Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup

Thanks to a few police officers who participated in the Resistance and leaked the information, a leaflet from “Solidarité”—an offshoot of the Jewish section of the M.O.I.—warned Jews, in Yiddish and French, of an imminent large-scale roundup.

On July 16 and 17, 1942, at the behest of the Nazis, 7,000 police officers and gendarmes carried out a mass arrest of Jews, organized by René Bousquet, secretary general of the Vichy police, and the Commissioner General for Jewish Affairs, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix. Jews—including foreigners, stateless persons, and those stripped of their French citizenship—were arrested. For the time being, French Jews were not targeted.

Many Jews did not know where to hide, but without the leaflet distributed by “Solidarité,” the toll would have been even higher. 13,152 Jews were rounded up in Paris. Among them—and for the first time—were women, the elderly, and children. More than 4,000 children. Single people and childless couples were sent directly to the Drancy camp. Families were crammed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver; the conditions of detention were appalling, and the stench was putrid. After several days of confinement at the Vel’d’Hiv, the families were gathered together in the transit camps at Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. The escalation of inhumanity accelerated: adults and teenagers were the first to be sent to their scheduled extermination. Young children were torn from their mothers, transferred to Drancy, and then deported in turn.

All of them were crammed into cattle cars bound for the Auschwitz camp in Poland. The children were the first to be gassed.
The latest research points to a “roundup after the roundup.” Since the number of Jews rounded up was deemed insufficient, the operation continued in late August. 1,200 adults and hundreds of children were arrested. The death toll then reached 14,000. Other roundups would follow.

Only non-French Jews were targeted in these roundups, but the Vichy regime, in an effort to consolidate its power in the face of the Nazis, deported 3,000 French children of foreign parents. The goal was to inflate the death toll from the Vél’ d’Hiv’ roundup.

When school started again in October 1942 in Paris, many children were missing from the classrooms… In the provinces—in Bordeaux, for example—on the orders of Maurice Papon, secretary general of the Gironde prefecture, on July 16, 1942, the fate of Jews, both adults and children, was the same: Drancy, Auschwitz…

It was not until July 16, 1995, that the crimes of the Vichy regime were officially acknowledged. The President of the French Republic, Jacques Chirac, said: “Yes, the occupying power’s criminal madness was aided by the French people and by the French state.”