Joseph Billig

Origins and early life

Joseph Billig was born Ossip Billig at Saint Petersburg on 22 June 1901, into the Russian Jewish bourgeoisie, and died at Corbeil-Essonnes on 3 January 1994.

Work and career

He joined the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine in June 1946, the archive Isaac Schneersohn had founded in secret at Grenoble in 1943, and spent the years 1947 to 1949 at Nuremberg, identifying among the captured German records everything that bore on the persecution of the Jews of France and having it copied for Paris. That work of sorting and cataloguing, done while nobody in France much wanted the file opened, is the foundation on which the later history of Vichy rests.

He then wrote it himself: L'Allemagne et le génocide in 1950, and above all Le Commissariat général aux questions juives, three volumes published between 1955 and 1960, the first full study of the French administrative body created to strip Jews of their livelihoods and property. His method was to establish everything from the archives and to assert nothing beyond them. The public did not hear of him: French opinion came to the subject only in the 1970s, and by then the documents were waiting, in order, because he had put them there.