Rafle du Velodrome d'Hiver

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As Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver (German raid of the winter velodrome ; named after the largest of the collection points, the Vél 'd'Hiv' in Paris ), the mass arrest carried out by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942 and the one a few days later Deportation carried out by Germans of several thousand Jews to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe.

Image from another raid in Paris on August 20, 1941

The raid

After the victorious campaign in the west in the spring of 1940, the north and west of France were occupied by the Germans . In the south, the Vichy government ruled under Marshal Philippe Pétain . This government, to which the police of all France was subordinate, worked with the German occupiers. A census was carried out in Paris in September 1940 to determine the number of Jews (150,000).

After joint planning by German and French officials, preparations began in 1942 for a mass raid in Paris. Stateless and foreign Jews between the ages of 16 and 60 were to be arrested. Only a quarter of the Jews living in Paris before the outbreak of war were born in France; most of them were refugees from Eastern Europe, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia.

The raid was carried out on July 16 and 17, 1942 . Many men, warned by rumors, left their homes and went into hiding without their families, believing that the wave of arrests was primarily directed against Jewish men. For this reason, proportionally more women and children were abducted and families were often separated by the arrests. More than 10,000 Jews escaped arrest because they had been warned by police officers. 13,152 Jews were arrested. 8160 of them (4115 children, 2916 women and 1129 men) were crammed into the Vélodrome not far from the Eiffel Tower and had to stay there for days. Originally, the Gestapo did not want to take on children under the age of 16; they were almost forced upon it by the French administration. At least 4,500 French police officers and gendarmes were involved in the action. The raid is known as "la grande rafle du Vel 'd'Hiv'" .

The temperatures under the glass roof of the cycling hall were unbearable. There were no toilets; Aid organizations were only allowed to bring little food and water onto the site. 30 people died there. After five days, the internees from the Vélodrome d'Hiver were taken by the French police via the Paris train station in Austerlitz to the transit camps in Drancy , Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers (Loiret department). There the children were separated from their parents or mothers. From July 19, 1942, the adults were first deported from here in cattle trucks to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. About the trapped people one hundred committed before further transport suicide . The children caught in the raid remained in the camps for about a month. According to an agreement between Berlin and Vichy, they were only deported from August 17th and were also murdered in Auschwitz. A total of 73,853 Jews were deported from France during the Second World War , often with the active assistance of French officials; only about 2,600 of them survived the Holocaust .

Commemoration

Since 1946 there has been a private plaque of an anti-fascist organization on the grounds of the Velodrome to commemorate the events during the Rafle du Vélodrome d'Hiver . Since the site is a reminder of the collaboration between French agencies in the Nazi persecution of Jews during the German occupation , the commemoration at this site was long considered a political issue in France. After the Velodrome was demolished in 1959, houses and a building for the French Ministry of the Interior were built on the site. In 1993 a memorial was erected near the site on Quai des Grenelles and inaugurated on July 17, 1994 in the presence of President François Mitterrand . It was designed by the Parisian architect Mario Azagury and the Polish sculptor Walter Spitzer , who was one of the survivors of Auschwitz . On July 20, 2008, a wreath-laying site for the victims was set up opposite the Bir-Hakeim metro station at the previous location of the stadium and a plaque was placed there.

Since around the year 2000, July 16 or the following Sunday has been celebrated with events across the country as a day of remembrance “to commemorate the racist and anti-Semitic crimes of the État français and to honor the Righteous Among the Nations ”.

Memorial site at the stadium (2009)

The involvement of the Vichy government and French police officers in this action was a taboo subject in France for decades . It was not until July 16, 1995 that the then French President Jacques Chirac admitted French co-responsibility and publicly apologized.

In her presidential election campaign in 2017, Marine Le Pen announced the consensus that had meanwhile been reached and on April 9th ​​said on French television that France was not responsible for the deportation of Jews from the winter velodrome. In doing so, she for her part broke a taboo on the politics of memory. Le Pen justified her opinion by saying that she wanted French children to be proud of being French again. The collaborating Vichy regime was "illegal" and does not represent France. Former presidents such as Charles de Gaulle or François Mitterrand had refused a French admission of guilt with similar arguments . The Jewish umbrella organization Crif accused Le Pen thereupon of revisionist statements and "insulting France".A few months later, on the 75th anniversary of the events on July 16, 2017, the new French President Emmanuel Macron affirmed his country's responsibility for the mass arrests during a memorial event in front of members of the Jewish community and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu , thereby indirectly contradicting Le Pen Statement that he had already called a "serious mistake" during the election campaign.

Movies

The events also form the framework for the 1976 film Monsieur Klein by Joseph Losey . Much of the drama was filmed on location. The film received 1977 a. a. the French César film award in the categories of best film and best director.

The film The Children of Paris (La Rafle) was released in France on March 10, 2010 , directed by Roselyne Bosch , produced by Ilan Goldman , who also deals with the events in Vél 'd'Hiv' . In the same year, the award-winning feature film Sarahs Schlüssel by Gilles Paquet-Brenner was released. The drama, which is based on the novel of the same name by Tatiana de Rosnay , tells the story of an American journalist living in Paris (played by Kristin Scott Thomas ) who is researching an article on mass deportation.

The documentary Les Enfants du Vel d'hiv (1992, director: Maurice Frydland) and the film The Persecuted (Les Guichets du Louvre) (1974, director: Michel Mitrani ), based on the novel by the eyewitness Roger Boussinot based.

A 2017 documentary by  Ruth Zylberman  reconstructs the fate of Jewish residents in a large Parisian residential complex: The children from Rue Saint-Maur, No. 209 . She finds only a few survivors of the raid and lets them talk about her memories of her parents and the days of that time.

See also

literature

  • Annette Muller, Manek Muller: La petite fille du Vel d'Hiv. Du camp d'internement de Beaune-la-Rolande 1942 à la maison d'enfants du Mans 1947. Cercil, Paris 2010, ISBN 2950756174 ; again Hachette , 2012, ISBN 2013232918 (contemporary witness report, French).
  • Tatiana de Rosnay: Sarah's key. Novel. Translated from the English by Angelika Kaps. Bloomsbury, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8270-0700-1 (several editions by various publishers, also as an audio book, filmed in 2010).
  • Daniel Goldenberg, Gabriel Wachman: Evadé du Vél 'd'Hiv. Calmann-Lévy, Paris 2006, ISBN 978-2-7021-3651-5 (French).
  • Maurice Rajsfus: Jeudi noir . L'Harmattan, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-7384-0039-6 (French).
  • Érik Orsenna : L'Exposition coloniale. Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1988, ISBN 2-7242-4362-5 (French),
  • Käthe Hirsch: At the Vélodrome d'Hiver collection camp in Paris. In: Hanna Schramm , Barbara Vormeier (Hrsg.): People in Gurs . Memories of a French internment camp 1940–1941 (German Exile 1933–1945, Volume 13). Heintz, Worms 1977, ISBN 3-921333-13-X . With a document appendix on French internment policy (pp. 246–384), including Hirsch's eyewitness report on pp. 332–334.
  • Claude Lévy, Paul Tillard: La Grande rafle du Vel d'Hiv (16 juillet 1942) . Robert Laffont, Paris 1967 (French). As paperback: 2002, ISBN 2-221-09750-5 ,
    • German: Black Thursday. Collaboration and final solution in France. Walter, Olten 1968, ISBN 3-7918-8012-8 .
    • English: Betrayal at the Vel 'd'Hiv. New York 1967.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Tatiana de Rosnay: Sarah's key . With materials for reading circles. Berliner Taschenbuchverlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-8333-0548-1 . Reading circle appendix ( Memento from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 360 kB) d. Ed., Section “Historical Background” (pp. 402–405).
  2. ^ Romain Leick: Tabu Vichy . In: Der Spiegel 38/2001, September 15, 2001, pp. 206-214 (here: 213 f.).
  3. ↑ See Der Spiegel 40/1997, September 29, 1997, p. 174; Romain Leick: Tabu Vichy. In: Der Spiegel 38/2001, September 15, 2001, p. 214.
  4. ^ Romain Leick: Tabu Vichy. In: Der Spiegel 38/2001, p. 207.
  5. ^ Journée nationale à la mémoire des victimes des crimes racistes et antisémites de l'État français et d'hommage aux «Justes» de France. The original title of the day, which was later changed, emphasized the illegitimacy of the Vichy regime and spoke of ... crimes committed under the authority of the state that called itself the "Government of the État français" . However, it was historically inaccurate, since Pétain had been appointed legally correct as head of state.
  6. ↑ Le Pen denies France's involvement in the persecution of Jews. In: Die Zeit , April 10, 2017; Retrieved April 20, 2017.
  7. ↑ Michaela Wiegel : The calculation of breaking taboos. In: FAZ , April 12, 2017; Retrieved April 20, 2017.
  8. ↑ Marine Le Pen causes outrage with testimony. www.spiegel.de, April 10, 2017.
  9. ↑ "Macron and Netanyahu remember the Holocaust in France." Merkur.de; Accessed July 16, 2017.