The Holocaust in France

The Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe wanted to become integrated into French society, which they considered their adoptive country. Approximately one third of them received French citizenship. Most of their children attended the state-sponsored, secular, French school system. The Ort network of vocational schools initiated professional training for Jews, primarily in industry and agriculture. Most of the students in these schools were Jews who had immigrated to France from Eastern Europe. Many of the immigrants were employed in manual labor, but some of them obtained a higher education, studied...

In May 1940 France was invaded by German forces. Within a month France was defeated. An armistice was signed ​on June 22, 1940 and following it France was divided into a German occupied zone in the North, a French governed zone in the South, also known as Vichy, which collaborated with the Germans and had certain authority also in the German-occupied zone, and a small demilitarized Italian occupied zone in the Southeast.In July 1940, a special commission (commission de revision des naturialsation) was set up to review naturalizations issued after 1927. Trials to denaturalize French citizens went...

On the 14th of May, 1941, Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 40 were called to present themselves to the Paris police. They were summoned using a green postcard, for which this wave of arrests became known as the “billet vert”. More than 5,000 Paris Jews were taken into custody in this wave of arrests, almost all of them of Polish extraction. A few Jews of Czech and Austrian origin were also arrested. After their arrest, the prisoners were sent to the detention camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.“They wake them from their sleep at six o’clock in the morning, and...

When, in May 1940, the Germans invaded France, thousands of immigrants who held German citizenship or were of German descent were concentrated in the “Winter Stadium” (Vel' d’Hiv) in Paris. These immigrants were considered enemy aliens. Among those detained were thousands of Jewish men, as well as Jewish women who had no children. The detainees were deported to the Gurs concentration camp near the French-Spanish border.After the anti-Jewish legislation of October 1940, the Vichy regime broadened its actions to arrest and detain Jews in its territory. They were incarcerated...

In May and June, 1942, Reinhard Heydrich (head of the SS Sicherheitsdienst, or SD), Fritz Sauckel (who organized the employment of forced labor for the German armament factories) and Adolf Eichmann (the SS official in charge of Jewish Policy), visited Paris. In June and July 1942 the French administration in charge of the Jewish question in France was replaced by a German one. As a result, French anti-Jewish policies were exacerbated. At dawn on the 16th of July, 1942, some 4,500 French policemen began a mass arrest of foreign Jews living in Paris, at the behest of the German authorities. Over...

The Jews in France were deported to the East at the height of a two year process of persecution and aggressive legislation. The laws passed included statutes defining who was to be considered a Jew, isolating Jews from French society, divesting them of their livelihood, incarcerating many of them, and registering their names with the police.From winter 1940-1941 French Jews began to be imprisoned in concentration camps. Thousands of Jews were imprisoned in camps in the vicinity of Paris and Southwestern France. In May 1941 many more thousands of Jews were arrested.In March 1942 some 1,000 Jews...