Vichy and Jewish children
1/n
1942: more than six thousand Jewish children are deported to Auschwitz. Because Vichy wants to get rid of useless and embarrassing "orphans" whose parents have already gone to the death camps.
1/n
1942: more than six thousand Jewish children are deported to Auschwitz. Because Vichy wants to get rid of useless and embarrassing "orphans" whose parents have already gone to the death camps.
2/n Of all the events of the Holocaust, few are more horrifying than the Nazi murder of over a million Jewish children. Throughout Europe, and not only in the immense charnel ground that had become the east of the continent, the German authorities hunted down the most innocent
3/n victims imaginable, and of whom several hundred thousand were to make the terrible journey to death factories on Polish territory. But even in this circumstance, in what constitutes the most revolting crime of Hitlerism, accomplices were found everywhere to lend him a hand.
4/n Laval delivers children...
There was no mention of the children by the Nazis, even among themselves. To the surprise of the Germans, it was the French who first proposed that Jewish children be included in the deportation trains.
Pierre Laval
There was no mention of the children by the Nazis, even among themselves. To the surprise of the Germans, it was the French who first proposed that Jewish children be included in the deportation trains.
Pierre Laval
5/n At the beginning of July, Adolf Eichmann, coordinator of deportations for the whole of Europe, came to Paris to finalize the details of the operation. Talks with Pierre Laval, head of the French government, followed immediately, and on July 6, Dannecker sent a chilling note
6/n to Berlin: "President Laval proposed, during the deportation of Jewish families from the occupied, to also include children under the age of sixteen. The question of Jewish children remaining in the occupied zone does not interest him."
Some time later, Dannecker's successor,
Some time later, Dannecker's successor,
7/n Heinz Rothke, noting that the answer was still pending, noted that the French police "expressed on different occasions the desire to see the children deported to the Reich". Finally, Eichmann telephoned his answer: children could be deported, as well as the elderly.
8/n ... Jean Leguay sends them to Auschwitz
Quickly, the children will be grouped together and added to the convoys leaving Drancy several times a week βfor an unknown destinationβ. During the month of July, the deportation trains included many teenagers;
Jean Leguay
Quickly, the children will be grouped together and added to the convoys leaving Drancy several times a week βfor an unknown destinationβ. During the month of July, the deportation trains included many teenagers;
Jean Leguay
9/n in August and September are also taken younger children - including even newborns. Finally, the convoys bound for Auschwitz carry away hundreds of children, who often constitute the bulk of the deportees. The trip is made in sealed freight cars, each carrying
10/n between 40 and 60 children, plus a handful of adults. The German participation in the arrest of the children seems to have been null and certain indications even make it possible to affirm that the Nazis disapproved of the affair. In August 1942, an American employee of a
11/n relief organization reported that the Germans had "started to reject, beyond the line of demarcation, the Jewish children who had remained alone in the occupied zone" after the arrest of their parents, thus delivering them to Vichy and creating a new headache for the French
12/n government. Already 1,600 children have come, and more are expected.
It was the French who took the initiative to round up children and send them to Drancy, and it was the head of the French police in the occupied zone, Jean Leguay, who assigned them to the various convoys
It was the French who took the initiative to round up children and send them to Drancy, and it was the head of the French police in the occupied zone, Jean Leguay, who assigned them to the various convoys
13/n leaving for Auschwitz; the Germans established the timetable, but it was the French police who decided on the composition of the convoys. All this Leguay explained in a letter in August, specifying that the convoys departing from Drancy scheduled for the 19th, 21st, 24th
14/n and 26th of the same month will be "made up of the children of families who had been interned in Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande".
It shows to what extremes callousness can lead, and how necessary such recklessness was for the accomplishment of murder. For together, the
It shows to what extremes callousness can lead, and how necessary such recklessness was for the accomplishment of murder. For together, the
15/n two conceptions of persecution - that of Vichy and that of the Nazis - perpetrated a crime of astonishing cruelty, each feeding the other and each without the other being hindered. Result: between 1942 and 1944, nearly two thousand children under the age of six,
16/16 and six thousand under the age of thirteen, were deported from France to Auschwitz. As far as we can tell, none survived.
End.
End.
17/ Laval was found guilty of plotting against the security of the state and collaboration. Laval was executed by firing squad in October 1945.
In 1979, Leguay was charged with crimes against humanity for his role in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. He died of cancer in 1989.
In 1979, Leguay was charged with crimes against humanity for his role in the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in Paris. He died of cancer in 1989.
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