The Vel d’Hiv round-up of 16 and 17 July 1942 was the largest single arrest of Jews carried out in France during the German occupation. It was planned and executed by French police on French government orders, with German operational coordination but with French manpower. Over 13,000 Jews, including 4,051 children, were arrested in Paris and the surrounding suburbs over the two days. They were held first at the Vélodrome d’Hiver indoor cycling stadium and at the Drancy transit camp, then deported to Auschwitz. Almost none of those deported returned. The operation has been the central reference point in French Holocaust memory since the late 1980s.
The plan
The operation was given the codename Opération Vent printanier (Spring Breeze) by the German occupation authorities. The plan was settled at meetings between the German Sicherheitspolizei in Paris (under SS-Hauptsturmführer Theodor Dannecker, an Eichmann subordinate) and the French police authorities in late June and early July 1942. The original German request was for the arrest of 28,000 foreign and stateless Jews living in greater Paris. The French police, under the Secretary General to the Police René Bousquet and the Préfet de Police of Paris Émile Hennequin, agreed to carry out the operation using French manpower. The French government’s calculation was that conducting the operation themselves preserved French sovereignty and protected, for the moment, the French citizen Jews. The German calculation was that French manpower made the operation possible at all.
The list of those to be arrested was prepared from the central Jewish file maintained by the Préfecture de Police, the so-called fichier Tulard, named after the police archivist André Tulard who had compiled it from the registration of Jews required by the German occupation order of October 1940. The file held the names, addresses and family compositions of around 150,000 Jews resident in greater Paris, by nationality and immigration status.
The round-up
The operation began at 4 a.m. on Thursday 16 July 1942. Around 9,000 French policemen, gendarmes and auxiliaries fanned out through the working-class Jewish neighbourhoods of the Marais, Belleville, the 11th arrondissement, the 18th arrondissement and the immediate suburbs. Over the following thirty-six hours they made 13,152 arrests. The numbers fell short of the German target because of widespread warnings: many Jews, alerted by sympathetic neighbours, by the French communist underground, or by leaks from inside the police itself, had gone into hiding the previous evening. The historians’ estimate is that perhaps half of those listed for arrest escaped.
Of those arrested, 8,160 had families with children and were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycle-racing stadium near the Eiffel Tower in the 15th arrondissement. The stadium had no toilet facilities adequate for the numbers held, no sufficient food or water, and no medical staff. Conditions over the five days the families were detained there became, by every account, intolerable. The 4,992 single adults and childless couples were taken directly to Drancy.
The families at the Vel d’Hiv were transferred to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret over 19 to 22 July. The German plan had been to deport adults only and to leave children in French institutional care. Bousquet objected, on French initiative: he insisted that the children be deported with their parents. The German authorities accepted. Between 31 July and 25 September 1942, the Jews held at Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande and Drancy were sent on transports from Bourget-Drancy station to Auschwitz. Of the 13,152 arrested in the round-up, around 100 survived the war.
The 1995 Chirac speech
The role of the French state in the Vel d’Hiv round-up was officially denied for half a century. The post-war Gaullist position was that the wartime French state at Vichy had been an illegitimate German puppet and that the Republic had no responsibility for what it had done. President François Mitterrand, who had himself worked for the Vichy government in 1942 and 1943, maintained this position throughout his presidency and refused to apologise for the round-up.
The position was revised by President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995, the fifty-third anniversary of the round-up, at the inauguration of the memorial on the site of the demolished Vélodrome d’Hiver. Chirac, the first French president to do so, explicitly acknowledged French state responsibility for the operation: “France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and of human rights, France, the land of welcome and of asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Failing in its word, it delivered those it was protecting to their executioners.” The Chirac speech is now treated as the moment at which French national memory of the Vichy years was officially reset.
Subsequent French presidents have reaffirmed the Chirac position. The Vélodrome d’Hiver was demolished in 1959. The current memorial, by the sculptor Walter Spitzer (himself a survivor of Auschwitz), was unveiled in 1994. Around the corner stands the Mémorial de la Shoah, the Paris Holocaust museum, opened in 2005, which holds the documentary archive of French wartime Jewish life and death.
Sources
- Maurice Rajsfus, La rafle du Vel d’Hiv, Que Sais-Je?, Presses Universitaires de France, 2002
- Serge Klarsfeld, Vichy-Auschwitz: Le rôle de Vichy dans la solution finale de la question juive en France, Fayard, 1983 and 1985 (the foundational documentary history)
- Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Basic Books, 1981
- Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II, Brandeis University Press, 2001
- Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944, Harvard University Press, 1991
- Jacques Chirac, speech at the Vél d’Hiv memorial, 16 July 1995, in Discours et messages de M. Jacques Chirac, Président de la République, La Documentation française
- Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, archives and oral histories, https://www.memorialdelashoah.org
- USHMM, “The Vel d’Hiv Round-Up”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org