The Holocaust in France was the persecution, deportation, and annihilation of Jews between 1940 and 1944 in occupied France, metropolitan Vichy France, and in Vichy-controlled French North Africa, during World War II. The persecution began in 1940, and culminated in deportations of Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland. The deportations started in 1942 and lasted until July 1944. In 1940, 340,000 Jews, about two-thirds French citizens and one-third refugees from Nazi Germany, were living in continental France. More than 75,000 Jews were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were killed.
Most of these Jews were foreigners : 25 000 from Poland, 7,000 from Germany, 4,000 from Russia, 3,000 from Romania, 3,000 from Austria, 1,500 from Greece, 1,500 from Turkey, 1,200 from Hungary. French Jews numbered around 24,000 (6,500 French Jews from Metropole, 1,500 from Algeria, 8,000 children of foreign parents, 8,000 Jews naturalized).Quel fut le bilan de la déportation des Juifs de France ?
Antisemitism was prevalent throughout Europe at the time. As in other German-occupied and aligned states, the Nazis in France relied to a considerable extent on the co-operation of local authorities to carry out what they called the Final Solution. The government of Vichy France and the French police organized and implemented the roundups of Jews. Although the vast majority of the deported Jews were killed, the overall survival rate of the Jewish population in France was up to 75%, which is one of the highest survival rates in Europe.
Background In May 1940, the Wehrmacht invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg and won the Battle of France in June. There was a German military administration in occupied France until the Wehrmacht had to withdraw after the Battle of Normandy. In 1940, around 700,000 Jews lived in French-ruled territory, of which 400,000 lived in French Algeria, then an integral part of France, and in the French protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. On the eve of World War II, Metropolitan France had a population of over 300,000 Jews, around 200,000 of whom lived in Paris. France also hosted a large population of foreign Jews who had fled persecution in Nazi Germany. By 1939, the Jewish population had increased to 330,000 due in part to the refusal of the United States and the United Kingdom to accept any more Jewish refugees following the Évian Conference. During the German occupation of the Netherlands and of Belgium in May 1940, Metropolitan France received a new wave of Jewish immigrants and its Jewish population peaked at 340,000 individuals.
When World War II was declared, French Jews were mobilized into the French military like all their compatriots, and as in 1914, a significant number of foreign Jews enlisted in regiments of foreign volunteers. Jewish refugees from Germany were interned as enemy aliens together with other German citizens. In general, the Jewish population of France was confident in the ability of France to defend them against the occupiers, but some, particularly from Alsace and the Moselle regions, fled westwards into the unoccupied zone from July 1940.
The armistice of 22 June 1940, signed between the Third Reich and the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, did not contain any overtly anti-Jewish clauses, but it did indicate that the Hitler regime intended the race laws existing in Germany since autumn 1935 to spread to Metropolitan France and its overseas territories: Article 3 warned that in the regions of France occupied directly by the Germans, the French administration must "by all means facilitate the regulations" relating to the exercise of the rights of the Reich; Articles 16 and 19 warned that the French government had to proceed to repatriate refugees from the occupied territory and that "The French government is required to deliver on demand all German nationals designated by the Reich and who are in France, in French possessions, colonies, protectorates and territories under mandate."
Under the terms of the armistice, only part of Metropolitan France was occupied by Germany. From the city of Vichy, the government of Philippe Pétain nominally ruled France under the new French State (État français), but only governed the southern part of Metropolitan France, the three departments of French Algeria, and France's other overseas territories. Nazi Germany and the Vichy regime saw the French colonial empire as an integral part of non-occupied Vichy France, and its anti-Jewish decrees were immediately implemented there, because of the Vichy vision of the empire as a territorial continuation of Metropolitan France.
History Conditions of armistice
From the summer of 1940, Otto Abetz, the German ambassador in Paris, organized the expropriation of rich Jewish families.« De la Haine Dans l'air », par Jérôme Gautheret et Thomas Wieder, Le Monde, 27 Juillet 2010 The Vichy regime took the first anti-Jewish measures slightly after the German authorities in the autumn of 1940. On 3 October 1940, Vichy passed the Law on the status of Jews to define who was a Jew, and to issue a list of occupations prohibited to Jews. Article 9 of the law stated that it applied to France's possessions of French Algeria, the colonies, the Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, and mandates territories. The October 1940 law was prepared by Raphaël Alibert. A 2010 document makes it clear that Pétain personally made the law even more aggressively antisemitic than it initially was, as can be seen by annotations made on the draft in his own hand. The law "embraced the definition of a Jew established in the Nuremberg Laws", deprived the Jews of their civil rights, and fired them from many jobs. The law also forbade Jews from working in certain professions (teachers, journalists, lawyers, etc.) while the law of 4 October 1940 provided authority for the incarceration of foreign Jews in internment camps in southern France such as Gurs. These internees were joined by convoys of Jews deported from regions of France, including 6,500 Jews who had been deported from southwestern Germany during Operation Bürckel in October 1940.
During Operation Bürckel, Josef Bürckel and Robert Heinrich Wagner, the Gauleiter of Gau Westmark and Gau Baden, respectively, oversaw the expulsion of Jews from their Gaue into unoccupied France. Only those Jews in mixed marriages were not expelled. The 6,500 Jews affected by Operation Bürckel were given, at most, two hours warning on the night of 22–23 October 1940, before being rounded up. The nine trains carrying the deported Jews crossed over into France "without any warning to the French authorities", who were not happy with receiving them. The deportees had not been allowed to take any of their possessions with them, these being confiscated by German authorities. The German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop treated the ensuing complaints by the Vichy government over the expulsions in a "most dilatory fashion". In revenge, the German Jews expelled in Operation Bürckel were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at camps in Gurs, in Rivesaltes and in Les Milles while the Vichy government waited for the chance to return them to Germany.
The General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, created by the Vichy State in March 1941, supervised the seizure of Jewish assets and organized anti-Jewish propaganda.See report by the Mission d'étude sur la spoliation des Juifs At the same time, German occupiers began compiling registers of Jews in the occupied zone. The Second Statut des Juifs of 2 June 1941 systematized this registration across the country and in Vichy-North Africa. Because the yellow star-of-David badge was not made compulsory in the unoccupied zone, these records would provide the basis for future roundups and deportations. In the occupied zone, a German order enforced the wearing of the yellow star for all Jews who were six years old and over on 29 May 1942.
On 2 October 1941, seven synagogues were bombed in Paris. Still, the vast majority of synagogues remained opened during the whole war in the Zone libre. The Vichy government even protected them after attacks as a way to deny persecution. In Alsace-Lorraine, many synagogues were destroyed or converted.
In order to more closely control the Jewish community, on 29 November 1941, the Germans created the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF) under which all Jewish charitable works were subsumed. German occupiers were thus able to learn where the local Jews lived. Many of the leaders of the UGIF was also deported, such as and .
Drancy camp
The arrests of Jews in France began in 1940 for individuals, and general roundups began in 1941. The first raid (rafle) took place on 14 May, 1941. The Jews who were arrested, all men and foreigners, were interned in the first transit camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret (3,747 men). The second roundup, between 20 July and 1 August, 1941, led to the arrest of 4,232 French and foreign Jews who were taken to the Drancy internment camp. During this roundup, 13,152 Jews (among them 4,115 children) were arrested by the French police and confined in the Vélodrome d'Hiver without any arrangements made for food, water or sanitary facilities.
Deportations began on 27 March, 1942, when the first convoy left Paris for Auschwitz concentration camp. In the occupied zone, the French police were effectively controlled by German authorities. They carried out the measures ordered by the Germans against Jews, and in 1942, delivered non-French Jews from internment camps to the Germans.Tal Bruttmann, « Au bureau des affaires juives. L'administration française et l'application de la législation antisémite », La Découverte, 2006 They also contributed to sending of tens of thousands from those camps to extermination camps in German-occupied Poland, via Drancy.
At the time, it was announced that the Reich had created a homeland for Jews somewhere in Eastern Europe, to which all of the Jews of Europe would be "resettled", and was portrayed as a utopia. In the spring of 1942, the claim that "resettlement in the East" meant going to the mysterious Jewish homeland in Eastern Europe was widely believed in France, even by most Jews, and though most French people did not believe the supposed homeland was really the paradise that the Nazi regime had promised, few could imagine the truth.
In the unoccupied zone, from August 1942, foreign Jews who had been deported to refugee camps in south-west France, in Gurs, Récébédou, and elsewhere, were again arrested and deported to the occupied zone, from where they were sent to extermination camps in Germany and occupied Poland. On 11 November 1942, Wehrmacht troops and Italian troops occupied Vichy France in an action called Case Anton.
From the invasion of Vichy France to 1945 The first large-scale deportations of Jews from the unoccupied part of France (Vichy France) took place in August 1942. On 13 August the Nimes Committee of humanitarian organizations in Vichy sent a telegram to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York City stating: "3,600 Jews from internment camps sent eastward, exact destination unknown....Mass arrests made in hotels Bompard and Levante, Marseille. 200 women taken to Les Milles for deportation. Mothers have choice of taking with them children over five or leaving them with welfare organizations. Total quota is 10,000, first from camps, then working groups. If quota not attained, then arrests to be made in cities."
Foreign (non-French) Jews who had been interned in refugee camps in south-west France, in Gurs, Récébédou, and elsewhere, were arrested and deported to the occupied zone, from where they were sent to extermination camps in Germany and occupied Poland.