Full Feature: Questioning Tyranny in France, 1941-42

"Our enemies are strange," wrote Isaac Schonberg to his fiancée, Chana, on 2nd October, 1941: "You ask the Frenchman, he tells you it's the German who sent you to the camp; you ask the German, he tells you he has nothing to do with it." The truth is that they both do it, and that the Frenchman seeks to outdo his master and does it all too well.'

The first pieces of legislation passed by Marechal Philippe Pétain’s authoritarian Vichy regime against France’s Jews came to pass in 1940, almost immediately after the armistice that took France out of the war, officially. In the spring of 1941, more edicts followed, and the situation escalated. During that year, three major roundups were organized in Paris. The first, in May 1941, led to the opening of the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps in the Loiret department and was sold to the people as ‘a simple check up’.The second, carried out by French police in August, supervised by German gendarmes, led thousands of Jews to the newly opened camp at Drancy, to the northeast of Paris. The third targeted prominent French Jews from the capital, hundreds of whom were transferred to Compiègne.

From 1942 to 1944, things intensified again. It came down to the level of German control. ’The aim was to implement the Final Solution in France, namely the deportation of Jews… and their extermination.’

But I wouldn’t be doing my job as a historian if I didn’t also point out the inherent antisemitism that existed in France already. Consider this grim letter to Pétain:

September 20, 1941

Avenue de France

Cannes

Most Revered Marechal,

I regret having used the word "Judeo" in a previous letter; It should read: 'Jewish-Anglo-Bolshevik conspiracy.'

The Jew led the English to the Bolsheviks, to the nihilists.

By denying Jesus, the Jew denied God to worship the golden calf more and more.

It was to regenerate humanity that God sent his son to earth, an example of gentleness, generosity, humility, a conscience for each and all, a glimmer of hope illuminating the spiritual world.

Some Jews refused to understand anything.

Nearly twenty centuries have passed…

As in the time of Jesus... the Jews are here with their love of money and their hatred of the spirit of God, they are starving us... they want to kill the poor, the Risen One... his Holy Spirit.

I come to ask you if they will always be at home, with us in France, and how long will you let them overwhelm us? If, at your advanced age, God has allowed you to witness such tribulations, it is so that you can remedy them.

Make them wear the yellow cap and a little red apron; condemn them to forced labor for life, to an animal state, servile, penniless... Confiscate all their possessions for the poor! An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The doctrine of Jesus was too kind to them, and God did not allow it beyond the death of his son; they must be made to disappear in bottomless boats to feed the fish they deprive us of; let them be the prey of the wild beasts that feed their young.

Today it is not necessary to have Israelite blood in one's veins to be Jewish; it is enough to have the spirit... this title belongs to the mayors, to the prefects who are content to do nothing... to the stateless foreigners, to the lazy bosses... to the well-fed... to the bosses and viper bosses who rejoice in making the youth work until exhaustion, until madness, until the end to better materially and spiritually deny them before the courts, to annihilate them before men and before God... sellers, sold and buyers of the black market... the one who eats in surplus what others lack; the foreign owners who permanently spill French blood from a stone; the Italian merchant who buys the juice of our vine to deprive the poor, the worker, the old man, in order to pay more for rich Jewish blood; the responsible notary who makes people sign and washes his hands of the future; The judge who has been dragging out the Paulo trial for over 10 years, etc., etc., but the most Jewish of the Jews are social security: always collecting and never giving…

Not to mention the lair of the donkey "Martin" where the flag flies over Milton (sic), over the Greek on French soil. We are in Cannes, we want a French Cannes and not an international city where Jewry rules supreme and only allows slaves to live.

Since you saved France, nothing has changed.

You can make speeches, we expect realities and not promises; the French are not lazy, they want their father's place, they want the justice of their ancestors to live happily while working. Make the greedy, avaricious Jews repay their debts. Save the orphans exhausted by war and hunger; multiply the bread, wine, chocolate, and shoes for the barefoot whose unhinged minds are still turned toward heaven, too high to grasp; they want Jesus and an earthly paradise to live in fraternal harmony.

Long live the Jews in the slaughterhouses, in the depths of hell. It is God who commands; in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

D.

And so the stage was set for the death of tens of thousands of French Jews.

Some figures for you: 320,000 Jews in mainland France at the onset of war.

Nearly 80,000 deported from France between 1942 and 1944.

2,500 survived.

Administration and the Camps

This was largely the responsibility of the French, with the occupying Germans lurking in the background.

At the lower level, the prefects played a central role in the system. They took internment measures, and within their entourage, a civil servant was in charge of the camps in the department or region.

This was often supplemented by the civil servant in charge of Jewish affairs. In the case of Drancy, during its "French" period (until control went into German hands in mid-1943), things became even more complicated, since the police headquarters and the Seine prefecture shared jurisdiction.

It was to these prefects that the camp leaders were accountable, leaders appointed by the Minister of the Interior. Former military personnel were primarily sought, but difficulties were soon encountered due to insufficient income. Conflicts over supervision arose. In the northern (occupied) zone, the gendarmerie had direct responsibility for a few camps for a time.

…If we are to judge the behaviour of these personnel, we undoubtedly find zealous brutes, as among the gendarmes of the Drancy camp, or, more systematically, within the Police for Jewish Questions (PQJ) who participated in the organisation of the first convoys. There were also resistance fighters, but they were rare. Reluctance is evident, even among the camp leaders: it is no coincidence that, between mid-July and early September 1942, no fewer than six camp leaders succeeded one another at Beaune-la-Rolande, even though there had only been two since the spring of 1941. The vast majority of staff "did their job," generally reluctantly when it came to organising departures, but they carried out orders.

First, they came for the undesirables. Anyone that didn’t fall into line with the Vichy regime. The roundups took in men, foreigners. By the end of 1941, they were coming for Frenchmen born and bred. By 1942, whole families were being rounded up with little distinction, ‘men, women, children, the elderly, French or foreign, all Jewish or declared as such—were swept away by persecution.’ Drancy in particular ceased to be a place where someone might spend several months, and functioned as a transit camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Today, I want to focus on a series of letters written by people brave enough to speak up, who voiced their concerns, and pleaded with the authorities; and others who were desperately seeking help from a man they had venerated. Because specifically, all of the letters I have translated for this were addressed to Marechal Pétain, the hero of Verdun himself, and called into question his regime’s persecution of the Jews.

Internees at Drancy