In the course of a two-day raid in Paris and the surrounding area, the French police arrested more than 13,000 foreign Jews by order of the Nazis. Among them were 4000 children. More than 8000 people were temporarily locked up in the ‘Velodrome d'Hiver’ cycling stadium. The others were sent on to the Drancy transit camp, just outside Paris, or to other camps in the countryside. Living conditions were poor. In the weeks that followed, the Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where most of them were murdered straight away.
The Nazis had started arresting Jews the year before, and after the major raid of July, Jews were also arrested in other parts of France. The French police collaborated.
In France, the government was more involved in the persecution of Jews than, for instance, in the Netherlands. As a result of ecclesiastical protests against the deportations, French minister Laval asked the Nazis, as a compromise, to arrest mainly foreign Jews. Most of the 75,000 Jews deported from France to extermination camps had come from abroad. Many of them had fled to France from Nazi Germany and the occupied territories in the 1930s. The majority of the 130,000 French Jews were not arrested, and survived the persecution of the Jews.
