Vel' d'Hiv Roundup

The Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv (the "roundup" or "rave" of the Vel' d'Hiv, from the French abbreviation for Vélodrome d'hiver, or winter velodrome) is the name of the July 16, 1942 raid - Operation Spring Breeze - during the occupation of France by the Germans. The roundup, in Paris, was one of several aimed at reducing the Jewish population. The victims were sent to a concentration camp and then to Auschwitz. Few of the transported Jews survived. French president Jacques Chirac apologised in 1995 for the role of French policemen and civil servants in the roundup.

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The vélodrome

The Vélodrome d'Hiver was an indoor cycle track (or velodrome) at the corner of the boulevard de Grenelle and the rue Nélaton, close to the Eiffel Tower in Paris. It was built by Henri Desgrange, editor of L'Auto and later organiser of the Tour de France, when his original track in the nearby Salle des Machines was listed for demolition in 1909 to improve the view of the Eiffel Tower. As well as track cycling, the new building was used for ice hockey, wrestling, boxing, roller-skating, circuses, spectacles and demonstrations.

Planning the roundup

The roundup, which was part of a continent-wide plan to intern and kill Europe's Jewish population, was a joint operation between the Germans and French administrators (see below for clarification).

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Until the German Occupation of France in 1940, no roundup would have been possible because no census listing religions had been held in France since 1874. A German ordinance on 21 September 1940, however, forced Jewish people of the occupied zone to declare themselves at a police station or sub-prefectures (sous-préfectures). Nearly 150,000 registered in the department of the Seine, encompassing Paris and its immediate suburbs. The names and addresses were kept by French police in a file that came to be known by the name of its founder, André Tulard, head of "Jewish Questions" at the préfecture.

Theodor Dannecker, the SS captain who commanded the German police in France, said: "This filing system subdivided it into files alphabetically classed, Jewish with French nationality and foreign Jewish having files of different colours, and the files were also classed, according to profession, nationality and street." These files were then handed to section IV J of the Gestapo, in charge of the "Jewish problem."

The Vel' d'Hiv roundup wasn't the first. Nearly 4,000 Jewish men were arrested on 10 May 1941 and taken to Gare d'Austerlitz and then to camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-La-Rolande. Women and families followed in July 1942.

What became known as the Vel' d'Hiv roundup was to be bigger than that. To plan it, René Bousquet, secretary-general of the national police, and Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, head of the "Jewish Question", travelled on 4 July 1942 to Gestapo headquarters to meet Dannecker and Helmut Knochen of the SS. A further meeting took place in Dannecker's office in the avenue Foch on July 7. Also present were Jean Leguay, Bousquet's deputy, a man called François who was director of the general police, Émile Hennequin, the 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 the Jewish Question (CGQJ) attended by Dannecker, Röthke, Ernst Heinrichsohn, Jean Leguay, Gallien, deputy to Darquier de Pellepoix (head of the CGQJ), several police officials and representatives of the French railway service, the SNCF. The roundup was delayed because the Germans wanted to avoid holding it before July 14. The national holiday was not celebrated in the occupied zone but there was a wish to avoid civil uprisings.

Dannecker declared: "The French police, apart from [malgré] a few considerations of pure form, have only to carry out orders!"

The roundup was aimed at Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Russia and those whose origins couldn't be determined, all aged from 16 to 50. There were to be exceptions for women "in advanced state of pregnancy" or who were breast-feeding, but "to save time, the sorting will be made not at home but at the first assembly centre".

The Germans planned for the French police to arrest 22,000 Jews in Greater Paris. The Jews would then be taken to concentration camps at Drancy, Compiègne, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. André Tulard "will obtain from the head of the municipal police the files of Jews to be arrested... Children of less than 15 or 16 years will be sent to the Union Générale des Israélites de France, which will place them in foundations. The sorting of children will be done in the first assembly centres."

Police complicity

The position of the French police was complicated by the sovereignty of the Vichy government, which nominally administered France while accepting occupation of the north. Although in practice the Germans ran the north and had a strong and later total domination in the south, the formal position was that France and the Germans were separate. The position of Vichy and its leader, Philippe Pétain, was recognised throughout the war by many foreign governments including the United States.

The independence, however fictional, had to be preserved. German interference in internal policing, says the historian Julian T. Jackson, "would further erode that sovereignty which Vichy was so committed to preserving. This could only be avoided by reassuring Germany that the French would carry out the necessary measures."

On 2 July 1942 René Bousquet attended a planning meeting in which he raised no objection to the arrests and worried only about the "embarrassing [gênante]" fact that the French police would carry them out. Bousquet succeeded in a compromise that the police would round up only foreign Jews. Vichy ratified that agreement the following day.

Although the police have been blamed for rounding up children of less than 16 - the age was set to preserve a fiction that workers were needed in the east - the order, says Jackson, was given by Pétain's minister, Pierre Laval, supposedly as a "humanitarian" measure to keep families together. Jackson argues, however, that Laval's main worry was what to do with the children once their parents had been deported.

Three former SS officers testified in 1980 that Vichy officials had been enthusiastic about deportation of Jews from France. The investigator Serge Klarsfeld found minutes in German archives of meetings with senior Vichy officials and Bousquet's proposal that the roundup should cover non-French Jews throughout the country.

The historians Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper record:

"Klarsfeld also revealed the telegrams Bousquet had sent to Prefects of départements in the occupied zone, ordering them to deport not only Jewish adults but children whose deportation had not even been requested by the Nazis."

The roundup

Émile Hennequin, director of the city police, ordered on 12 July 1942 that "the operations must be effected with the maximum speed, without pointless speaking and without comment."

At 4am on 16 July 1942, 12,884 Jews were arrested: 4,051 children, 5,802 women and 3,031 men. (A total of 13,152 has also been quoted). An unknown number, warned by the French Resistance or benefiting from a lack of zeal, deliberate or accidental, of some policemen, escaped being rounded up. Conditions for the arrested were harsh: they could take with them only a bed cover, a sweater, a pair of shoes and two shirts. Most families were split up and never reunited.

After arrest, some Jews were taken by bus to a concentration camp in an incomplete block of flats in the northern suburb of Drancy. Others were taken to the Vélodrome d'hiver in the 15th arrondissement, which had already been used as a prison in a roundup in the summer of 1941.

The Vel' d'Hiv

The Vel' d'Hiv' was available for hire to whoever wanted it. Among those who had booked was Jacques Doriot, a stocky, round-faced man who led France's largest fascist party, the PPF. It was at the Vel' d'Hiv' among other venues that Doriot, with his Hitler-like salute, roused crowds to join his cause. Among those who helped in the Rafle du Vel' d'hiv were 3,400 young members of Doriot's PPF.

The Germans demanded the keys of the Vel' d'Hiv' from its owner, Jacques Goddet, who had taken over from his father Victor and from Henri Desgrange. The circumstances in which Goddet surrendered the keys remains a mystery and the episode makes only a few lines in his autobiography.

The Vel' d'Hiv' had a glass roof, which had been painted dark blue to avoid attracting bomber navigators. The glass raised the heat when combined with windows screwed shut for security. The numbers held there vary according to accounts but one established figure is 7,500 of a final figure of 13,152. They had no lavatories: of the 10 available, five were sealed because their windows offered a way out and the others were blocked. The arrested Jews were kept there with only water and food brought by Quakers, the Red Cross and a few doctors and nurses allowed to enter. There was only one water tap. Those who tried to escape were shot on the spot. Some killed themselves.

After five days, the prisoners were taken to camps at Drancy, Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers and then to extermination camps.

After the roundup

Roundups were conducted in both the northern and southern zones of France but public outrage was greatest in Paris because of the numbers involved in a concentrated area. The Vel' d'Hiv' was a landmark in the city centre. The Roman Catholic church, which had not always been quick to condemn the Germans, was among the protesters. Public reaction obliged Laval to ask the Germans on 2 September not to demand more Jews. Handing them over, he said, was not like buying items in a discount store. Laval managed to limit deportations mainly to foreign Jews and he and his defenders argued after the war that allowing the French police to conduct the roundup had been a bargain to ensure the life of Jews of French nationality.

In reality, "Vichy shed no tears over the fate of the foreign Jews in France, who were seen as a nuisance, 'dregs [déchets]' in Laval's words. Laval told an American diplomat that he was "happy" to get rid of them.

When a Protestant leader accused Laval of murdering Jews, Laval insisted they had been sent to build an agricultural colony in the East. "I talked to him about murder, he answered me with gardening."

Drancy camp

The internment camp at Drancy - which is now the subsidised housing that it was intended to be - was easily defended because it was built of tower blocks in the shape of a horseshoe. It was guarded by French gendarmes. The camp's operation was under the Gestapo's section of Jewish affairs. Theodor Dannecker, a key figure both in the roundup and in the operation of Drancy, was described by Maurice Rajsfus in his history of the camp as "a violent psychopath... It was he who ordered the internees to starve, who banned them from moving about within the camp, to smoke, to play cards etc."

Immediate control of the camp was by Heinz Röthke. It was under his direction from August 1942 to June 1943 that almost two-thirds of those deported from Drancy were sent to Auschwitz. It is to Drancy that Klaus Barbie transported Jewish children that he captured in a raid of a children's home, before deporting them to Auschwitz, where they were killed.

On liberation, the camp was run by the Resistance - "to the frustration of the authorities; the Prefect of Police had no control at all and visitors were not welcome." - which used it to house not Jews but those it considered had collaborated with the Germans. When a pastor was allowed in on September 15, he discovered cells 3½m by 1¾m that had held six Jewish internees with two mattresses between them. The prison returned to the conventional prison service on 20 September.

In December, 1941, 40 prisoners from Drancy were executed in retaliation for a French attack on German police officers.

Aftermath

The roundup accounted for more than a quarter of the 42,000 Jews sent from France to Auschwitz in 1942, of whom only 811 came home at the end of the war.

Pierre Laval's trial opened on 3 October 1945, his first defence being that he had been obliged to sacrifice foreign Jews to save the French. Uproar broke out in the court, with supposedly neutral jurors shouting abuse at Laval, threatening "a dozen bullets in his hide". It was, said the historians Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, "a cross between an auto-de-fé and a tribunal during the Paris Terror. From 6 October Laval refused to take part in the proceedings, hoping that the jurors' interventions would lead to a new trial. Laval was sentenced to death but tried to commit suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule. His stomach had to be pumped out 17 times and he was eventually shot, tied to a chair, at Fresnes on 15 October.

Jean Leguay survived the war and its aftermath and became president of Warner Lambert, Inc. from London (now merged with Pfizer), and later president of Substantia Laboratories in Paris. In 1979, he was accused in connection with the roundup but killed himself before his trial.

Louis Darquier was sentenced to death in absentia in 1947 for collaboration. However, he had fled to Spain, where the Francisco Franco regime protected him. France never asked for his extradition. He died on 29 August 1980, near Málaga, Spain.

Helmut Knochen was sentenced to death by a British Military Tribunal in 1946 for the murder of British pilots. The sentence was never carried out. He was extradited to France in 1954 and again sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. In 1962, the president, Charles de Gaulle, pardoned him and he was sent back to Germany, where he retired to Baden-Baden.

Émile Hennequin, head of Paris police, was condemned to eight years' penal labour in June 1947

René Bousquet was last to be tried, in 1949. He was acquitted of "compromising the interests of the national defence", but declared guilty of [Indignité nationale] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) for involvement in the Vichy government. He was given five years of Dégradation nationale, a measure immediately lifted for "having actively and sustainably participated in the resistance against the occupier". Bousquet's position was always ambiguous and there were times he worked with the Germans and others when he worked against. After the war he worked at the Banque d'Indochine and in newspapers.

In 1957, the Conseil d'État gave back his Legion of Honour, and he was given an amnesty on 17 January 1958, after which he stood for election that same year as a candidate for the Marne. He was supported by the Democratic and Socialist Union of the Resistance; his second was Hector Bouilly, a radical-socialist general councillor. In 1974, Bousquet helped finance François Mitterrand's presidential campaign against Valéry Giscard d'Estaing.

In 1986, as accusations cast on Bousquet grew more credible, particularly after he was named by Louis Darquier, he and Mitterrand stopped seeing each other. The parquet général de Paris closed the case by sending it to a court that no longer existed. Lawyers for the International Federation of Human Rights spoke of a "political decision at the highest levels to prevent the Bousquet affair from developing". In 1989, Serge Klarsfeld and his [association des Fils et Filles des déportés juifs de France] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help), the [National Federation of deportees and internees, Resistants and Patriots] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) and the [Ligue des droits de l'homme] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help) filed a complaint against Bousquet for Crime against humanity, for the deportation of 194 children. Bousquet was committed to trial but on 8 June 1993 a 55-year-old mental patient named Christian Didier entered his flat and shot him dead.

Theodor Dannecker was interned by the United States Army in December 1945 and a few days later committed suicide.

Jacques Doriot, whose French right-wing followers helped in the round-up, fled to Sigmaringen, Germany, and became a member of the exile Vichy government there. He died in February 1945 when his car was strafed by Allied fighters while he was travelling from Mainau to Sigmaringen. He was buried in Mengen.

Action against the police

After the Liberation, survivors of the internment camp at Drancy began legal proceedings against gendarmes accused of being accomplices of the Nazis. An investigation began into 15 gendarmes, of whom 10 were accused at the Cour de justice de la Seine of conduct threatening the safety of the state. Three fled before the trial could start. The other seven said they were only obeying orders, despite numerous witnesses and accounts by survivors of brutality.

The court ruled on 22 March 1947, that the seven were found guilty but that most had rehabilitated themselves "by active participation, useful and sustained, offered to the Resistance against the enemy." Two others were jailed for two years and condemned to dégradation nationale for five years. A year later they were reprieved.

Apology

For decades the French government declined to apologise for the role of French policemen in the roundup or for any other state complicity. The argument rested on the legal problem that the French Republic had been declared finished when Philippe Pétain instituted a new French State during the war and that the Republic had been re-established only once the war was over. It was not for the Republic, therefore, to apologise for events that happened while it had not existed and which had been carried out by a state which it did not recognise.

On 16 July 1995, the President, Jacques Chirac, ruled it was time that France faced up to its past and he acknowledged the role that the state had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation. He said:

"These black hours will stain our history for ever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was assisted('secondée') by the French, by the French state. Fifty-three years ago, on 16 July 1942, 450 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders, obeyed the demands of the Nazis. That day, in the capital and the Paris region, nearly 10,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested at home, in the early hours of the morning, and assembled at police stations... France, home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners."

Memorials and monuments - Paris

A fire destroyed part of the Vélodrome d'Hiver in 1959 and the rest was demolished. A block of flats and a building belonging to the Ministry of the Interior now stand on the site. A plaque marking the Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv was placed on the track building and moved to 8 boulevard de Grenelle in 1959. On 3 February 1993, the President, François Mitterrand, commissioned a monument to be erected on the site.

It stands now on a curved base, to represent the cycle track, on the edge of the quai de Grenelle. It is the work of the Polish sculptor Walter Spitzer and the architect Mario Azagury. Spitzer's family were survivors of deportation to Auschwitz. The statue represents all deportees but especially those of the Vel' d'Hiv. The sculpture includes children, a pregnant woman and a sick man. The words on the monument are: "The French Republic in homage to victims of racist and antisemitic persecutions and of crimes against humanity committed under the authority of the so-called 'Government of the State of France.'"

The statue was inaugurated on 17 July 1994. A ceremony is held there every year and it was during a ceremony that Jacques Chirac, successor to François Mitterrand, made his remarks, in 1995, about the guilt of the French police and gendarmerie in collaborating with the Germans. The statue was placed on land given by the city of Paris and paid for by the Ministère des Anciens Combattants (Minister of Veterans [Am], Old Soldiers [Br]). The statue is cared for by the Defence Ministry.

Memorials and monuments - Drancy

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The memorial with, in the background, the camp buildings, now public housing

A memorial was also constructed in 1976 at Drancy, after a design competition won by Shelomo Selinger. It stands beside a rail wagon of the sort used to take prisoners to the death camps. It is three blocks forming the Hebrew letter Shin, traditionally written on the Mezuzah at the door of houses occupied by Jews. Two other blocks represent the gates of death. Shelomo Selinger said of his work: "The central block is composed of 10 figures, the number needed for collective prayer (Minyan). The two Hebrew letters Lamed and Vav are formed by the hair, the arm and the beard of two people at the top of the sculpture. These letters have the numeric 36, the number of Righteous thanks to whom the world exists according to Jewish tradition."

On 25 May 2001, the cité de la Muette - formal name of the Drancy apartment blocks - was declared a national monument by the culture minister, Catherine Tasca.

The Holocaust researcher Serge Klarsfeld said in 2004: "Drancy is the best known place for everyone of the memory of the Shoah in France; in the crypt of Yad Vashem (Jérusalem), where stones are engraved with the names of the most notorious Jewish concentration and extermination camps, Drancy is the only place of memory in France to feature."

Significance

The primary significance of the roundup was the killing of innocent people because of their religion. But there is a political and social significance because the Vel' d'Hiv' has remained a symbol of national guilt and of national outrage.

The wartime history of France differed from that of other occupied nations in that the country was socially and politically divided, until it was all finally occupied by the Germans after being divided into an occupied and non-occupied zone. The pre-war Republic disintegrated after the invasion and France looked for, and in the first-war hero Philippe Pétain found, a figurehead to give it hope.

Pétain established a government at Vichy - because it had more hotels and better telephones than elsewhere- and he nominally ran the new French State in both the occupied and unoccupied zones. France became a neutral nation in fact however flimsy that status was in practice.

As the historian Julian Jackson points out, Pétain tried to maintain the independence of France and to stop its police force, among other organs of state, from becoming auxiliaries of the Germans. But if he did not agree to what the Germans demanded, as with the Vel' d'Hiv', the Germans would either do it themselves or take away command of the police. Pétain was left in the position of having the police do whatever the Germans wanted of them as a way of preserving their own supposed independence.

The guilt comes not only through this co-operation, if not outright collaboration, but through the zeal with which parts of the police force worked with the Germans. While some policemen tipped off Jews so they could escape, others were tried - if they didn't flee first - for their brutality. French policemen ensured their neighbours stayed behind bars, ready to be taken to their death, only because they were of a different religion.

The Vel' d'Hiv' has remained a symbol of a wider disquiet, at the broadest level because of the Pétain government which France at first welcomed and then saw deteriorate into an organ of the occupation—often enthusiastically—and on a narrower level by individuals who profited from the occupation and furthered its cause or didn't raise what in retrospect seemed enough objection.

There were heroes of the Occupation and there were those who faced death through dishonour. In between were the millions who got on with their lives without the benefit of knowing how the war would turn out. It is they, examining their consciences and wondering whether they could have done more, who find the Vel' d'Hiv' a disturbing symbol of what Julian Jackson calls The Dark Years.

Bibliography

• Jean-Luc Einaudi and Maurice Rajsfus, Les silences de la police - 16 juillet 1942, 17 octobre 1961, 2001, L'Esprit frappeur, ISBN 2-84405-173-1 (Rajsfus is an historian of the French police, the second date refers to the 1961 Paris massacre under the orders of Maurice Papon, who would later be judged for his role during Vichy in Bordeaux)
• Maurice Rajsfus, Jeudi noir, Éditions L'Harmattan. Paris, 1988. ISBN 2738400396
• Maurice Rajsfus, La Rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv’, Que sais-je ?, éditions PUF

Primary sources

• Instructions given by chief of police Hennequin for the raid. Template:Fr icon

Film documentaries

• William Karel, 1992. La Rafle du Vel-d'Hiv, La Marche du siècle, France 3.

External links

• Le monument commémoratif du quai de Grenelle à Paris Template:Fr icon
• Le site de la memoire des conflits contemporains en région parisienne Template:Fr icon
• Occupied France: Commemorating the Deportation Template:En icon
• additional photographs Template:En icon
• French government booklet Template:Fr icon
• 1995 speech of President Chirac Template:Fr icon