missing.

The inquiry recommends that, as an act of contrition, the French state and financial institutions give £230m to a proposed foundation to promote recollection and understanding of the Holocaust in France. It also suggests a score of "important" paintings, stolen from Jewish families who did not survive should be given by French museums to the Museum of Israel in Jerusalem.

The three-year inquiry, led by a former minister, Jean Mattéoli, completes another stage in the formal admission by the Paris government of official French participation in the persecution and despoilation of Jews resident in France between 1940 and 1944.

The committee was set up following pressure from the French Jewish community after a declaration by President Jacques Chirac in 1995 that the French state had "committed the unpardonable sin" of taking an active part in the Holocaust. Previous presidents had insisted that the wartime Vichy regime was not a legitimate representative of France.

About £880m at today's values was stripped from French Jews in commandeered flats and houses, "aryanised" businesses, blocked bank accounts and jewellery and property stolen at internment camps.

The figure does not include million of pounds of propertystolen by the Germans (at least 40,000 railway trucks full of furniture, paintings and a "vast fleet of pianos", said the report).

It also fails to take account of the full value of life insurance policies on Holocaust victims which French companies failed to pay out after the war. Insurance firms were especially reluctant to assist the inquiry.

Mr Mattéoli said the proposed Holocaust Foundation would help French people to "understand what it was like for 150 people to be shoved into a wagon built for 40, what the suffering of these people, these mothers, must have been. I would like to awake the French conscience to what the Nazis did and what the Pétain government often did even before it was asked by the Germans".