Vichy and the Vel d'Hiv

On July 16-17, 1942, 13,152 Jews — including more than 4,000 children — were arrested in Paris by French police, not by Germans. The operation, called Vel d'Hiv for the indoor cycling stadium where the detained were initially held in conditions without food, water, or sanitation, was organized by René Bousquet, the Vichy government's Secretary General of the Police. Bousquet had volunteered French civilian police to do work the Germans could not have completed without local cooperation. Almost none of those deported survived. After the war Bousquet was lightly punished, returned to a comfortable banking career, and was finally indicted for crimes against humanity in 1991 only to be assassinated by a publicity-seeker in 1993 before his trial. The pattern is the Diplomat's: a civil servant's identity bound up in belonging to and serving the system, with the system's content treated as politically given. Vichy needed no fanatics. It needed competent French civil servants who would not break ranks. The administrative continuity of a state can carry out atrocity precisely because Diplomats keep showing up to work.