Transport 13, Train 901-8 from Pithiviers, Camp, France to Auschwitz Birkenau, Extermination Camp, Poland on 31/07/1942

On July 15 Helmut Knochen, Senior Commander of the Security Police and SD in Paris, notified the Military Commander in France, Carl-Heinrich von Stuelpnagel, that the French government was ready to arrest the foreign Jews in Paris for deportation to the East. “The French police will take responsibility for the arrests and will execute them autonomously.” Knochen confirmed that the French police would mobilize 3,000 police officers for the operation and that the roundup would be completed by July 17 at 13:00. The arrests were described in an unauthored report that was sent to the AJDC (American Joint Distribution Committee), written a short time after these events. The report indicated that on the evening of July 15-16, the French police proceeded to arrest 28,000 foreign Jews whose names had been listed. According to this report, many Jews had been warned in advance and had therefore managed to go into hiding, resulting in the arrest of only 12,000-14,000 Jews. The sick, however, could not evade arrest and the surgery wing of the Rothschild hospital was emptied. Children under the age of three were separated from their mothers. Some were handed over to neighbours, others remained in the streets and were eventually piled onto trucks with hundreds of others. The report stated: “We could hear their cries, their screams, and their calls for their mothers in the dark, deserted streets. The Assistance Publique and the UGIF (Union générale des israélites de France, General Union of Jews in France ) were in charge of taking care of some of these children and approximately 5,000 children were divided up into three different schools. Four children died within 12 hours of their arrest…. The number of suicides was approximately 300-400; some mothers threw their children out the window and followed.” While filling in as head of the Jewish Affairs Department at the Sipo-SD during Dannecker’s absence, Heinz Roethke sent out a summary on July 17 detailing the arrests made over the course of the two previous days. In it he indicated that the French police had arrested a total of 12,884 Jews: 3,031 men, 5,802 women, and 4,051 children....