6,000 Jews Arrested in Paris Sent to Labor Camps

The 6,000 Jews arrested in Paris this week during a gigantic house-to-house raid in the Jewish section of the city were today sent to labor camps.

At the same time the authorities in Paris today officially announced that owners of houses, flats and buildings having Jewish tenants who have not returned to Paris are given the legal right to sell the tenant’s household furnishings. They are entitled to deduct the rent and taxes due from the money received from the sale, but they must not return the remainder to the Jewish tenant. Instead they must deposit this balance with the German authorities in Paris in accordance with the German ordinance blocking funds belonging to Jews.

Details received here today on the raid which was carried out in the Place de la Republic section which is thickly populated by Jews, reveal that policemen were stationed at the door of every house from daybreak. At six a.m. inspectors with lists in their hands entered each house, while others were engaged in stopping men in the streets asking them for their identity papers. The arrested Jews were all told to take indispensable hand luggage along with them, prior to their being transported to the concentration camp in Drancy.

In addition to the 6,000 Jews rounded up this week, hundreds of Jews were arrested in Paris long before the recent anti-Nazi demonstrations. Some 500 Jews in one group are now spending their ninth month in an internment camp known as Camp de la Lande, near Tours. This group consists of Jews who had originally resided in Alsace-Lorraine and who were sent to Bordeaux when Alsace-Lorraine was evacuated. They were expelled from Bordeaux last December and interned in the camp. Among this group of internees are over 100 children under the age of 14, and eighty men and women over the age of 50. Some of the families had sons or brothers in the French army.