Vel' d'Hiv Roundup

The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup ( ; from french: Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv', an abbreviation of ) was a mass arrest of foreign Jewish families by French police and gendarmes at the behest of the German authorities, that took place in Paris on 16 and 17 July 1942. According to records of the'' Préfecture de Police'', 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children.

They were held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver ( 'Winter Stadium'; known as "Vel’ d’Hiv") in extremely crowded conditions, almost without food and water and with no sanitary facilities. In the week following the arrests, the Jews were taken to the Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps, before being shipped in rail cattle cars to Auschwitz for their mass murder.

The roundup was one of several aimed at eradicating the Jewish population in France, both in the occupied zone and in the free zone. French President Jacques Chirac apologized in 1995 for the complicit role that French police and civil servants played in the raid. In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron more specifically admitted the responsibility of the French State in the roundup and, hence, in the Holocaust.

The Vélodrome d'Hiver

The Vélodrome d'Hiver was a large indoor sports arena at the corner of the and in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, not far from the Eiffel Tower. It was built by Henri Desgrange, editor of L'Auto, who later organised the Tour de France, as a velodrome (cycle track) when his original track in the nearby ''Salle des Machines'' was listed for demolition in 1909 to improve the view of the Eiffel Tower. As well as track cycling, the new building was used for ice hockey, wrestling, boxing, roller-skating, circuses, spectacles and demonstrations. In the 1924 Summer Olympics, several events were held there, including foil fencing, boxing, cycling (track), weightlifting, and wrestling.

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. In 1939 Jewish refugees were interned there before being sent to camps in the Paris region and in 1940 it was used as a internment center for foreign women, an event that served as a precedent for its selection as internment location.

Precursors

The "Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup" was not the first roundup of this sort in France during World War II. In what is known as the green ticket roundup (french: rafle du billet vert), 3,747 Jewish men were arrested on 14 May 1941, after 6,694 foreign Jews living in France received a summons in the mail (delivered on a green ticket) to a status review (french: examen de situation). The summons was a trap: those who honoured their summons were arrested and taken by bus the same day to the Gare d'Austerlitz, then shipped in four special trains to two camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-La-Rolande in the Loiret department. Women, children, and more men followed in July 1942.

Planning the roundup

The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup, was part of the "Final Solution", a continent-wide plan to intern and exterminate Europe's Jewish population, it was a joint operation between German and collaborating French administrators.

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"). Nearly 150,000 people registered in the department of the Seine that encompasses Paris and its immediate suburbs. Their names and addresses were kept by the French police in the fichier Tulard, a file named after its creator, André Tulard. Theodor Dannecker, the SS captain who headed the German police in France, said: "This filing system subdivided into files sorted alphabetically; Jews with French nationality and foreign Jews had files of different colors, and the files were also sorted, according to profession, nationality and street." These files were then given to the Gestapo, in charge of the "Jewish problem." 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 policy.

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. The previous roundups had come short of the 32,000 jews promised by the French authorities to the Germans. Darquier proposed the arrest of stateless Jews in the Southern Zone and the denaturalization of all Jews who acquired French citizenship from 1927. A further meeting took place in Dannecker's office on the avenue Foch on 7 July. Also present were Jean Leguay, Bousquet's deputy, Jean François, who was director of the police administration at the Paris prefecture, Émile Hennequin, head of Paris police, and André Tulard.

Dannecker met Adolf Eichmann

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