Authors: Ruth Brandon
And then, in 2001, ten years after the Corrèze
affair, six years after Bettencourt’s exit, the Nazi past returned to haunt
L’Oréal once more.
I
n the
freezing winter of 1948, Eugène Schueller announced to his protégé François
Dalle that they were going to visit L’Oréal’s German subsidiary, which had its
headquarters in Karlsruhe, just across the Rhine from Schueller’s native Alsace.
The company had opened its first German agency in Berlin, in 1922, but it did
not do as well as expected, and its manager, Frau Kuhm, refused to produce her
account books. In 1930 L’Oréal sacked her (to her fury—she sued, but lost) and
opened another office under the management of a Frenchman, André Tondu.
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The Berlin premises were destroyed during the war,
and after it Tondu, who remained in charge, moved the business to Karlsruhe.
There, under the name Haarfarben und Parfümerien (Hair Dyes and Perfumery) he
rented the ground floor and cellar of a house in the center of town, at number
18, Kaiserallee. The business at that point was “Lilliputian,” Dalle remembered:
its “factory” consisted of the cellar room, an area of about 300 square
meters.
69
When the business needed more space, in February
1949, Tondu signed purchase papers on its behalf for a property situated just
round the corner, at 17, Wendtstrasse. This house and the one at 18,
Kaiserallee, shared a common neighbor, number 19, Wendtstrasse, a once-luxurious
mansion that had been bombed during the war, and which occupied the corner lot
where Wendtstrasse met Kaiserallee. If Tondu could consolidate, and buy this
property also, his business would then occupy an important and valuable site in
the center of town.
In November 1951, he seemed to have received some
assurance that he would indeed, sooner or later, be able to buy number 19. That
month, Haarfarben bought the house at 18, Kaiserallee, whose ground floor and
basement it had hitherto been renting—a move that only made sense if they now
knew they would also be able to buy the ruined lot situated between the two
properties they owned already. And in 1954 they duly did so.
The seller was a large insurance company, the
Badischer Gemeinde Versicherung Verband (BGV), which had acquired number 19 in
1938 from a Frau Luise Dürr. The property, however, was not owned by Frau Dürr.
Rather, it belonged to the family of a wealthy lawyer named Dr. Fritz
Rosenfelder in whose name she was acting. Until 1936, Dr. Rosenfelder had lived
there with his mother-in-law, his wife, Kaethe, and their young daughter, Edith.
But the family was Jewish, and by the end of 1936 they knew they would have to
leave Germany. Dr. Rosenfelder spoke French and had studied in Paris, and he
therefore decided to move his family to that city, traveling on ahead to look
for accommodations. They would join him there as soon as he had found somewhere
suitable for them all to live.
By the time he was ready to receive them, however,
the situation in Germany had deteriorated further. For Jews to leave was no
longer a straightforward matter. There was now invariably a price to pay: in the
Rosenfelders’ case, this included their house. They would need exit visas, and
to obtain them, Dr. Rosenfelder was told he must designate an agreed Aryan to
handle all his business in Germany—which meant transferring “all the rights” to
this person, including the right to dispose of property.
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The holder of this power of attorney would be
Frau Dürr. Dr. Rosenfelder had never met her and knew nothing about her. No one,
least of all an experienced lawyer, would willingly sign over his property to
such a person in this way. But as it was the only way to get his family out of
danger, he signed.
The family duly came to Paris and in September of
1938 moved into an apartment in the rue des Saussaies, near the Champs-Élysées
(as it happened, just across the road from where the Gestapo would establish its
headquarters). Meanwhile, on January 20, 1938, Frau Dürr transferred rights in
number 19, Wendtstrasse on behalf of Dr. Rosenfelder “once of Karlsruhe, now of
New York,”
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to BGV.
For the Rosenfelders, as for so many Jewish
families, the war was a time of unspeakable torment. In 1939, Dr. Rosenfelder
was sent by the French to the first of a series of internment camps, where food
was scarce and living conditions atrocious.
6
During
intervals of freedom he managed to get visas for his family to emigrate to
America, but his mother-in-law refused to go: America, she declared, had no
culture. By 1941, however, it was clear that Paris, though doubtless cultured,
was no longer safe for Jews. Fritz Rosenfelder was interned once again, this
time at Les Milles, near Aix-en-Provence, and Kaethe, Edith, and Kaethe’s
mother, Emma, decamped to Allauch, a small town not far away, where they lodged
with a family and Edith went to school.
So things went on for some months. Then one day,
when Edith chanced to be at the beach with her teacher, her mother and
grandmother were picked up by the
milice
. They were
sent to the infamous internment camp at Drancy, a staging post for Auschwitz,
where they died. Edith was saved by a young village girl who arrived before the
gendarmes could find her, and who helped her hide.
Fritz, meanwhile, had escaped from Les Milles. When
he heard what had happened, he realized there was no way of retrieving his wife
and mother-in-law. He and his daughter made their perilous way to Switzerland,
where, weakened by his successive ordeals, he died in 1945. Edith, then
seventeen, ended up in a camp for Jewish displaced persons, where she stayed
until an uncle who had made it to Brazil agreed to take her in. She traveled to
Brazil, married there, and had two children. But she could never bear to talk
about the war, or her dead mother and grandmother. She told her children she
didn’t remember.
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In 1951, the year Edith Rosenfelder married, BGV
took full legal possession of 19, Wendtstrasse. Until 1949, regulations imposed
by the victorious Allies had prevented any dealing in property stolen from the
Jews by the Nazis. But on January 1st of that year these restrictions were
lifted, and in August 1950, BGV began the process of establishing their legal
right to number 19. In the absence of living claimants, all such matters were
decided via the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO), based in New
York.
There were, of course, living claimants: not just
Edith Rosenfelder, but an uncle, Fritz’s brother, Karl Rosenfelder, who was then
still alive. And it seems that Karl Rosenfelder was trying to lay claim to his
family’s property. But BGV made no effort to contact him—on the contrary: an
internal memorandum dated June 4, 1951, records that a lawyer had phoned to say
that Karl Rosenfelder had been in touch with a view to establishing his right to
restitution of the property, but that if the matter could not be settled by
negotiation via the JRSO, he (the lawyer) would not pursue the matter, as he had
no wish to act against his friends in BGV.
73
As
it turned out, this man had been chairman of the Association of National
Socialist Lawyers for Karlsruhe during the 1930s and was personally responsible
for the banning of Fritz Rosenfelder from practicing. He was unlikely, to say
the least, to have been an enthusiastic advocate for Fritz’s brother Karl.
The matter was settled, without reference to either
Karl or Edith Rosenfelder, on November 5, 1951. On that day, BGV agreed to pay
JRSO 5,000 deutschmarks as compensation, in return for ownership of the lot at
19, Wendtstrasse.
74
Later they claimed that
Karl Rosenfelder had signed the document, but neither they nor anyone else have
ever produced his signature.
Meanwhile, André Tondu’s property purchases on
behalf of Haarfarben progressed in close step with BGV’s. In January 1949, as we
have seen, the restriction on dealing in stolen Jewish properties was lifted,
allowing BGV to begin the formalization of its ownership of 19, Wendtstrasse. In
February, Tondu made the first of his purchases—number 17, Wendtstrasse. And he
bought the property at 18, Kaiserallee on the very day—November, 5, 1951—that
the BGV/JRSO matter was settled, that same day reconfirming his purchase of 17,
Wendtstrasse.
Two and a half years later, on June 29, 1954, the
Wendtstrasse saga was completed—at least as far as Tondu and Haarfarben/L’Oréal
were concerned. That day Tondu, on behalf of Haarfarben, bought number 19 from
BGV for DM 27,000. The transfer document noted that a restitution procedure had
been initiated concerning ownership of this property, but that the file had been
closed, entitling the present owner [BGV] to dispose of the property.
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Haarfarben/L’Oréal now owned the entire corner
site at the junction of Kaiserallee and Wendtstrasse. They would remain there
for the next thirty-seven years, selling the property in 1991 (the same year, as
it happened, that the Corrèze scandal broke).
Edith Rosenfelder, now Edith Waitzfelder, living in
Rio de Janeiro, knew nothing of these maneuverings. But her daughter, Monica,
noticed that the other Jewish families they knew in Rio, many of whom had
arrived there in circumstances very similar to Edith’s, had all received
restitution payments from Germany. Edith had received nothing; and although she
hated talking about her family’s life in Germany, and what had happened to them,
she said enough to indicate that they had been well-off and had owned a
substantial property in Karlsruhe. Why, then, had she been neglected? What had
happened to her rightful compensation?
Monica Waitzfelder determined to find out. She
moved to Paris, found a job there, and set about unraveling her family’s German
affairs.
The task, which she carried out in the intervals of
her busy life as an opera director, turned out to be difficult and complex.
Papers that should have been available somehow could not be found. Bureaucrats
were unhelpful. A clause in the November 5, 1951, agreement by which BGV
acquired 19, Wendtstrasse, for example, stated that “The JRSO undertakes,
inasmuch as the defendant (the BGV) acts in conformity with instructions from
the JRSO, to compensate the defendant to a maximum of 5,000 DM if a situation
arises where those with a priority right make themselves known and validly
undermine the defendant’s position.”
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But when
Waitzfelder made inquiries regarding this clause, she was informed that the
compensation had already been paid, and the matter was closed. Yet how was this
possible? No one but Edith, her uncle Karl having now died, had a priority
right, and she had never made herself known to JRSO, since by the time she found
out what was going on in Karlsruhe, the JRSO no longer existed.
“L’Oréal is still very powerful [in Karlsruhe],”
was the explanation offered by one nervous and unhelpful woman at the Karlsruhe
town hall when asked why she could not supply copies of the relevant documents.
Bit by bit, however, Monica Waitzfelder accumulated the documents and pieced
together the story. The 1954 papers recording BGV’s sale of 19, Wendtstrasse to
Haarfarben stated that “The compensation rights owed to victims of the war
remain entirely within the possession of the vendor.” That was to say, BGV—the
people who had illegally acquired the property in the first place.
On June 18, 2001, Maître Charles Korman, acting for
Monica Waitzfelder, wrote to Lindsay Owen-Jones, managing director of L’Oréal,
detailing what his client had uncovered. Valuations of sales and rental income
for comparable properties indicated that the Waitzfelders had been cheated, over
the years, of a substantial sum. The amount named by Korman was DM 60,556,726,
(roughly, €30,000,000, or $40,500,000). He made it clear that both he and Ms.
Waitzfelder would prefer an out-of-court settlement, but failing that they would
go to court.
However, in letters to the lawyer and, later, to
Edith and Monica Waitzfelder, Owen-Jones rejected all notion of a settlement. He
declined to acknowledge that L’Oréal had any responsibility in the affair,
asserting that Haarfarben was quite distinct from L’Oréal and that L’Oréal had
not bought a majority holding in it until 1961. If strictly true in a legal
sense, in practice the company always regarded the German subsidiary as part of
the parent organization. There is particular mention of Haarfarben as part of
the L’Oréal family in staff magazines from 1948 and 1949, while a paragraph in
L’Oréal Deutschland’s website describes how André Tondu restarted the business
in Karlsruhe after it was bombed out of Berlin.
Owen-Jones insisted that the JRSO transaction of
1951, in which due compensation had been awarded, had been signed by Karl
Rosenfelder (though he, too, failed to produce any signature). He declared his
“deepest conviction . . . that L’Oréal has done no wrong to Mrs. Edith
Rosenfelder,” and announced that L’Oréal had appointed its own lawyers to deal
with the case. They were Michel Zaoui and Jean Veil, two well-respected Jewish
advocates, one of whom (Zaoui) had been a leading prosecutor in the Klaus Barbie
trial—a choice whose insulting implications were not lost on the
Waitzfelders.
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Owen-Jones had clearly been
advised that the law was on his side, and, that being so, he was not inclined to
give in.
L’Oréal did indeed win the case, both at the first
hearing, when the Waitzfelders’ complaint was declared out of time, and later,
to Korman’s great surprise, on appeal. But it is still hard to understand why
Owen-Jones decided to fight rather than settle. From a publicity point of view,
it would surely have been better for L’Oréal to portray themselves as prepared
to right old wrongs rather than as legalistic skinflints upholding shameful Nazi
theft. The Waitzfelders would doubtless have settled for less than the stated
sum—not that €30 million would bankrupt a company of L’Oréal’s size and wealth.
In 1988,
Capital
magazine calculated that the
Bettencourts, its main shareholders, were getting richer at the rate of €14.2
million
a day
, or €590,000 an hour, while in 2001
their share of the company’s dividends amounted to more than €81 million.
78
As Owen-Jones presided over year after year of
double-digit growth, the share price rose from $8 in 1990 to $76 in 2000. When
he took charge, Liliane Bettencourt, the company’s largest shareholder, was
already the wealthiest woman in France; he made her the wealthiest woman in the
world.