The Vel d'Hiv round-up

At four in the morning on Thursday 16 July 1942, thousands of French policemen and gendarmes, divided into teams of a few men each, fanned out across Paris and its suburbs with index cards in their hands. They knocked on the doors of Jews whose names and addresses the police had gathered two years earlier, and took away whole families. By the evening of 17 July, according to the report of the Prefecture of Police, they had detained 13,152 people. About half of them, families with children, were locked up for several days in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycling track in the 15th arrondissement, a few hundred metres from the Eiffel Tower. From the velodrome’s shortened name the operation went down in history as the Vel d’Hiv round-up (French: rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv). It was the largest single round-up of Jews in France during the war. Almost none of those detained survived.

It is often said that the Jews were arrested “on the orders of the Vichy government, headed by Pierre Laval”. That is a simplification. The demand came from the Germans, who were preparing the deportation of the Jews of the whole of Western Europe. The Vichy government, however, was not forced into anything: after negotiations it agreed that the arrests would be carried out by the French police alone, itself specified whom they were to cover, and added to the German plans the children, whom the Germans had not asked for at all. Responsibility for the round-up is thus shared by the occupier and the French State.

The road to July 1942

Vichy’s anti-Jewish policy began long before the round-up and was not dictated from Berlin. As early as October 1940 Pétain’s government issued the Statute on Jews, which expelled them from the civil service, the army, the press and many professions, and allowed prefects to intern foreign Jews in camps. In March 1941 the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs was set up to handle the “Aryanisation” of Jewish property. In the occupied zone the Germans had ordered Jews to register with the police as early as September 1940. In the Seine department almost 150,000 people came forward, and a prefecture official, André Tulard, compiled from their data a huge card index, arranged by nationality, occupation and address. It was this index that was to show the police which doors to knock on.

The first round-ups took place in 1941. On 14 May the French police detained 3,747 foreign Jews who had answered a summons to have their “situation checked”, and sent them to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret department. In August it was the turn of the 11th arrondissement of Paris, and those detained were held in a new camp at Drancy, outside Paris. In December several hundred well-to-do Jews of French nationality were arrested. The first train carrying Jews from France left for Auschwitz on 27 March 1942.

After the Wannsee Conference, Adolf Eichmann’s department in the Reich Security Main Office prepared mass deportations from the West. In the spring of 1942 the Germans reorganised police authority in France: in May Reinhard Heydrich came to Paris to install Carl Oberg as Higher SS and Police Leader (a few weeks later Heydrich died as a result of the assassination attempt in Prague), and at the end of May Jews in the occupied zone were ordered to wear the Star of David. At a conference in Berlin in June 1942 it was decided that in the first stage some 100,000 Jews fit for work, aged 16 to 50, were to be deported from France. The operation, conducted in parallel in the Netherlands and Belgium, was code-named “Spring Wind” (Frühlingswind, Vent printanier). In Paris it was directed by the head of the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs department, SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, who answered to the commander of the Security Police, Helmut Knochen.

Bargaining in Paris and Vichy

The Germans did not have enough men in France to carry out such large-scale arrests themselves. They needed the French police, and the Vichy government – in which, since April 1942, Pierre Laval had been head of government and minister of the interior – wanted to keep control over it and at least the appearance of sovereignty. The talks were conducted by the secretary-general of the police, René Bousquet. At a meeting on 2 July 1942 he did not object to the arrests as such. According to German notes, the only thing he found awkward was that the French police were to carry them out in the occupied zone. A compromise was agreed: the French police would arrest foreign and stateless Jews in both zones, while Jews of French nationality would be spared for the time being. On 3 July the Council of Ministers approved the agreement. According to the minutes, Marshal Philippe Pétain considered the distinction between French and foreign Jews to be just and comprehensible to public opinion. In August the cooperation of the French and German police was formally confirmed by a declaration of Oberg’s, known as the Oberg–Bousquet agreement.

On 4 July Laval made a proposal that sealed the fate of thousands of families. As Dannecker noted two days later, the head of government proposed that when Jewish families were deported from the unoccupied zone, children under 16 should be taken too, while the fate of children in the occupied zone “did not interest him”. Laval later presented this as a “humanitarian” gesture intended to keep families together. In reality they were separated anyway; the real question was what to do with children whose parents were to be deported. The Germans had initially not wanted to deport children, because they were keeping up the fiction that the deportees were going “to work in the East”.

The details were settled at further meetings in Paris on 4, 7 and 10 July, attended by Bousquet, the new commissioner for Jewish affairs Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Bousquet’s deputy Jean Leguay, Dannecker, Knochen, senior officials of the Prefecture of Police and representatives of the railways. Dannecker gave assurances that the French police, “despite certain purely formal scruples”, would simply carry out orders. The date was moved from 13 to 16 July, so as not to hold the operation on the national holiday of 14 July. The Germans expected 22,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and the USSR, as well as stateless Jews, to be detained in the Paris area. A Prefecture of Police circular of 13 July provided for the detention of 27,427 people from the card index. According to the instructions of 12 July issued by the director of the municipal police, Émile Hennequin, officers were “not to discuss” anything with those detained, including their health, and the whole operation was to be carried out “with maximum speed, without unnecessary words and without comment”.

16 and 17 July

According to the figures most often given in the literature, some 9,000 policemen, gendarmes and police cadets were assigned to the operation. Those detained were allowed to take a blanket, a jumper, a pair of shoes and two shirts. The keys to their flats were taken from them, and the flats were later looted or allocated to other tenants. From the assembly points at police stations people were taken away in Paris municipal buses. According to older accounts several hundred volunteers from Jacques Doriot’s fascist French Popular Party helped in the round-up, but more recent research by the French historian Laurent Joly does not confirm this. Germans were practically absent from the arrests themselves.

The plan did not succeed on the scale the Germans had wanted. News of the forthcoming round-up had leaked beforehand. Underground Jewish and communist papers warned of it, and some policemen warned people or did not search for them too zealously. Many people were hidden by their neighbours. Because the earlier round-ups had mainly targeted men, many of them went into hiding, believing that women and children were in no danger. According to the Prefecture of Police report, 13,152 people were detained: 3,118 men, 5,919 women and 4,115 children. Other tabulations of the same documentation give slightly different figures, for example 4,051 children. Most of the children had been born in France and were French citizens.

Five days in the velodrome

Single adults and childless couples were taken straight to Drancy. Families with children – by various findings from about 7,500 to more than 8,000 people, including most of the children detained – were locked in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The hall had previously hosted cycle races, ice hockey matches, boxing bouts and political rallies, including Doriot’s. Its glass roof had been painted dark blue for fear of air raids, and the windows had been permanently sealed, so in the July heat it was stifling inside. No food, water or sanitation had been provided. Some of the few toilets were locked because their windows could have been used to escape, and the others were soon blocked. People lay on the concrete and in the stands, amid excrement and stench. Water and a little food were brought by the Quakers and the Red Cross, and a few doctors and nurses were let in. Several prisoners committed suicide; according to accounts, several people were shot while trying to escape; the sick and the old died.

After five days, between 19 and 22 July, the families were taken by train to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. On 19 July the first transport carrying people detained in the round-up left Drancy for Auschwitz. On 20 July Eichmann agreed to the deportation of children and the elderly together with adults fit for work.

The children

The last act was played out in the camps in the Loiret, guarded by French gendarmes. At the end of July and the beginning of August the mothers and older children were deported to Auschwitz in several transports from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. According to witnesses, the gendarmes tore children from their mothers by force. More than 3,000 small children were left in the camps, some of them only two or three years old, in the care of a few adults and volunteers from relief organisations. In the second half of August they were taken to Drancy and from there, mixed in with groups of unfamiliar adults, in sealed wagons to Auschwitz, where almost all of them were murdered in the gas chambers immediately on arrival. Some of them were deported as late as September.

Of the more than 13,000 victims of the round-up, according to French findings, fewer than a hundred adults survived the war. Of the children deported after the round-up, almost none survived. A handful were saved who managed to escape from the camps or were taken out of them before deportation.

Place in the war

The Vel d’Hiv round-up was the central part of the summer of 1942, when more Jews were deported from France than at any other time in the war. In 1942 trains from Drancy and the Loiret camps took some 42,000 people to Auschwitz, of whom 811 returned after the war. In August the Vichy government handed over to the Germans thousands of foreign Jews from the unoccupied zone. Yet the shock was evident. On 23 August the Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Géraud Saliège, had a pastoral letter read out in churches in which he wrote that Jews are human beings and belong to the human race. Other bishops and the leader of the French Protestants, Pastor Marc Boegner, protested too. Influenced by the mood of public opinion, Laval asked the Germans on 2 September not to demand further thousands of Jews, and throughout the war he sought to ensure that the deportations mainly affected foreigners. According to Serge Klarsfeld’s findings, some 76,000 Jews were deported from France during the war, of whom about 2,500 survived.

After the war Laval was sentenced to death and shot in October 1945, though not for the Vel d’Hiv but for his whole policy of collaboration. Dannecker committed suicide in American custody in December 1945. Bousquet, after a brief trial in 1949, returned to public life; charged with crimes against humanity in the early 1990s, he was shot dead by a deranged man in 1993 before he could stand trial. The velodrome was demolished in 1959. For decades the French authorities held that the Vichy state had been illegitimate and that the Republic was not responsible for its acts. Only on 16 July 1995 did President Jacques Chirac, speaking at the site of the former velodrome, say that “the criminal folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French State”, and acknowledge that France had then committed “the irreparable” by delivering those under its protection to their executioners.

A few days after the round-up in Paris, on 22 July 1942, the Germans began the great deportation operation in occupied Warsaw. As in Paris, and a few days earlier in Salonika, registrations and card indexes drawn up earlier by the occupiers and their local helpers became instruments of the Holocaust.