When Paris’ luxury hotels are mentioned here – the Crillon, George V, Ritz, Meurice, Majestic – they all are on the Rive Droite, the Right Bank, many in historical buildings once owned by aristocrats. The Lutetia though stands apart, a grand transatlantic liner of a place on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank, in a similar class but perceived to be symbolising something different.

It is the only such hotel this side of the Seine, on Boulevard Raspail, and this was the “in” area of Paris in the 1920s and 1930s if you were poor, foreign, intellectual or artistic, author Jane Rogoyska recounts. Here are the Latin Quarter and Montparnasse, the intellectual heart of Paris full of students at the Sorbonne, Sciences Po and the École Normale Supérieure.

It is also the centre of political decision-making. While the Presidents may reside at the Elysée Palace on the Right Bank, the Senate and the Assemblée nationale are over on the other side of the river, as is the official residence of the Prime Ministers, the Hôtel Matignon. Here in the 6th arrondissement Hôtel Lutetia stands out, premises far removed from the shabby places where the German exiles fleeing the murderous Adolf Hitler had to live.

Hitler, we know, was gunning for Jews, communists, political activists, Weimar intellectuals,  writers of critical polemics, philosophers, scientists, journalists, creators of “degenerate” art, actors, directors and believers in alternative models to his, people who had not hidden their contempt for the Führer and his goose-stepping black-shirted and brown-shirted acolytes.

The exodus from Germany really began in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, and many of the first wave of anti-Nazi refugees fled to Czechoslovakia, Holland, Switzerland and Belgium, Rogoyska details, but most escaped to France, home of liberté, égalité et fraternité. In 1933 alone, 60,000 to 65,000 Germans bolted, of which France accepted some 25,000 refugees, 85 percent of them Jewish and about 90 percent male, less than 40 years old.

Rogoyska’s book, while not fully the story of this prominent hotel, does take it as the fulcrum for a narrative divided into three periods – that of the exiles from 1933 to the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, secondly the German occupation of Paris and the Lutetia in mid-1940 to the city’s liberation by the Allies in August 1944, and finally the climax of these events from 1945 onwards when survivors of Nazi concentration camps arrived at the hotel.

First, some history. The Lutetia opened in 1910, the only “grand” hotel on the bohemian Left Bank and elegantly planted, the author describes, between the Quartier latin and the long greenspace of the Champ de Mars stretching to the Eiffel Tower. The Jardin de Luxembourg and the famous cafés of Boulevard Saint-Germain were nearby, and ever since the Lutetia’s opening it had provided a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians and politicians.

Writers André Gide had his lunch there and James Joyce lived in one of the rooms. Artists  Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse were also guests. Charles de Gaulle and his bride Yvonne spent the first night there after their wedding. Ernest Hemingway drank in the basement bar in the 1920s. But splendid establishments with crystal chandeliers, mosaics, frescoes, parquet floors, valets, chambermaids and hot and cold running water cost money to enjoy.

So, for example, when Gisela Freund, 24, left Frankfurt on a night train because she was a student in danger of arrest and torture for helping print a clandestine magazine critical of Hitler, all she had were a suitcase and her camera. How would she survive in Paris?

Likewise, author Heinrich Mann, elder brother of the famous Thomas, had to slip away over the Rhine to Strasbourg after he urged opposition to the Nazis and came under surveillance. His partner Nelly Kroeger would follow after settling their affairs, and was saved from the Gestapo only because her brother had joined the Schutzstaffel, the SS, Hitler’s bodyguard.

Novelist Anna Seghers was interrogated by German police about her political activities and her radical Hungarian husband, László Radványi, who taught at the Workers University of Berlin. He was in Switzerland at the moment and she went into hiding for a few days, before they reunited in Zurich. Anna’s mother Hedwig took their children Peter and Ruth to them in Strasbourg then returned to Mainz, never to see her daughter and grandchildren again.

When the Reichstag  burned in February 1933, Hitler blamed communists and suspended civil rights. Journalist Gustav Regler, 35, went to the National Library in Strasbourg to examine the Reichstag blueprints, and found there was a passage in the cellars that led to the presidential home now occupied by powerful Nazi Hermann Göring.

Regler cajoled a librarian into copying the architectural drawings, which were not available to the public, and took them to well-known propagandist and former Communist MP Willi Münzenberg in Paris. Münzenberg and Heinrich Mann would set up and head the German Popular Front, comprising exiled anti-fascists and representing pre-Nazi German political and intellectual life. The Lutetia would host meetings of this illustrious group.

Meanwhile, those who arrived in France earliest were greeted by generosity, their stand against Hitler admired. They hoped work could be found in Paris. Most had only a  suitcase and lived in penury in cheap hotels. Exile could be a misery of solitude, a humiliation of food coupons, cash handouts and incomprehensible bureaucracy. French was a foreign language.

Both the French government and the exiles themselves hoped it would be only temporary. So many were arriving, hundreds, sometimes thousands, a month, increasingly desperate individuals and families, that they then became France’s “undesirables”.

On to phase two of Rogoyska’s book, the war and scooping up of all “enemy aliens” into French internment camps, ramshackle wooden huts without beds, light or heat. More than 2 million citizens fled Paris and German infantry entered the deserted, shuttered city on June 14, 1940. The Abwehr, the German military’s intelligence service, took over the Lutetia. This made sense, the Left Bank historically linked with artists and intellectuals, reliably anti-Nazi.

Eventually more than 100 Abwehr staff would be quartered at the hotel. The hotel staff acted with dignity and professional pride, albeit with a degree of reserve to their unwanted guests. But Marcel Weber, whose job was to receive diners, would not allow his finest wines and champagnes to fall to the barbarians, and he walled up these bottles in the cavernous cellars. According to him, a group of escaped French prisoners of war was hidden there too.

The Germans, generally, were on best behaviour, a delicate dance with the conquerors seeking to convince the conquered that they were not really so bad. Hitler paid a short hours-long visit on June 23, 1940 to revel in his triumph and study the architecture that he planned to outclass in his new magnificent Berlin. It was his one and only time in Paris.

Rogoyska recounts the mass roundup of Jews by French police, some 75,000 deported between June 1942 and July 1944, also the efforts by those on the Nazi wanted lists to flee France, perhaps by boat from Marseilles, the only major port still functioning in the unoccupied zone, or walking across the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. And there was the priest Robert Alesch who betrayed dozens of members of the French Resistance. He was shot.

Finally, the Nazis ran, leaving rationing and blackouts but General Dietrich von Choltitz disobeying Hitler’s order to destroy the city. In great irony, Hôtel Lutetia was requisitioned as the main repatriation centre for les absents (the missing), those surviving prisoners of war, forced labourers and walking skeletons with shaved heads and filthy striped clothes.

The Lutetia has been refurbished and is open today, perhaps selling Jane Rogoyska’s book.