|
|
 |
| |
Italian police. Von Mackensen meets with Mussolini on
March 17 and is told that the Italian commander will be ordered to give French
police "entirely free hands in this enterprise."
It is a crucial moment
for Jews in France, because to the extent that Vichy did less than the Nazis
wanted, it had used Italian inaction as an excuse. Italy's abandonment of the
Jews would lead inevitably to Vichy's acceleration of arrests of deportable
Jews in the Southern Zone, and eventually to arrests of naturalized and native
French Jews throughout France.
Informed of Mussolini's decision, Luigi
Vidau of the Foreign Ministry and Secretary of State Giuseppe Bastianini bring
to his attention a Foreign Ministry report written by Italian officers who were
eyewitnesses of "scenes of massacres committed by the SS in a concentration
camp in Poland." The report asserts that "no country – not even allied
Germany – can claim to associate Italy, the cradle of Christianity and of
law, with crimes for which the Italian people may one day be held accountable."
Another report, by the Italian ambassador in Berlin, confirms that the Germans
are gassing Jews in the East.
Bastianini meets with Mussolini on
March18 and gives him the information gathered on the fate that awaits Jews
deported to the East. Mussolini revokes his earlier decision and instead makes
the Italian police solely responsible for the Jews in Italian-occupied France.
On March 19 he names Guido Lospinoso, former Italian consul in Nice and
currently a police official in Bari, as inspector general of the Italian Racial
Police, headquartered in Nice. Lospinoso takes up his post the next day and
will continue protecting Jews from arrest by German and Vichy police until
Mussolini is overthrown in July and the Germans occupy the Italian Zone in
September.
March 23, 1943. The argument over deportation of
French Jews continues even as more of them are sent to the East.
Convoy 52, sent to Sobibor from Le
Bourget-Drancy, carries 994 people, 780 of them Jews who were arrested in
Marseilles in January. The convoy includes 66 adolescents and children under
18. As far as we know, all of the passengers on convoy 52 were gassed on
arrival at Sobibor. (On Eichmann's instructions, convoys
50, 51,
52, and 53 went to Sobibor because the Auschwitz gas chambers and
crematoria were severely overloaded at the time.) There were no survivors from
convoy 52 at the end of the war.
Convoy 52 carries 580 French Jews to
their deaths. Told they would be on the convoy, Leguay had informed Röthke
the day before that "Pétain had expressed his inability to understand
the sending of Jews of French nationality while there are still so many other
Jews in France. Bousquet had ordered French police not to participate in the
evacuation of French Jews." When Leguay went on to say that "the French
government reserved for itself solution of the problem of French Jews,"
Röthke could not contain his anger.
Röthke informs SS General
Oberg of the exchange, and Oberg immediately orders 30 German security police
detailed to replace French police in assembling the convoy. In the end, French
police appear on the platform of the Le Bourget-Drancy station to assist in
loading the boxcars and to escort the train to the German border. The Germans
accept French assistance on the platform, but beginning with this convoy they
assume responsibility for escorting deportation trains once they leave the
station.
|
|
| |
| |
| |
FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
 |
Back |
Page 74 |
Forward |
 |
|
