Occurring during World War II, Jews arrested during the roundup were deported to Nazi Germany and targeted for extermination as part of the Holocaust.

It was one of several measures aimed at eradicating French Jews in both the area of France under direct German occupation and the so-called "zone libre" that took place in 1942 as part of Opération Vent printanier (Operation Spring Wind).

Planned by René Bousquet, Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Theodor Dannecker and Helmut Knochen, the roundup was the largest deportation of Jews from France.

[2] They were confined in the Vélodrome d'Hiver, an indoor sports arena, in extremely crowded conditions without any arrangements made for food, water or sanitary facilities.

In the view of President Charles de Gaulle's administration and the successive French governments, France could not be held accountable for the roundup since the Vichy state was "both illegal and illegitimate".

Only in 1995, in contrast with the silence of his predecessors, did President Jacques Chirac apologise for the role of French police and civil servants in the roundup, calling it "the darkest hours that will forever tarnish our history".

[5] The Vel d'Hiv was also the site of political rallies and demonstrations, including a large event attended by Xavier Vallat, Philippe Henriot, Leon Daudet and other notable antisemites when Charles Maurras was released from prison.

The first anti-Jewish ordinance of 27 September 1940, promulgated by the German authorities, forced Jewish people in the Occupied Zone, including foreigners, to register at police stations or at sous-préfectures ("sub-prefectures").

At the request of the German authorities, the Vichy government created in March 1941 the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives or CGQJ (Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs) with the task of implementing antisemitic policies.

[9] On 4 July 1942 René Bousquet, secretary-general of the national police, and Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, who had replaced Xavier Vallat in May 1942 as head of the CGQJ, travelled to Gestapo headquarters at 93 rue Lauriston in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to meet Dannecker and Helmut Knochen of the SS.

Another meeting took place the same day at the CGQJ, attended by Dannecker, Heinz Röthke, Ernst Heinrichsohn, Jean Leguay, Gallien, deputy to Darquier de Pellepoix, several police officials and representatives of the French railway service, the SNCF.

"[11] The roundup was aimed at Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and the apatrides ("stateless"), whose origin couldn't be determined, aged from 16 to 50.

[13] On 2 July 1942, René Bousquet attended a planning meeting in which he raised no objection to the arrests, and worried only about the gênant ("embarrassing") fact that the French police would carry them out.

[12] Although the police have been blamed for rounding up children younger than 16—the age was set to preserve a fiction that workers were needed in the east—the order to do so was given by Vichy's Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, supposedly as a "humanitarian" measure to keep families together.

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.

[14] In 1990, charges of crimes against humanity were laid against Bousquet in relation to his role in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup of Jews, based on complaints filed by Klarsfeld.

[14]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."

The Police force included gendarmes, gardes mobiles, detectives, patrolmen and cadets; they were divided into arresting teams of three or four men each, fanning across the city.

A few hundred followers of Jacques Doriot volunteered to help, wearing armband with the colours of the fascist French Popular Party (PPF).

An unknown number of people managed to escape, warned by a clandestine Jewish newspaper or the French Resistance, hidden by neighbors or benefiting from the lack of zeal or thoroughness of some policemen.

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.

At the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, 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"[14]—who used it to house not Jews, but those it considered collaborators with the Germans.

Lawyers for the International Federation of Human Rights spoke of a "political decision at the highest levels to prevent the Bousquet affair from developing".

Jacques Doriot, whose French right-wing followers helped in the round-up, fled to the Sigmaringen enclave in Germany and became a member of the exile Vichy government there.

Vichy was an accidental regime that existed only because of the enemy occupation.On 16 July 1995, the newly elected Gaullist President, Jacques Chirac, reversed that position, stating that it was time that France faced up to its past.

Il y a cinquante-trois ans, le 16 juillet 1942, 450 policiers et gendarmes français, sous l'autorité de leurs chefs, répondaient aux exigences des nazis.

[36] The earlier claim that the Government of France during World War II was some illegitimate group was again advanced by Marine Le Pen, leader of the National Front Party, during the 2017 election campaign.

The words on the Mitterrand-era monument still differentiate between the French Republic and the Vichy Government that ruled during WW II, so they do not accept State responsibility for the roundup of the Jews.

The ceremony was led by Jean-Marie Bockel, Secretary of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and was attended by Simone Veil, a deportee and former minister, anti-Nazi activist Beate Klarsfeld, and numerous dignitaries.

The ground floor also shows a changing exhibit of prisoner faces and names, as a memorial to their imprisonment and then murder by the Germans, assisted by the French gendarmerie.