Shapiro Scholar Sarah Gensburger presents on the persecution of Jewish tenants in wartime Paris

On April 14, 2026, Sarah Gensburger, Professor of Political Science and History at CNRS and Sciences Po Paris, and the 2025-2026 Sara and Asa Shapiro Scholar in Residence at the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research delivered a lecture entitled “Homes as Witnesses of the Holocaust in Paris: How Jewish tenants were deprived of their rental rights (and never recovered them)”. Her talk was based on a decade of archival research, conducted with her colleagues Isabelle Backouche and Eric Le Bourhis, for their book Appartements témoins. La spoliation des locataires juifs à Paris, 1940-1946, published in 2025. The lecture examined how local administration in Paris, during the German occupation and after, used housing policy to facilitate the dispossession of Jewish families and hindered their return after the city’s liberation in August 1944. Gensburger observed that Holocaust historiography on France has overlooked the role of ordinary housing administration in the persecution of Jews, particularly in Paris. While scholarship has traditionally emphasized deportation, extermination, and the Aryanization of Jewish businesses and property, she argued that the systematic reallocation of Jewish rental rights constituted an equally important, yet neglected, dimension of persecution.

Gensburger opened her talk with an incident from 18 May 1945, days after the end of the war in Europe, when around 300 non-Jewish residents demonstrated on the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois against the eviction of a non-Jewish tenant who had moved into an apartment in early August 1944. The apartment legally belonged to the Rosenfeld family, French Jews who had rented it since the 1920s and whose head of household had been murdered at Auschwitz. The demonstrators used antisemitic slogans and incorrectly described the Rosenfeld family as foreigner Jews. Thirteen similar demonstrations occurred across Paris in 1945, all triggered by disputes over apartments previously rented by Jewish families who had returned after the war. These events revealed widespread resistance to restoring homes to returning Jews and challenged the conventional interpretation that the French public was broadly sympathetic to Jewish victims.

Gensburger argued that existing historiography of the Holocaust in France has often distinguished between the antisemitism of the Vichy state and the supposedly protective attitudes of ordinary French society, by pointing to the survival of three-quarters of France’s Jewish population as evidence for the latter. She contended that housing policy in Paris, under the Prefecture de la Seine, reveals a different picture. Systemic antisemitism did not depend on widespread ideological hatred, but operated through administrative practices that encouraged ordinary non-Jewish citizens to benefit from the persecution and absence of their Jewish neighbors.

Methodologically, Gensburger and her colleagues prioritized administrative archives over survivor testimony to reconstruct the mechanisms behind housing dispossession. Her team uncovered sixty-six previously mislabeled archival boxes in the Paris City Archives containing almost 10,000 files that documented the reallocation of legally rented so-called “Jewish apartments” to non-Jewish tenants between 1943 and 1959. Following her team’s research, the Paris City Archives officially changed the labeling of the boxes to reflect this history, illustrating how historical scholarship can reshape public understanding.

In her lecture, Gensburger situated the local administration’s re-housing policy within the broader context of wartime Paris. Severe housing shortages had existed since the 1920s, and Paris was overwhelmingly a city of tenants rather than homeowners. French law strongly protected tenants, making eviction difficult and allowing many Jewish families to continue paying rent even while in hiding, displaced, or arrested. Jewish Parisians were socially diverse and geographically dispersed across the city. This dispersion, alongside German preconception of the French as less antisemitic than other parts of Europe, prevented them from establishing a dedicated Jewish ghetto within the city. Moreover, as France had no official religious census under the laïcité system since 1872, German authorities relied on compulsory Jewish registration and Jewish residential addresses, the latter information often volunteered by non-Jewish neighbors, to identify those targeted for persecution. Consequently, the homes of Jews themselves became an essential instrument through which their persecution was enacted in Paris.

Initially, Aryanization focused on Jewish businesses, bank accounts and property while officially excluding private homes, apart from the organized looting of Jewish art collections. This changed with the implementation of the Final Solution in 1942. German authorities launched “Operation Furniture,” a programme to empty Jewish apartments after families had been arrested or forced into hiding. Relying heavily on neighbors and building janitors to identify such homes, the operation emptied around 40,000 apartments—approximately 80 percent of Jewish homes in Paris. Furniture and household belongings were removed by Parisian moving companies and sorted by Jewish forced laborers before being shipped to Germany. Operation Furniture also created the highly visible category of the “Jewish apartment.” Sealed doors, removal trucks and public inventories made the process visible to local residents, while the housing shortage made these apartments increasingly desirable. Although landlords and prospective tenants petitioned the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs to cancel leases of Jewish tenants, often using explicitly antisemitic language, these requests were initially rejected because private homes fell outside the Aryanization process.

The situation changed in 1943 when Allied bombing created thousands of homeless civilians. The Prefecture de la Seine established a rehousing office that systematically reassigned apartments still legally rented by absent Jewish tenants to non-Jewish applicants. Initially intended for bombing victims, the policy soon expanded to include prisoners of war, civil servants, large families and applicants supported by French or German officials. Created administratively rather than through legislation, it frequently ignored existing legal protections for Jewish tenants.

Unlike earlier petitions, applications to the rehousing office rarely contained overt antisemitic language because the process became bureaucratically normalized. Officials openly referred to “Jewish apartments” in the reallocation process, and temporary administrators were sometimes appointed to terminate Jewish leases, creating an appearance of legality. Gensburger estimated that around 20,000 apartments were reallocated through this system. The policy effectively transformed Jewish homes into a new form of social housing while preserving private property, allowing ordinary Parisians to benefit materially from persecution without necessarily expressing ideological antisemitism. Mapping thousands of cases, Gensburger and her colleagues found that the process was intensely local: 10 percent of new tenants already lived in the same building and one-quarter moved from within 300 meters. These findings demonstrated that neighbors and local networks played a central role in identifying and occupying Jewish homes, readily assuming that their former occupants would never return.

After the liberation of Paris, many Jewish survivors sought to reclaim their apartments because they needed housing, hoped missing relatives might return there, and depended on local social and economic networks. While French courts initially recognized their legal rights, the provisional French administration passed legislation on 14 November 1944 that protected many categories of wartime occupants, especially the groups created by the rehousing policy during occupation. The provisional government also introduced a decree that restored Jewish property rights, yet explicitly excluded rental rights from it. Restitution became even more difficult after 1946, when further legislation suspended evictions if the rehoused tenants occupied apartments that were claimed by Jewish tenants of foreign origin. This disproportionately affected Jewish survivors as two-thirds of Parisian Jews before the war were foreign nationals. Court orders also depended on police enforcement, forcing many Jewish tenants to approach the same police personnel that had arrested them during occupation and who, in most such cases, failed to carry out the evictions. Gensburger argued that administrative continuity enabled wartime antisemitic policies to persist within apparently neutral legal frameworks. Some survivors were able to recover their apartments only after decades of litigation.

Gensburger concluded her talk by noting that attention to housing fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the Holocaust in France. Rather than focusing solely on extermination, historians should recognize how local administration and everyday participation enabled the permanent removal of many Jewish families from Paris. Systemic antisemitism operated through routine bureaucratic practices, producing inequalities that persisted well beyond liberation.

The lively Q&A that followed included discussion on gender, colonial comparisons, and public policy. Gensburger highlighted the gendered nature of post-war restitution, noting that women often faced greater legal obstacles because rental rights were registered in men’s names and many women delayed legal action while awaiting the return of male relatives. She also welcomed the idea of comparative studies with colonial contexts, particularly discriminatory housing policies affecting French Algerians in the 1950s and 1960s, while acknowledging the distinct historical circumstances of each case.