France fell in World War II to the German invasion which began in May 1940 and ended with the
occupation of Paris on 14 June and
capitulation to Germany eight days later. France was occupied by Nazi Germany and divided in two, with the north and west (including Paris) belonging to the
Occupied zone administered directly by Germany, and the rest to the so-called
Zone libre ("Free zone") in the south and east. The French government under Marshall
Philippe Pétain moved to the town of
Vichy in the . On 10 July parliament
dissolved itself, ending the
Third Republic and creating the "
French State" (; more commonly known as the "
Vichy regime") in its place with Petain holding supreme power. Starting in 1940, the Vichy government adopted laws that excluded Jews and their children from certain roles in society. These laws were passed without coercion from the Germans. According to Marshal Philippe Pétain's chief of staff, "Germany was not at the origin of the anti-Jewish legislation of Vichy, that legislation was spontaneous and autonomous". On 22 July 1940, Vichy set up a special commission to examine and revoke the citizenship of Jews who had been
naturalised after the 1927
reform of the nationality law, with the aim of removing "foreigners" from French society. Roughly three hundred thousand Jews lived in France, of whom nearly half were foreign Jews who had fled since World War I from Eastern Europe and, more recently, from Nazi Germany. In September 1940, the French authorities, by order of the
Germans, performed a census of foreign Jews. On 3 September 1940 it became legal to arrest and imprison all dangerous foreigners for the sake of national security and public order. SS-Hauptsturmführer
Theodor Dannecker, representative of
Adolf Eichmann in Paris, wished to speed up the exclusion of Jews, not only by registering them and plundering their goods, but also by interning them. He counted on
Karl Theo Zeitschel at the German embassy in Paris, who shared the same objectives, and who was in charge of relations with the
Commissariat-General for Jewish Affairs, which was created on 29 March 1941.
Prelude On 4 October, the Vichy regime promulgated a new
law on the status of Jews. It became legal for local authorities to arrest foreign Jews and inter them in special camps. , the German Consul General in Paris, wrote in a report to Berlin that "The French government has undertaken to send all foreign-born Jews to concentration camps in the Unoccupied Zone," and continued that "Jews will be arrested in the Occupied Zone the moment the necessary camps are ready." By 1941, the camps at Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Roland,
Compiegne, and
Drancy were in operation, chiefly for the purpose of interning foreign Jews from Paris. On 22 April 1941, Dannecker informed prefect
Jean-Pierre Ingrand, representative of the Ministry of the Interior in the
Occupied zone, of the transformation of the German camp for French prisoners of war of
Pithiviers into an internment camp for Parisian Jews, with the transfer of its management to the office of the Loiret prefect. At the same time, the Germans insisted on the implementation of the law of 4 October 1940 which allowed the
internment of foreign Jews. The
camp at Pithiviers being insufficient for the purpose on its own, the
Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp was added for a maximum total capacity of 5,000 detainees. == Operations ==