The Nazi Aryanization of Galeries Lafayette: Jewish Owners Expelled and the Paris Department Store Seized

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The Nazi Aryanization of Galeries Lafayette: Jewish Owners Expelled and the Paris Department Store Seized

Galeries Lafayette, Théophile Bader, Raoul Meyer, and Max Heilbronn / 1940s

During the Nazi occupation of France in 1940, Galeries Lafayette was subjected to the policy of “Aryanization,” the systematic confiscation of Jewish-owned businesses and their transfer to non-Jewish control. The company’s Jewish founders and administrators—Théophile Bader, Raoul Meyer, and Max Heilbronn—were forced out, while 129 Jewish employees were also compelled to resign. The seizure stripped the families of Bader, Meyer, and Heilbronn of their property and severed the store from the people who had built it into one of Paris’s great retail institutions. Control of the Galeries Lafayette group was transferred to the Swiss businessman Aubert and the French industrialist Harlachol. The episode reveals how Nazi racial persecution operated not only through deportation and physical violence, but also through the bureaucratic takeover of prominent commercial and fashion institutions. Galeries Lafayette’s glamorous architectural identity—its monumental dome, luxury departments, and central place in Parisian consumer culture—therefore existed during the occupation under a regime of forced dispossession and collaboration.