This week marks the 82nd anniversary of the raid on Jews in Paris, known as La rafle du Vel’d’Hiv, a crime against humanity committed in France during the German occupation. It was not German soldiers, but French civilians and police, advised by the Gestapo, who took part in the raids in Paris and the suburbs of the capital between 16 and 17 July 1942, in which they raided hundreds of homes to arrest and transport Jews to the Winter Velodrome. Around 14,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were sent from there to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, to be murdered in the gas chambers. The outrageous truth is that it was the French themselves who betrayed their Jewish neighbours, in order to ingratiate themselves with the traitorous regime of General Pétain, with the Gestapo and the Nazi troops that occupied France.
A collaborationist regime
Following the signing of the armistice promoted and signed on June 22, 1940 by General Pétain, which gave the Nazi army free rein to occupy French soil, the National Assembly, meeting at the Vichy casino, gave him control of all the powers of the State. The collaborationist regime, imitating the Nazi script, immediately began a national campaign that paid tribute to the leader’s personality, displaying his portrait in all public places and modifying school texts to extol his figure as the refounder of the country. A special effort was devoted to the formation of youth in the “moral values” of the new order. Civil liberties were immediately suspended, political parties and unions were banned.
In October 1940, exclusion laws against Freemasons and Jews were enacted, expelling French people of Jewish descent from public administration and universities, and prohibiting their right to form associations. Persecution extended to socialists, communists, journalists, intellectuals, artists and any manifestation of dissent. To give power and control to its civilian followers, the Legionary Order Service was established, a paramilitary organization that was dedicated to collaborating expressly with the Nazi occupation forces in social intelligence work, surveillance, kidnapping of dissidents, murder and repression, becoming in January 1943 the French Militia, which had 30,000 armed men, supported by the Gestapo and the Nazi army.
The Orwellian Operation “Spring Wind”
In July 1942, the Nazi regime planned and organized Operation Spring Wind, a large-scale raid against Jews throughout Europe, from Germany. In France, General Petain’s regime, advised by German officers, mobilized 9,000 policemen in Paris and the suburbs of the capital, based on information provided by the residents of each neighborhood, violently raiding thousands of homes, sowing terror in the Jewish community. The instructions of the director of the Paris municipal police, Émile Hennequin, on July 12, 1942, were implacable: “The guards and inspectors, after having verified the identity of the Jews whom they are tasked with arresting, must not discuss the claims that may be made against them, nor must they discuss their state of health or age; every Jew who is arrested must be taken to the detention center without any exception; the operations must be carried out with the utmost speed, without useless words and without any comment.”
On July 13, 1942, the police headquarters issued a circular no. 173-42 ordering the arrest of 27,427 Jews living in France. The arrest was postponed due to the national holiday of July 14, which was not celebrated in the occupied zone, as they feared a reaction from the civilian population. The operation therefore took place two days later, on the night of July 16, with surprise raids on homes. Those who tried to escape were killed on the spot. In total, 13,152 Jews were arrested: 4,115 children, 5,919 women and 3,118 men, who had to survive without food and with only one source of water, in suffocating heat and a terrible smell that invaded the track and facilities of this sports center while the transfers were being prepared. Hundreds of prisoners committed suicide when they learned of the fate that awaited them. Adult prisoners and children over the age of 12 were deported to Auschwitz on 5 August, the youngest at the end of August. During the Vichy regime, 70,000 French people were imprisoned and 10,000 death sentences were handed down by its “jurists of horror”. The regime was complicit in the genocide committed by the Nazis, as 149,000 Jews were deported from France during the occupation.
On this shameful episode, the Presidents of the Republic Charles de Gaulle and then François Mitterrand publicly adopted the position that France and the Republic should not be confused with the Vichy regime. On July 16, 1995, President Jacques Chirac broke with the position of his predecessors and acknowledged the responsibility of the French State in this roundup that contributed to the Holocaust, calling it irreparable. With the exception of Jacques Chirac, there have been decades of ambiguity by French presidents and politicians in the face of the horror experienced by the Jews in July 1942. Faced with the new anti-Jewish wave of the French Islamo-left that today relives those terrible days of hatred of Israel, we can only say two words: Forbidden to forget!
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