Drancy internment camp was an assembly and detention camp for confining Jews who were later deported to the extermination camps during the German occupation of France during World War II. Originally conceived and built as a modernist urban community under the name La Cité de la Muette, it was located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, France.
The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of foreign Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children.
Jean Leguay was the second-in-command of 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 murders of thousands of people, both adults and children.
René Bousquet was a high-ranking French political appointee who served as secretary general to the Vichy French police from May 1942 to 31 December 1943. For personal heroism, he had become a protégé of prominent officials before the war and had risen rapidly in the government.
André Tulard (1899–1967) was a French civil administrator and police inspector. He is known for having created the fichier juif, a census of Jews in Vichy France. Tulard was head of the Service of Foreigners and Jewish Affairs at the Prefecture of Police of Paris.
The Marseille roundup was the systematic deportation of the Jews of Marseille in the Old Port between 22 and 24 January 1943 under the Vichy regime during the German occupation of France. Assisted by the French police, directed by René Bousquet, the Germans organized a raid to arrest Jews. The police checked the identity documents of 40,000 people, and the operation sent 2,000 Jews first to Fréjus, then to the camp of Royallieu near Compiègne, in the Northern Zone of France, and then to Drancy internment camp, last stop before the extermination camps. The operation also encompassed the expulsion of an entire neighborhood before its destruction. Located in the Old Port, the 1st arrondissement was considered by the Germans to be a "terrorist nest" because of its small, windy and curvy streets For this occasion, SS leader Carl Oberg, in charge of the German Police in France, made the trip from Paris, and transmitted to Bousquet orders directly received from Himmler. It is a notable case of the French police's collaboration with the German occupiers.
Numerous internment camps and concentration camps were located in France before, during and after World War II. Beside the camps created during World War I to intern German, Austrian and Ottoman civilian prisoners, the Third Republic (1871–1940) opened various internment camps for the Spanish refugees fleeing the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Following the prohibition of the French Communist Party (PCF) by the government of Édouard Daladier, they were used to detain communist political prisoners. The Third Republic also interned German anti-Nazis.
Beaune-la-Rolande is a commune in the Loiret department in north-central France.
Vichy France, officially the French State, was the French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II. It was named after its seat of government, the city of Vichy. Officially independent, but with half of its territory occupied under the harsh terms of the 1940 armistice with Nazi Germany, it adopted a policy of collaboration. Though Paris was nominally its capital, the government established itself in the resort town of Vichy in the unoccupied "free zone", where it remained responsible for the civil administration of France as well as its colonies. The occupation of France by Nazi Germany at first affected only the northern and western portions of the country, but in November 1942 the Germans and Italians occupied the remainder of Metropolitan France, ending any pretence of independence by the Vichy government.
The Round Up is a 2010 French historical war drama film written and directed by Roselyne Bosch and produced by Alain Goldman. The film stars Mélanie Laurent, Jean Reno, Sylvie Testud and Gad Elmaleh. Based on the true story of a young Jewish boy, the film depicts the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, the mass arrest of Jews by French police who were accomplices of Nazi Germans in Paris in July 1942.
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 deportation started in 1942 and lasted until July 1944. Of the 340,000 Jews living in metropolitan/continental France in 1940, more than 75,000 were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were murdered.
Pithiviers internment camp during the Holocaust was a transit camp for Jewish deportees in Pithiviers in Occupied France during the Second World War. Children were separated there from their parents; the adults were processed and deported to concentration camps farther away, usually Auschwitz. This was the fate for example of the novelist Irène Némirovsky.
Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp was an internment and transit camp for foreign-born Jews, located in Beaune-la-Rolande in occupied France, it was operational between May 1941 and July 1943, during World War II.
Led by Philippe Pétain, the Vichy regime that replaced the French Third Republic in 1940 chose the path of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. This policy included the Bousquet-Oberg accords of July 1942 that formalized the collaboration of the French police with the German police. This collaboration was manifested in particular by anti-Semitic measures taken by the Vichy government, and by its active participation in the genocide.
Maurice Rajsfus was a French writer, journalist, historian and anti-establishment militant. He was the author of numerous books addressing themes such as the Jewish genocide in France, the police, and attacks on civil liberties.
The green ticket roundup, also known as the green card roundup, took place on 14 May 1941 during the Nazi occupation of France. The mass arrest started a day after French Police delivered a green card to 6694 foreign Jews living in Paris, instructing them to report for a "status check".
The Study Mission on the Spoliation of Jews in France, also known as the Mission Mattéoli, was set up in March 1997 by Alain Juppé, then Prime Minister, and chaired by Jean Mattéoli.
A roundup is a police operation of interpellation and arrest of people taken at random from a public place, or targeting a particular population by ethnicity, appearance, or other perceived membership in a targeted group. To ensure operational success, organizers rely on the element of surprise in order to reduce the risk of evasion as much as possible. When the operation involves large numbers of individuals not targeted for any perceived group membership, it may be called a mass arrest.
Annette Muller was a French writer and Holocaust survivor. She was an escapee of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup. Her autobiography, La petite fille du Vel' d'Hiv, published in 1991, gives rare accounts of the roundup and the destiny of her fellow prisoners.
Vichy syndrome is a term used to describe the guilt, denial and shame of French people regarding the actions of Vichy France. It was coined by historian Henry Rousso in his book The Vichy Syndrome (1987), wherein Vichy and the state collaboration of France remains a "past that doesn't pass away". Historiographical debates are still passionate and oppose different views on the nature and legitimacy of Vichy's collaborationism with Germany in the implementation of the Holocaust.
