Spies, radicals and deportees: one hotel in wartime Paris

There's a hotel in central Paris that lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 40s, a pre-war centre of anti-Nazi German dissidents in exile from Hitler's Reich, a wartime HQ for German military intelligence, and, eventually, a post-war deportee relocation hub. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, David Musgrove asked Jane Rogoyska to reveal the remarkable story of the ever-evolving Hotel Letitia. Today I am talking to Jane Rogoyska about her new book, Hotel Exile. Jane, welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Thank you. I'm very well, very pleased to be here. So it's the story of the Second World War from a different angle, through the prism of one place. the Hotel Lutetia in Paris. Maybe I've pronounced that wrong, you can probably correct me.

Can you quickly introduce me to this hotel, please? So the Hotel Lutetia serves, as you said, as the prism through which we tell the story of three groups of people who were all connected to this hotel during a period between 1933 and 1945. So the hotel itself is the only Grand Hotel on the left bank of Paris. So it sits in the 6th arrondissement.

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