The Star of David in Belgium and France

On 27 May 1942 the German military administration in occupied Belgium issued an ordinance requiring every Jew over the age of six to appear in public only with a yellow Star of David on the breast. Two days later, on 29 May, an identical ordinance – the eighth in a series of decrees “concerning measures against the Jews” – was signed by the German military commander in France. In less than a month the Jews of three occupied countries of Western Europe, the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France, had been marked out in the same way as the Jews in the Reich since the autumn of 1941 – who in the spring of 1942 also had to mark the doors of their flats with a star – and the Jews in occupied Poland since the autumn of 1939.

It is often said that on 27 May wearing the star “became compulsory” in Belgium and that on 29 May the Jews in France were “ordered” to wear it. These dates, however, refer to the signing of the ordinances, not to their coming into force. In Belgium the star had to be worn from the first days of June: some sources give 3 June, others 7 June. In France the ordinance of 29 May was published on 1 June and took effect on Sunday 7 June 1942, and only in the occupied zone.

The decision was taken in Berlin

The marking of the Jews in the West was not the idea of the local commanders. After the Wannsee Conference the Jewish affairs section of the Reich Security Main Office, headed by Adolf Eichmann, was preparing deportations from Western Europe. In March 1942 the question of the star came up again at meetings in Berlin and Paris. The commander of the Security Police in France and Belgium, Helmut Knochen, said openly that the badge was a necessary step on the road to the “Final Solution of the Jewish question”. The aim was to separate the Jews from the rest of society before their deportation began.

The Netherlands, governed by the civilian Reich Commissioner Arthur Seyss-Inquart, came first. The order was announced there on 29 April and took effect on 3 May 1942. In Belgium and France, where power lay with the military, matters moved more slowly. In Paris, as early as January 1942, Admiral François Darlan, then head of the Vichy government, had given the German command to understand that a separate badge for Jews would shock French public opinion. The Germans went ahead nevertheless. On 5 May 1942 Reinhard Heydrich came to Paris to install Carl Oberg as Higher SS and Police Leader in France. According to French researchers, it was during this visit, at a meeting attended by the head of the Paris Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, Theodor Dannecker, and by Ambassador Otto Abetz, that the final text of the ordinance was settled. Dannecker was already ordering the cloth and the printing blocks for the stars.

Belgium: the mayors refuse

In Belgium the ordinance was issued by the military administration of General Alexander von Falkenhausen, which since 1940 had governed Belgium and two departments of northern France. It crowned a long series of measures. From October 1940 Jews had had to register with their municipalities, and their identity cards were stamped “Juif–Jood”. They were barred from many professions, thousands of Jewish businesses were liquidated or taken over, and in the autumn of 1941 the compulsory Association of Jews in Belgium was set up, the Belgian counterpart of the Judenrat. Some people remembered how in April 1941 Flemish collaborators had staged a pogrom in Antwerp. According to the most common estimates there were between 65,000 and 75,000 Jews in Belgium in 1940. Most of them were recent immigrants from Germany and Eastern Europe; only a small proportion held Belgian citizenship.

The Belgian star was the size of a palm, made of yellow cloth, with a black letter “J” in the centre. The letter stood both for the French word “Juif” and for the Dutch “Jood”. It had to be worn visibly on the left side of the breast. The Germans wanted the municipalities to distribute the stars. At the beginning of June the nineteen mayors of the Brussels conurbation met to discuss the matter, and on 5 June they sent the occupation authorities a letter refusing to take part: “You cannot ask us to co-operate in carrying it out. Many Jews are Belgians, and we cannot agree to take part in a regulation that strikes so directly at the dignity of every human being, whoever he may be.” The authorities in Liège did likewise. The Germans then compelled the Association of Jews in Belgium to distribute the stars, and Jews bought them at three for 75 centimes.

Historians at the Kazerne Dossin museum in Mechelen, through which transports to Auschwitz passed in the following years, write that the star shocked the non-Jewish population, which until then had been fairly indifferent to the fate of the Jews. The underground press protested, and one member of the board of the Jewish association wrote that the Belgians had behaved “magnificently”: they pretended not to see anything and were particularly courteous to those wearing the badge. The refusal of the mayors of Brussels and Liège gave many families a few precious weeks to prepare hiding places.

France: the eighth ordinance

In France the ordinance was signed by the German military commander, General Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. It forbade Jews aged six and over to appear in public without the star. This was a six-pointed star the size of a palm, made of yellow cloth and outlined in black, bearing the word “Juif” in black, which had to be worn “clearly visible, on the left side of the breast, firmly sewn onto the clothing”. Jews who were citizens of neutral states, of Germany’s allies and of certain enemy states were exempted, to avoid reprisals against Germans abroad, as were some people living in mixed marriages. Individual exemptions could be granted by Oberg.

The stars were handed out by the French police at local police stations, three per person, in exchange for one coupon from the clothing ration card. The ordinance applied only to the occupied zone. The Vichy government, headed again since April by Pierre Laval, pursued its own anti-Jewish policy, and its Commissariat for Jewish Affairs issued its own laws. It did not, however, introduce the star in the free zone, and it was not introduced there even after the Germans and Italians occupied that zone in November 1942. Philippe Pétain, in a letter of 12 June, did not protest against the ordinance itself but asked for exemptions to be possible for “certain French families”. Among those on the German list of exemptions was the wife of Vichy’s representative in Paris, Fernand de Brinon.

The reaction of some Parisians took the occupiers by surprise. In the first days after 7 June students and young people of non-Jewish origin appeared in the streets wearing stars on which, instead of “Juif”, they had written “Swing”, “Zazou” or other words, and some wore yellow handkerchiefs and flowers. The police detained several such people as early as 7 June. Some of these “friends of the Jews”, as the reports called them, were held for several months in the camp at Drancy. The president of the Protestant Federation of France, Pastor Marc Boegner, wrote to Pétain of the “painful impression” the new regulations had made in his Church. In the university church of the Sorbonne, Canon Jean Rupp, with the consent of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, called the star a measure “incomprehensible to the French soul”. Not all Jews came forward to collect their stars. Some, like the poet Max Jacob or the physician Robert Debré, never wore it at all. Failing to wear the star or covering it up could, however, lead to arrest and deportation, and for the next two years the French and German police hunted such people down in the streets and on the Métro.

Place in the war

The star was not an end in itself. The first transport of Jews from France had left for Auschwitz as early as 27 March 1942, and in June Eichmann agreed a plan for mass deportations with his offices in the West. On 16 and 17 July 1942, in the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, the French police arrested some 13,000 Jews in Paris, among them more than 4,000 children. In the Netherlands trains to Auschwitz began to leave in July, and in Belgium on 4 August 1942, from the Dossin barracks in Mechelen. People who had been marked were easier to find and at the same time cut off from the rest of society.

The same star that was meant to arouse hostility often aroused sympathy in Belgium and France. Its introduction showed many people who had until then been indifferent what the occupier’s policy really meant, and it contributed to the growth of networks of help. In 1942 the underground Jewish Defence Committee was founded in Belgium, and by the liberation it had hidden thousands of children and adults. In the end some 25,000 Jews were deported from Belgium, some 76,000 from France and more than 100,000 from the Netherlands. The outcome differed greatly between these countries: in the Netherlands the overwhelming majority of Jews perished, while in France and Belgium most survived, largely because they managed to go into hiding in time.

On the same day that the star ordinance was issued in Brussels, Czechoslovak parachutists attacked Heydrich in Prague – the man who three weeks earlier, during his visit to Paris, had discussed the question of the star with his subordinates among other matters.