An incident in which Vichy France police officials during World War II deported Jewish children above and beyond Nazi requests was reported last weekend by the French news magazine L’Express.
Although the episode, which resulted in the deaths of thousands, was one of the most repugnant examples of Nazi collaboration by Frenchmen during the war, not one of the officials has been brought to justice, the mass-circulation news weekly reported.
It began when French police arrested 3,500 Jewish children in July 1942 on orders of the Vichy government.
The Nazis had asked only for the detention of adults over 16. But the Vichy police also rounded up children under 16, and as young as 6 months.
The children were confined with their mothers in two concentration camps that were built and run by the French inside France, while Vichy waited for further instructions from the Germans, L’Express reported.
Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, at the time in charge of Jewish affairs in Vichy, suggested that the children be placed in special homes in France. But Police Chief Jean Leguay and his immediate superior, Rene Bosquet, urged the Germans to take them as deportees.
While waiting for the Gestapo to decide, the two French police officials handed over the children’s mothers to be deported, L’Express reported.
The youngsters were left practically unattended while Berlin took its time. Two weeks later, on July 31, the Gestapo acceded to the French request.
The children were placed on special trains to Auschwitz. Fewer than a dozen are known to have survived.
According to L’Express, Leguay was the police official who initially urged the Gestapo to deport the children. He was never tried for war crimes and died an old man at his home in Paris last year.
The magazine stressed that no Frenchman has ever been indicted, much less tried for collaboration with the Nazis.
Although much was made of the life sentence imposed on the former Lyon Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie in 1988 for crimes against humanity, Barbie was, after all, a German, L’Express pointed out. France simply docs not want to open the closet in which so many of its own skeletons hang, the news weekly concluded.
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