Bernard Herz, as a wealthy Jew with a large home in Chantilly as well as a Paris apartment and valuable stock, was an early target. It appears that he was harassed and picked up for questioning as early as 1940, but Suzanne Belperron managed to engineer his release through the influence of an actress friend called Rika Radifé, who was married to the actor Harry Baur.* She knew that if the company was to survive it would now have to be owned by her. By 23 January 1941 she had registered a new limited company in her name, Suzanne Belperron SARL, with one associate and with some money lent to her for the transaction by the interior designer Marcel Coard. But the Nazis were ever suspicious of such transactions and Belperron could be under no illusions that the business would from now on be ignored. She too was taken in for questioning and forced to prove through baptismal certificates that the Vuillerme family did not have any Jewish blood.
From 1940, Germans had been making inventories of Rothschild items. According to an 8 December 1941 report by the head of the foreign currency protection command – Devisenschutzkommando – G?ring himself wanted to decide on the disposal of the Rothschild family assets when he came to Paris. Among the extensive lists of table silver, knives, forks, spoons and dishes, there were ‘pictures and objects of art which were found in a cupboard in the house of the Jewess Alexandrine Rothschild, Paris 2, Rue Leonardo de Vinci. These paintings and objets d’art are to be turned over to the Einsatzstab Rosenberg.’ There were a further fifty-two packages of objects of art and jewellery from the property of various members of the Rothschild family, twenty-one of which were to be turned over to the ERR, the other thirty-one to be kept until sent for by G?ring ‘under lock and key of the foreign currency protection command’.
The Camondo family, known as the Rothschilds of the East as they had come to France from Constantinople in the mid-nineteenth century and were almost as rich, decided in 1941 to complain about the pillaging of their personal art collection and wrote letters to Paul Sézille and others. Léon Reinach, husband of Béatrice de Camondo, complained about ‘the spirit of hate and jealousy’ that was motivating such theft. But to no avail. The family mansion at 63 Rue de Monceau stands today, as then, just the other side of the highly manicured Parc Monceau. The park was developed by a pair of Jewish financiers, Isaac and Emile Péreire, in the 1860s as a suitable area for entrepreneurs and their families to live, and was surrounded by a number of sumptuous mansions owned by Jewish millionaires, including several Rothschilds and Ephrussis; the old-established Paris Jews, who regularly attended the opera, had fine horses and carriages and were determined patrons of the arts. Ironically, the area became something of a ghetto. The H?tel Camondo is a gem of a house rebuilt by Comte Mo?se de Camondo, who at the beginning of the twentieth century demolished the simpler house he had inherited from his parents, intending that the new one should resemble the Petit Trianon of Versailles. Mo?se had a keen eye for furniture and objets d’art, especially fine French works of the late eighteenth century. As a young man he was considered something of a bon vivant, but after his wife, the beautiful Irène Cahen d’Anvers, herself the daughter of a wealthy banker, had deserted him in 1897 for the handsome Italian in charge of the stables, Count Sampieri, he became more reclusive. The terms of the divorce – divorce was still considered rather shameful at the time – gave him custody of the couple’s two children, Nissim and Béatrice, to whom he was devoted. But in 1917 Nissim, a pilot in the French air force, was killed in a dogfight with a German plane. Mo?se, devastated, retreated further into his world of precious objects, often spending days sitting alone in the small room where he displayed his unrivalled collection of Sèvres porcelain.
Béatrice, distressed already by her parents’ painful separation, now suffered again with the loss of her beloved brother, and the year after Nissim’s death she agreed to an arranged marriage with Léon Reinach, scion of an intellectual and musical family that had been prominent in supporting Captain Alfred Dreyfus throughout his ordeal. They had two children, Fanny and Bertrand, and after her father’s death in 1935 they divided their time between an apartment in Neuilly and a luxurious villa on the Riviera, the Villa Kerylos, a magnificent re-creation of a Greek temple. Her father had already in 1924 bequeathed the Parc Monceau house to the state, hoping that such a generous donation would perpetuate the name of the family – motto, ‘Faith and Charity’ – and link it with the period in French history that he loved. When he died, Béatrice made sure that his wishes were carried out and that the family home, now a museum under the auspices of the Union Central des Arts Décoratifs, was opened on 21 December 1936.*