Louis Darquier de Pellepoix

Darquier de Pellepoix 1942

Louis Darquier , better known by his adopted name Louis Darquier de Pellepoix (born December 19, 1897 in Cahors , † August 29, 1980 in Málaga , Spain ) was a French journalist, politician and administrative officer who represented a militant anti-Semitism . Under the Vichy regime he was chairman of the General Commissioner for Jewish Affairs .

Life

Pre-war period

Louis Darquier came from a distinguished family in Cahors. His father Pierre Darquier was a doctor and as a member of the left-wing Parti radical from 1907 to 1919 mayor of Cahors.

At the beginning of the First World War he volunteered, but contrary to his wishes, he was unable to pursue a military career and was dismissed from service in 1919. After working in the grain trade for a few years through his father's mediation, he was fired for embezzling company funds and lived as a bohemian for several years . During this time he added the de Pellepoix title to his name and claimed to be a descendant of the astronomer Antoine Darquier de Pellepoix . He emigrated to Great Britain , where he married an Australian actress.

At the beginning of the 1930s he returned to France and joined the Action française . He was wounded in the anti-parliamentary riots organized by right-wing extremist circles in Paris on February 6, 1934. After the victory of the Popular Front in the 1936 elections, he founded his own anti-Semitic party and a newspaper called La France enchaînée (“The Chained France”), in which he spoke to Adolf Hitler after the Reichskristallnacht with the words Bravo Fritz! congratulated. During a session in 1937 he called for the " Jewish question to be resolved with the greatest urgency, either through expulsion or massacre." In 1939 he was sentenced to three months in prison for inciting racial hatred in his newspaper.

Second World War

After the campaign in the West he was a French soldier and a prisoner of war in June 1940 and was released from captivity by the Germans two months later. In May 1942 he became chairman of the Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives as the successor to Xavier Vallat , who was deemed too moderate by the German authorities. On July 15, 1942, he took part in the final preparations for the mass arrest and subsequent deportation in the Vélodrome d'Hiver . On February 1, 1943, in an article he signed in Le Petit Parisien , he demanded the introduction of the Jewish star in the unoccupied zone, the exclusion of Jews from the public service and the revocation of French citizenship for those Jews who lived after 1927 had been naturalized. In February 1944, at the instigation of the Germans, he was replaced by Charles du Paty de Clam from his provisional functions.

post war period

After the liberation of France , he fled to French-speaking Spain, where he led a quiet existence as a French teacher and translator, after being sentenced to death in absentia for collaboration and the confiscation of his property in France in 1947 . On October 28, 1978, the newspaper L'Express published an interview with him under the quote: Only lice were gassed in Auschwitz . He denied any responsibility for the events in the Vélodrome d'Hiver and passed this on to the Secretary General of the Police of the Vichy regime, René Bousquet . The publication of this newspaper interview was followed by an extradition request from France to Spain, which, however, was not granted. Darquier died in Spain on August 29, 1980.

His daughter Anne Darquier (* 1930 in London) was abandoned by her parents as a toddler. She lived in England, became a psychiatrist and died in 1970 of an overdose of alcohol and barbiturates .

literature

• Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews , Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1998, 3 volumes, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 . (Entry: Darquier de Pellepoix, Louis)
• Serge Klarsfeld , Ahlrich Meyer (transl.): Vichy - Auschwitz: the cooperation of the German and French authorities in the final solution of the Jewish question in France , Greno, Nördlingen 1989, ISBN 3-89190-958-6 ; udT Vichy - Auschwitz. The “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in France , WBG, Darmstadt 2007; Corrected edition and updated in the extensive literature list and in the register. In: Forschungsstelle Ludwigsburg FSL, Vol. 10, ISBN 3-534-20793-9 .

Web links

• Carmen Callil: Bad Faith, a forgotten history of family and fatherland (book review, English)
• Carmen Callil: Darquier de Pellepoix ou la France trahie (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Article in La France enchaînée No. 16, 15. – 30. November 1938