On This Day in History: July 16

The Vel' d'Hiv Roundup

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Prior to World War II there were fewer than 17 million Jewish people on Earth. More than a third of them were murdered in the Holocaust. To this day, over three-quarters of a century after the end of the fucking Nazi genocide, the world Jewish population has still not reached pre-war levels.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 16, 1942--

Antisemitism is alive and well in France (and everywhere, really). With roughly half a million people, France has the largest Jewish population in Europe. It’s also the largest European source of Jewish immigrants to Israel; they’re leaving a long history of being treated like shit by their countrymen.

In the spring of 1940, the German blitzkrieg rolled over France like they were a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys. I stole that from The Simpsons. Anyway, the Germans didn’t occupy all of France right away. They designated a “free zone” in the south. The leadership was based in the city of Vichy, so the region was named Vichy France. And they were an authoritarian puppet government of the fucking Nazis and totally complicit in the Holocaust.

Beginning on July 16, 1942, a terrible betrayal of French humanity took place called the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup. Paris was in the German-occupied zone, but the Vichy police state had some control there. The French police were ordered by the Vichy government to commit a mass arrest against Paris Jews and ship them to Auschwitz. And they did.

Vel’ d’Hiv was an indoor cycling velodrome where many of the arrest victims were held in cramped quarters with little food or water, and no sanitation. During a two-day period, over 13,000 Jews, including 4,000 children, were rounded up by French police and sent off for extermination. Did I mention the police were French? Because they were French. Did I mention the French Vichy government was complicit? Because they were complicit as fuck. In fact, in the 1980s it was revealed that Vichy officials weren’t just complicit in the genocide, they were enthusiastic about it. They were more than happy to order thousands of their fellow French citizens, fellow human beings, to Auschwitz to be murdered.

Assholes.

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