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[posi…] tion of the French government. If the
French government places obstacles in the way of the arrests, the Führer
will certainly not show understanding."
The threat is clear: if the
French police do not participate in the anti-Jewish action in Paris, Vichy will
be committing a direct provocation against Hitler's personal wishes. Bousquet
surrenders. According to the minutes: "This is why we have arrived at the
following arrangement: since, following the point raised by the Marshal, there
is no question for the moment of arresting Jews of French nationality, Bousquet
declares himself ready to carry out arrests of foreign Jews throughout French
territory [in both the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones], in a unified action and
the numbers we wish."
July 6, 1942. After writing his report on
the July 4 meeting with Bousquet, Dannecker sends Eichmann an urgent telex to
inform him of the outcome of the decisive negotiations that have gone on since
Eichmann's departure from Paris on July 1. Dannecker prefers not to begin with
his disappointing news; French Jews will not be arrested, at least for the time
being. He leaves it to Eichmann to deduce this from the agreement he reports:
"All stateless Jews of the Occupied Zone and the Unoccupied Zone will be
readied for evacuation when we order it." He feels constrained at the end of
the telex to specify further: "To close, I must note that until the present we
have only been able to settle the question of stateless or foreign Jews to get
the action started." Dannecker ends on an optimistic note: "In the second phase
we will attend to the Jews naturalized in France after 1919 or 1927."
In this telex, Dannecker raises the problem of Jewish children in two
sentences that will forever be written in the history of France, because they
originate with the head of the French government.
In his initial plan
for the roundups on June 15, Dannecker wrote of the "transplantation" of the
Jews, "with, in perspective, the possibility of later sending the children
under 16 years of age who have been left behind." But on July 4, according to
Dannecker: "Premier Laval has proposed that at the time of the evacuation of
Jewish families from the Unoccupied Zone, their children be taken as well. As
for the Jewish children who would remain in the Occupied Zone, the question
does not interest him."
Thus Laval proposes to the Germans the
deportation of entire families without a minimum age limit; he leaves to the
Nazis the responsibility and therefore a free hand to decide on deportation of
children under 16 whose parents will be arrested in the Occupied Zone and
deported. These are children who, as he well knows, are for the most part
French, even if to an anti-Semite Jewish children born in France to foreign
parents are, in the words of Xavier Vallat, the first Vichy Commissioner for
Jewish Questions, "only trainees in French nationality."
What are
Laval's motives? He explains them at a cabinet meeting in Vichy on July 10:
"With humane intentions, the head of government obtained agreement –
contrary to the initial German terms – that children, including those
under 16, would be permitted to accompany their parents." Laval's humanitarian
intentions may be doubted.
July 7, 1942. The first meeting of
the Special Commission responsible for preparing the great Paris roundup to
come is convened at the offices of the Gestapo's Jewish Affairs Department, 31
bis Avenue Foch, Paris. Parti […cipating]
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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