Black Earth(105)

Under the Vichy regime in 1940, the prewar aspiration to limit and control immigration became the open plan to make France an ethnically homogeneous state. Jews without citizenship, along with others who lacked citizenship, were to be removed. After the passage of the “Jewish Statute,” foreign Jews were sent to camps. About 7,055 French Jews were denaturalized and thereby placed in the category of greater risk, that of foreign Jews. Policy in France then followed the logic of escalation that was visible in eastern Europe. Major raids and roundups of Jews by the French police were timed with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941, with the reversal of the German offensive that winter, and then as retaliation for (very real) French communist resistance in March 1942. By summer 1942, the French roundups included Jewish women and children. Jews in Paris were taken to Drancy, where they were selected for transport to Auschwitz and death.

French and German policies met at a certain precise point. The French placed Jews without French citizenship in camps. The Germans wanted to take such people, but only insofar as the Germans themselves could consider them stateless. Crucially, Nazi malice stopped at the passport: As much as Nazis might have imagined that states were artificial creations, they did not proceed with killing Jews until states were actually destroyed or had renounced their own Jews. The French were willing to round up Jews from Hungary and Turkey, for example, but the Germans were unwilling to kill such people without the consent of the Hungarian and Turkish governments. Germany was entirely willing to murder Jews of Polish and Soviet citizenship, since it considered these states to be defunct. Germany was also willing to take and murder French Jews, but only under the condition that French authorities first stripped such people of citizenship. This the French authorities at first showed a certain inclination to do, although complications of law and bureaucracy delayed the process considerably.

In summer 1942, when the Germans demanded a greater number of French Jews, the highest French authorities reconsidered the question of depriving their own citizens of citizenship. Depatriation was not, for them, a Jewish question, but rather a sovereignty question. After the tide of war visibly turned at Stalingrad in February 1943, French authorities decided not to depatriate any more French Jews. In July 1943, efforts to strip French citizenship from Jews nationalized after 1927 (about half of the Jews who were French citizens) were abandoned. The Holocaust continued in France as a German policy executed with a certain amount of local French collaboration, bringing general terror to French Jews in hiding but achieving relatively little success. A large majority of French Jews, about three-quarters, survived the war.

The decisive matter, here as everywhere, was sovereignty. For French authorities, the Jewish question was subordinate to that of the well-being, as they saw matters, of their state. They certainly wished to remove Jews from France—foreign Jews to be sure and, no doubt, most or all Jews. But they could see the inherent problem of allowing German preferences to determine their own citizenship policy. The moment a state no longer determines internal membership, it loses external sovereignty. By the same token, French authorities had recourse to foreign policy and could react to the course of the war. Unlike the Dutch and the Greeks, who had lost these elements of sovereignty, the French could respond to Allied pressure about the Jews and anticipate a British and American occupation, which was indeed coming.

The Holocaust in France was mainly a crime against Jews who, from a French perspective, were foreign. As Fran?ois Darlan, head of government in 1941 and 1942, put it: “The stateless Jews who have thronged to our country for the last fifteen years do not interest me.” Jews without French citizenship were about ten times more likely to be deported to Auschwitz than were Jews with French citizenship. At Drancy, Jews were selected for deportation according to the vitality of their state. Jews in France understood this perfectly. In 1939, when Poland was destroyed by the joint German-Soviet invasion, Polish Jews living in France flocked to the Soviet embassy in Paris. This was not out of any love for the Soviet Union or communism. They simply knew that they needed state protection. Between September 1939 and June 1941, documents from Hitler’s Soviet ally were of great value. But when Hitler betrayed Stalin, and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, these Jews’ new papers were suddenly useless.

Considerably more Polish Jews resident in France were killed than French Jews resident in France. Statelessness followed these thirty thousand murdered Polish Jews to Paris, to Drancy, to Auschwitz, to the gas chambers, to the crematoria, and to oblivion.

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The likelihood that Jews would be sent to their deaths depended upon the durability of institutions of state sovereignty and the continuity of prewar citizenship. These structures created the matrix within which individual choices were made, the constraints upon those who did evil, and the possibilities for those who wished to do good.