The Holocaust in France
In 1940, 340,000 Jews, about one half French citizens and one-half refugees from Nazi Germany, were living in continental France.
As in other German-occupied and aligned states, the Nazis in France relied to a considerable extent on the co-operation of local authorities to carry out what they called the Final Solution.
[7] The armistice of 22 June 1940, signed between the Third Reich and the government of Marshal Philippe Pétain, did not contain any overtly anti-Jewish clauses, but it did indicate that the Germans intended the racial order existent in Germany since 1935 to spread to Metropolitan France and its overseas territories: Under the terms of the armistice, only part of Metropolitan France was occupied by Germany.
[10] Article 9 of the law stated that it applied to France's possessions of French Algeria, the colonies, the Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, and mandates territories.
while the law of 4 October 1940 provided authority for the incarceration of foreign Jews in internment camps in southern France such as Gurs.
The nine trains carrying the deported Jews crossed over into France "without any warning to the French authorities", who were not happy with receiving them.
[13] The German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop treated the ensuing complaints by the Vichy government over the expulsions in a "most dilatory fashion".
[13] As a result, the Jews expelled in Operation Bürckel were interned in harsh conditions by the Vichy authorities at the camps in Gurs, Rivesaltes and Les Milles while awaiting a chance to return them to Germany.
Because the yellow star-of-David badge was not made compulsory in the unoccupied zone, these records would provide the basis for the future round-ups and deportations.
The second round-up, between 20 July and 1 August 1941, led to the arrest of 4,232 French and foreign Jews who were taken to Drancy internment camp.
[19] Women and children were also targeted, for instance during the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup on 16–17 July 1942, in which 13,000 Jews were arrested by the French police.
On 13 August the Nimes Committee of humanitarian organizations in Vichy sent a telegram to the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York City stating: "3,600 Jews from internment camps sent eastward, exact destination unknown....Mass arrests made in hotels Bompard and Levante, Marseilles.
[25] In late summer 1942, Adam Rayski, the editor of the Communist underground newspaper J'accuse, came into contact with a former soldier in the Spanish Republican Army who had fled to France in 1939.
[26] The soldier had in turn been deported from the Gurs internment camp to work as a slave laborer on a project run by the Organisation Todt in Poland before escaping back to France.
[26] The soldier told Rayski that he learned during his time in Poland that there was a camp located in Silesia named Auschwitz where all of the Jews been sent for "resettlement in the East" were being exterminated.
However, the Milice, a French paramilitary force inspired by Nazi ideology, was heavily involved in rounding up Jews for deportation during this period.
The last, from the camp at Drancy, left the Gare de Bobigny on 31 July 1944, just one month before the Liberation of Paris.
The claim was much more recently reiterated during the 2017 presidential election campaign by Marine Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front Party.
[32] The first book dedicated entirely to the subject was Vichy France and the Jews (1981), which was co-written by Paxton and the Canadian historian Michael Marrus.
[30] Those responsible for the roundup, according to Chirac, were "4,500 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders [who] obeyed the demands of the Nazis.
"[33] Chirac commented in his speech about the Velodrome d'Hiver roundup: "[T]hose black hours soiled our history forever.
