As a scholar of the Holocaust and WWII I've
read and heard horrible stories about what
the Germans and their collaborators
made innocent and defenseless
people, children, women, elderly, unarmed prisoners, but one
that most impressed me is made in one of the
most "civilized" world
cities in theory, Paris, and by French. They not
only murdered their parents
but left the children alone and then also kill them after.
And it has passed recently and too close.
It was not until 16 July 1995 that the subject of collaboration
and complicity in the deportations from France was broached and confessed.
On this day France’s State President Jacques Chirac publicly apologized
for the involvement of French officials in the Shoah.
On the night of July 16, 1942, 4,500 gendarmes collaborationist
government of Marshal Petain, who
had signed a pact with Hitler and accepted the occupation of France by the German army in
Paris came to a gigantic raid, in which
Jews. They were arrested and subsequently
imprisoned in subhuman conditions,
in the winter Velodrome.
What became known as the
"Vel' d'Hiv Roundup" was to be more important. To plan it, René
Bousquet, secretary-general of the national police, and Louis Darquier de
Pellepoix, who had replaced Xavier Vallat in May 1942 as head of the CGQJ, traveled
on 4 July 1942 to Gestapo headquarters at 93 rue
Lauriston (Paris, 16th arr) to meet
Dannecker and Helmut Knochen of the SS. A further
meeting took place in Dannecker's office in the avenue
Foch on 7 July. Also present were Jean
Leguay, Bousquet's deputy, Jean François who was
director of the general police, Émile
Hennequin, head of Paris police, André Tulard, and others from the French police.
Dannecker met Adolf
Eichmann on 10 July 1942, and another meeting took place the same day at the
General Commission for Jewish Affairs (CGQJ) attended by Dannecker, Heinz
Röthke, Ernst
Heinrichsohn, Jean Leguay, Gallien, deputy to Darquier de
Pellepoix, several police officials and representatives of the French railway
service, the SNCF. The
roundup was delayed because the French asked to avoid holding it a couple of
days before Bastille Day on 14 July.
The national holiday was not celebrated in the occupied zone, and there was a
wish to avoid the risk of civil uprisings.
Dannecker declared: "The
French police, despite a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry
out orders
A total of 12,884 non French Jews, 3,031 men,
5,802 women and 4,051 children were rounded up in Paris for deportation to the
death camps in Poland. For a whole week, 6,900 of them including the 4,051
children, were confined in the huge sports stadium, the
Velodrome d'Hiver, a stadium designed for cycle
sports, on the Boulevard de Grenelle. Without food and little
water and only four toilets, the victims were in a deplorable state for five
days before being transferred to the camps at Drancy or Pithiviers on the
outskirts of Paris. Here the Vichy French police separated the children from
their parents. The parents were then transported to Auschwitz to be gassed. The
children followed soon after. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January
26, 1945, they found 2,819 inmates still alive but only thirty of the 6,900
non-French Jews were alive. Sadly, none of the 4,051 children
survived.
The children from two years were arrested 16 to July 20 onlyParis and surroundings. It was the first time aThe raid included. After passing through hellWinter Velodrome, everyone wouldevacuated, along with their mothers, no lessterrible internment camps of Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. Shortly would last the lastmaternal consolation company.
In late July, mothers will be separated from their children in heartbreaking scenes, to besent to Auschwitz and gassed immediately.
 |
| Child interned at Drancy with her doll awaiting deportation |
The children, aged 2 to 12 years, remain alone,stranded in appalling conditions(The sick, malnourished, dirty, eaten of parasites). From mid-August, will betransferred to Drancy; from there, crammed intocattle cars, as they once were theirparents with little water provisions or under afrightful heat, will travel to Auschwitz and, getting off the train, to the gas chamber.None survived.
Collaborating with French offices
and the SNCF, German authorities staged, between June and September 1942, the
deportation of approximately 8,000 Jews from the internment camps in
Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers to Auschwitz where most of them were murdered
directly upon their arrival. The Jews, who had been transported away from the
Vélodrome d’Hiver to Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers in July 1942, suffered
greatly from the conditions prevailing in the two camps, where the general food
and medicine supply and hygienic conditions turned out so inadequate and
insufficient that they caused diseases to break out and spread.
On 30 July the Orléans Commando of
the security police was sent the following message by telegram from Paris: “The
transport trains will leave Pithiviers station as agreed on Friday, 31.7.1942
and on Monday, 3.8.1942 at 6.15 a.m. The train scheduled for Wednesday,
5.8.1942, will depart from Beaune-la-Rolande station on 5.20 in the morning.
Children are not yet to be included in these transports. They will be deported
on a separate ulterior transport. Any separation between parents and children
that may become necessary in the course of the adults’ deportation is to be
carried through now.” (ITS Document 82197927)
This cold-blooded, unscrupulous and
inhuman strategic directive brought about the immediate separation of the
children from their parents and supervisors. The scenes that must have unfolded
when this separation became fact and the adults were deported are beyond
human(e) powers of imagination. The children had to stay behind, distressed,
disoriented, left to their own, guarded by French gendarmes, and wait
their deportation turn to extermination to come. When it finally did come in
August, most of the children had already become orphans without knowing
themselves to be.
Some of the murderers ( as usual almost without punishment )
René Bousquet (11 May 1909 – 8 June
1993) was a high-ranking French political appointee who served as secretary
general to the Vichy regime police from May 1942 to 31 December 1943
In the 1949, he was
automatically convicted as a Vichy official and sentenced to five years of Indignité nationale, but his
sentence was reduced due to beliefs that he also aided the Resistance and attempted to preserve some autonomy for French police during the Nazi Occupation. Excluded from the government, he went into business. After receiving
amnesty in 1959, Bousquet became active again in politics, supporting left-wing
politicians through the 1970s, and becoming a regular visitor of François Mitterrand after his
election as president in the 1980s.
After years of increasing
accusations about his activities during the war, in 1989 Bousquet was accused
by three groups of crimes against humanity. He was
ultimately indicted by the French Ministry of Justice in 1991 for his decisions during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942,
which led to Jewish children being deported and killed in eastern Europe Nazi extermination camps. Bousquet
was assassinated in 1993 by Christian Didier shortly before his trial was to
begin.
A veteran of World War I, Darquier had been active in Fascist and antisemitic politics in France in the 1930s, being a member, at various times, of Action Française, Croix-de-Feu and Jeunesses Patriotes. On 6
February 1934 he was injured at the Place de la Concorde riot, and,
according to the Janet Maslin, writing in The New York Times in 2006,
"parlayed (his) new status as a 'man of 6 February' into a leadership
role." During this period he began collaborating with the noted antisemitic publisher Ulrich Fleischhauer's Welt-Dienst
(World-Service or Service Mondial) organization based in Erfurt, Germany.
Darquier's extreme views were well-publicized. In 1937, he said, at a
public meeting, "We must, with all urgency, resolve the Jewish problem,
whether by expulsion, or massacre." A British report in 1942 called him "one of the most notorious
anti-semites in France".At Nazi Germany's behest, he was appointed to head Vichy's Commissariat General aux
Questions Juives (Office for Jewish Affairs) in May 1942, succeeding Xavier Vallat, whom the SS in France found too moderate.Darquier's ascendancy to this post immediately preceded the first mass
deportations of Jews from France to concentration camps. He was fired in February 1944 when, in
Nicholas Fraser's words, "his greed and incompetence could no longer be
countenanced."
He was sentenced to death in absentia in 1947 by
the French High Court of Justice for collaboration. However, he had fled to Spain, where members of the authoritarian regime
of Francisco Franco,
specifically General Antonio Barroso y Sánchez-Guerra, protected him.
In 1978, a French journalist interviewed him. Among other things, Darquier
declared that in Auschwitz, gas chambers were not used to kill humans, but only lice, and that
allegations of killings by this method were lies by the Jews. The interview was printed in L'Express and started
off an instantaneous scandal. The extradition of Darquier was considered, but was refused by Spain.
Jean
Leguay (29 November
1909 — 5 July 1989) was second in command in the French National Police during
the Nazi Occupation of France. He was complicit in the 1942
roundup of Jews in Paris and their deportation from France to Nazi extermination camps, which resulted in
the deaths of thousands of people, both adults and children.
After the war, Leguay became president of Warner Lambert, Inc. of London.
(It is now merged with Pfizer.) Later he became president
of Substantia Laboratories in Paris.
In 1979 Leguay was charged with crimes against
humanity for his role in the organisation of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv), the mass arrest of more
than 13,000 Jews on 16 and 17 July 1942 in Paris.
Leguay died of cancer in 1989. In a statement unprecedented
in the history of French justice, the judiciary officially stated after his
death that Leguay's involvement in crimes against humanity was ascertained
beyond any doubt.
Émile Hennequin
CEO of the Paris municipal police
, was responsible for the practical organization of the raid.
His are the detailed instructions that were given to the police who intervened . He was condemned in june 1947 to eight years hard labor for collaborating with the Germans, but not for his involvement in the raid of the Velodrome but enjoys a pardon decree June 28, 1948 and was put into compulsory retirement on the same day.
ANDRÉ Tulard.
(1899–1967)
(1899–1967)
Was a French civil administrator and police inspector. He is known for having created the "Tulard files," which censused Jewish people during Vichy , it contained more than 150,000 people. Tulard was head of the Service of Foreigners and Jewish Affairs at the Prefecture of Police of Paris.
. He also participated in the organization of July deportations. He died in 1967, retaining the Legion of honor, without being subject to any prosecution after the war.
. He also participated in the organization of July deportations. He died in 1967, retaining the Legion of honor, without being subject to any prosecution after the war.
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