Avenue Foch with chestnut trees along its full length. The Avenue was constructed during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III, as part of the grand plan for the reconstruction of Paris conducted by Napoleon's Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann. It was designed to connect the Place d'Etoile with another important part of Haussmann's plan, the Bois de Boulogne, the new public park on the west end of the city. The original plan, by Jacques Hittorff, who had designed the Place de la Concorde decades earlier, called for an avenue forty meters wide between the modern Avenue Victor Hugo and the modern
Avenue Foch of the First World War, who died in that year. During the Second World War, the headquarters of the Gestapo was located for a time at number 72, and the office of Section IV B4 of the Gestapo, the Juden Referat, which was responsible for the arrest and deportation of French Jews to the concentration camps, had its office at 31 bis Avenue Foch. The street was nicknamed « avenue Boche » by the Parisians ("Boche" being a slang word for "German"). The gardens of Avenue Foch occupy a space of 6.62 hectares, in the space 1200 meters long and