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Since the establishment of the status of Jews, all French and foreign Jews in the occupied zone had to register at the police stations in Paris and the sub-prefectures in the provinces.
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The raid was carried out at the request of the Nazi regime as part of its policy of extermination of all Jewish populations in Europe. In July 1942, "Operation Spring Wind" was ordered, which originally called for the arrest of all Jews in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris on the same day.
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In Paris, these arrests were carried out with the collaboration of 7,000 French police and gendarmes, on the orders of the Vichy government, after negotiations with the occupier led by René Bousquet, secretary general of the national police. Following these negotiations, initiated by Pierre Laval, Jews of French nationality were excluded from this roundup, which essentially concerned foreign Jews or stateless refugees in France.
July 16, 1942
Characters
René Bousquet
Pierre Laval
Philippe Pétain
Procedure
13,152 people were apprehended by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942, including approximately 4,000 children under the age of 16 who were not initially planned to be deported. This is twice less than the quota set by the Germans and the police headquarters.
Some of the people are transported to the Drancy camp, north of Paris. Families with children are directed to the Vélodrome d'Hiver, rue Nélaton, in the 15th th arrondissement of Paris (now extinct).
More than 8,000 people, the majority of whom are children, will pile up there for several days in squalid conditions:no sleeping places, no food, no drinking water, with violent lighting day and night, amid cries and calls of loudspeakers. Only three doctors and a dozen nurses from the Red Cross are authorized to intervene.
The Vel d'Hiv families will be transferred from the Gare d'Austerlitz to the internment camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Loiret.
Consequences
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In August, the parents are separated from their children and sent to the extermination camps in Poland. The children will in turn be sent two weeks later to Auschwitz-Birkenau which, since the beginning of July, has been transformed from a forced labor camp into an extermination camp on an industrial scale.
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The roundup accentuates the collaboration between Vichy and the German occupiers in the field of the “Jewish question”. But it also leads to the beginning of a split in French opinion, which until then has been massively indifferent or wait-and-see. Gradually, some citizens switch to the Resistance, more or less active; others, conversely, become radicalized and fall into anti-Semitism and collaboration.
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It was not until July 16, 1995, that President Chirac officially recognized "that these dark hours sully our history forever, and are an insult to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state”.