Israeli property tycoon buys former nazi hangout in paris

Last September, I was ensconced in red velour, seated in the grande salle of the Hôtel Lutetia, on the Left Bank in Paris. I had just stumbled in from the hotel’s chrome-accented brasserie, where I downed a half bottle of Sancerre and six Bélon oysters, almost precisely where Simone de Beauvoir, in 1940, wrote a love letter to Sartre, whom she addressed as “Most dear little being.” Across from me was Jean-Luc Cousty, the Lutetia’s jovial general manager. It was good that I was a bit drunk because I needed to ask him something that’s not, shall we say, délicat. I wanted to know how he felt about working for a Jew.

This was not an entirely spurious question. In occupied Paris, the Lutetia, draped in swastikas, was among the most notorious redoubts for Nazi officers, and last August it was purchased by a group led by the Jewish real estate mogul Alfred Akirov, an Israeli of Iraqi extraction. The $185 million sale was immediately hailed as a way of redeeming the hotel’s Nazi past.

Conceived by the directors of the neighboring Bon Marché department store, the Lutetia opened in 1910 as a rest stop for out-of-town shoppers. From its inception, the hotel has been a frumpily elegant repository of Left Bank anecdotes and intrigues. De Gaulle spent his wedding night here. Isadora Duncan came when she was broke and insisted on ordering Champagne. Picasso was in residence when he learned of Apollinaire’s death. (He sat perfectly still for a long time and then continued work on a self-portrait.)

But let’s cut to the Nazis. When Oskar Reile, the Prussian spy catcher, first arrived at the hotel, in June of 1940, a German colonel greeted him with a glass of Champagne. Reile was attached to the Abwehr, the German intelligence outfit with a headquarters in the Lutetia, which paid bonuses to informants for every Resistance member whom they betrayed. Interrogations would take place inside the hotel, in a room with a window that looked out onto the notorious Cherche-Midi prison, where torture victims reportedly were placed in tubs of water that were gradually brought to a boil.

Alfred Akirov knows about all this history, but he does not seem particularly moved by it nor is he proud or boastful that a former Nazi hotel is now under Jewish ownership. When I spoke to Akirov and referred to news reports that suggested the purchase was rooted in symbolism, he snapped, “Look, I don’t think this is the reason that a public company does a deal. It is not a hobby. It is not personal.”

Indeed, the Lutetia is just another plum property in his rapidly expanding hotel portfolio. Akirov is currently in the process of transforming two other buildings with rich historic pedigrees — the Café Royal in London and the Conservatorium in Amsterdam — into five-star hotels, which are scheduled to open within a year.

Source: The New York Times