The Parisian Police and the Holocaust: Control,Round-ups,Hunt,1940–4

Abstract

Slightly more than half of the 74,150 Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944 were arrested in Paris and its close suburbs. For the large majority of these 38,500 men, women, and children, their arrest was carried out by ordinary policemen belonging to the Paris Police Prefecture. The objective of this article is to propose a complete and synthetic analysis of the role of this institution and its agents in the Holocaust. In Paris, unlike anywhere else in Europe, the implementation of the ‘final solution’ was entrusted to the traditional administration. These police officers were competent and knew perfectly the environment of the persecution. But, generally speaking, they were not anti-Semite activists, they did not like the Germans, and, more importantly, they acted according to their own institutional logic. So, the French's repressive system did not automatically feed the Nazi machine of destruction. It is this complexity of the machine of persecution in occupied France which explains, in many respects, the toll of the Holocaust in France, and, more specifically, in the Paris region.