Looking for a Paris hotel with a past?

CHANCES ARE, most people who pay several thousand euros a night to stay in a five-star hotel in Paris do not—or do not want to—think about it. But during the second world war the city’s grandest hotels hosted a very different sort of guest: Nazis. The blue-carpeted Ritz operated a German wing, welcoming Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command. Nearby, closer to Place de la Concorde, the Crillon and Meurice were commandeered to house military governors and officers. Near the Arc de Triomphe, the Majestic (now the Peninsula) hosted the then-triumphant German military command.

Meanwhile, on the left bank of the Seine, the Abwehr (German military intelligence) used the Lutetia as its base. The hotel’s elegant Art Deco building has grapes etched into its stone—a fitting motif, given the amount of wine the Nazi officers consumed as long-stay guests. But the Lutetia has a different place in history from the other hotels, because of what happened after the war. It served as the largest reunification centre in France, with an estimated 20,000 concentration-camp survivors coming through its doors in 1945, about a third of those who returned.

“Out of all the grand hotels in Paris, the Lutetia was the only one to be offered the ‘redemption’ of receiving returning deportees after the compromises of the occupation,” writes Jane Rogoyska, a British author. In “Hotel Exile” Ms Rogoyska tells the story of Paris in the 1930s and ’40s, with the Lutetia as the through line.

Named after the ancient Roman city that would become Paris, the Lutetia opened its doors in 1910, with its interiors resembling those of a sleek ocean liner. Its backers, the board of Bon Marché, Paris’s first department store, were expecting smooth sailing: they planned to attract a splashy clientele who would stay the night after splurging. Instead two world wars erupted within three decades. During the first, the hotel housed French officers and converted banqueting rooms into a Red Cross hospital.

The author chronicles the foggy period before the second world war, with all its delusions and changes of heart. The Jews arriving in France in the early 1930s believed they were leaving Germany only temporarily. Before Hitler, the Weimar Republic had had 16 chancellors in about 15 years, averaging less than 11 months in office. Many émigrés thought Hitler would not last. At first the French welcomed the newcomers, but soon the number of immigrants ballooned—and French charity shrivelled. The new arrivals were trapped: they could not return to Germany, get a work permit in France or secure an identity document to travel elsewhere.

In the build-up to war the Lutetia hosted German émigrés, such as Heinrich Mann, a novelist, and Willi Münzenberg, a communist agitator. They gathered at the hotel to organise a meeting—known as the “Lutetia Committee”—to voice their dissent about Germany’s dictatorship. James Joyce took part, too, and the Irish author even lived at the hotel for a while.

When the Germans arrived at the Lutetia in 1940 after conquering Paris, there was nothing for the hotel staff to do but accommodate them—and, in the case of the Abwehr’s chief, Wilhelm Canaris, his dachshunds. (When travelling he booked twin beds so they could sleep beside him.) But there were a few acts of clever resistance: one employee sequestered the hotel’s finest wine in a section of the cellar and built a wall, so the Germans did not know it was there.

The most riveting—and heartbreaking—era at the Lutetia took place after the war’s conclusion. Those who had beaten the odds and survived the camps were entitled to a 48-hour stay, during which they were fed and interviewed, and received medical treatment and identity documents. The Lutetia was where people hoping to reunite with their families came to wait in cautiously optimistic anguish. It was also where the horror dawned on them of what had been happening out of sight. The average weight of the returning deportees was 48kg (106lb).

Ms Rogoyska mined news clips and archives for chilling and memorable stories from survivors. One member of the French resistance, Charles Palant, could not bear to tell his sister-in-law that he had seen her brother die in a camp, so he went to the Lutetia to wait for him, “so that Lily could still have something to hope for, at least for a while…until time took it upon itself to put the truth in place”.

At the heart of the book (and the title) are the different forms of exile experienced by people passing through the hotel. There was the exile of the first wave of German Jews fleeing their government; the “strange exile” of German officers in their “prolonged posting in a smart hotel”. And there was the exile of survivors who returned from camps. To Parisians these deportees were a reminder (a “living reproach”, Ms Rogoyska argues) of French collaboration with the Nazis, which they wanted to forget. And so the warm welcome offered to deportees at the Lutetia turned colder, as time marched on.

Hotels can make for evocative settings, and this is not the first book to narrate history through a revolving door. “The Finest Hotel in Kabul” (2025) and “The Secret Life of the Savoy” (2020) are just two recent examples. Unfortunately, though there is a lot that redeems it, “Hotel Exile” is not a five-star. As in a hotel lobby, too many people come and go in a hurry. Ms Rogoyska’s penchant for micro-chapters with self-evident titles over deeper analysis prevents the book from being excellent.

Still, it may make you see Paris differently. In a city where so many remarkable events have unfolded, the selection of what to memorialise in stone is revealing. Streets are peppered with signs marking the spot where French resistance fighters were gunned down. But other mentions of the occupation are scarcer. Walk down Boulevard Raspail to the Lutetia’s entrance, and not far from the nameplate advertising that it is a Mandarin Oriental, there is a plaque commemorating its role as a welcome centre for camp survivors. Nowhere is it acknowledged who was staying in the hotel beforehand. ■