The Holocaust in France

The Holocaust in France refers to the persecution, deportation, and annihilation of Jews and Roma between 1940 and 1944 in occupied France, metropolitan Vichy, and in Vichy-North Africa, during World War II. The persecution began in 1940, and culminated in deportations of Jews from France to death camps in Germany and Nazi-occupied Poland from 1942 which lasted until July 1944. Of the 340,000 Jews living in metropolitan/continental France in 1940, more than 75,000 were deported to death camps, where about 72,500 were killed. French Vichy government and the French police participated in the roundup of Jews. Although most deported Jews died, the survival rate of the Jewish population in France was up to 75% which is one of the highest survival rates in Europe.

In the summer of 1940, there were around 700,000 Jews in the French soil, of which 400,000 lived in French Algeria, and integral part of France, and in the two French Protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco. The French mainland, continental France, known as the Metropole, or Metropolitan France (French: France métropolitaine or la Métropole), had a population of about 150,000 Jewish nationals during the Interwar period, in addition France hosted a large population of foreign Jews who had fled persecutions in Germany. By 1939, the Jewish population had increased to 330,000 due to the refusal of the United States and the United Kingdom to accept any more Jewish refugees following the Évian Conference. After the occupation of Belgium and the Netherlands in 1940, France hosted a new wave of Jewish immigrants and Jewish population peaked at 340,000 individuals.

At the declaration of World War II, French Jews were mobilized into the French military like their compatriots, and, like in 1914, a significant number of foreign Jews enlisted in regiments of foreign volunteers. Jewish refugees from Germany were interned as enemy aliens. In general, the Jewish population of France was confident in the ability of France to defend them against the occupiers, but some, particularly from Alsace and the Moselle regions fled westwards into the unoccupied zone from July 1940.

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