The First Roundup of Jews in Paris, 1941

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

The First Roundup of Jews in Paris, 1941

May 17, 2026, 1:00 a.m. ET

A black and white photo shows two police officers, one looks at the camera. A man and woman kiss in the center of the photo.

 

By Jean-Marc Dreyfus

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/opinion/holocaust-france-photographs-1941.html

 

Mr. Dreyfus is a Holocaust historian at the University of Manchester. He is a co-author, with Lior Lalieu, of “La Rafle du Billet Vert. 14 Mai 1941. Les Photos Retrouvées.”

 

In 1950, Robert Doisneau photographed a kiss you’ve surely seen. The man and woman seem to have been stopped by ardor amid the midday rush, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Though staged, it became, nearly immediately, one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

 

Surely unknown to Mr. Doisneau, nine years earlier, there was another kiss captured on film in Paris that was much more spontaneous, just as passionate — far more desperate — between two Jews about to be separated by Vichy police. This kiss, found on a contact sheet of Nazi propaganda images in a Reims flea market six years ago, is now at the heart of a new exhibition of 98 Nazi propaganda photos at the Shoah Memorial in Paris curated by Lior Lalieu and me. This kiss, perhaps destined to become just as iconic, reveals a very different midcentury Parisian moment.

 

The photos provide a detailed visual account — almost minute by minute — of the very first, and little known, roundup of Jews in France on May 14, 1941. That day, some 3,700 foreign-born Jews obeyed a summons by Paris police with a notice, printed on light green paper (it became known as the “green ticket roundup”), for what they believed would merely be a check of their immigration and identity papers. The operation was organized by a man named Theodor Dannecker, the envoy of Adolf Eichmann in Paris. A photographer with the Nazi propaganda unit in the city was on hand to observe.

 

What gives these newly discovered photographs their singular power is not only what they show but the fact that they survived at all. They remind us that the past is never entirely buried, and that images can unexpectedly return to challenge the void of memory and representation. They function today not as propaganda, the purpose for which they were originally produced, but as fragments of truth — painful, incomplete and indispensable — that allow us to better understand the way the roundup was organized and conducted and also to get a glimpse of the victims’ shock, fear and pain.

 

There are only a few hundred photographs of roundups or murders of Jews from the 1930s and 1940s, a disparity of mass proportion considering the extent of the genocide. Some were taken by victims as acts of resistance, some by bystanders, and others, like this collection, were by an authorized photographer for the Nazi propaganda machine. From time to time, grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators find these images in attics and boxes when the older generation passes away.

 

This particular group of photographs was meant to document a Nazi success story. They begin with the trap: Jewish men and their spouses were summoned to over 60 locations in Paris: police offices, various administrations and a sports facility in the 11th Arrondissement. Women, we know from eyewitness testimony, were asked to return home to gather items; a list was provided. When they returned, as the images we now have on hand show, they were barred from reuniting with their male relatives. The doors were closed and guarded by French policemen. We can see the women’s pain, their bewilderment, many with bundles in their arms. We see couples as they part from each other.

 

Other photos document the departure of guarded buses, commandeered from the Paris bus company, filled with the captured men. We see the arrival of the internees at Paris’s Austerlitz train station. The same photographer captures the imprisonment of these Jews a few days later at the French internment camps Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Some 700 of those Jewish men were later liberated, or escaped, after the green ticket roundup. About 3,000 of those taken that day were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; of that group, just a scant few returned.

 

Taken months before the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe was made, these 98 photos do not show extermination camps, gas chambers, shootings or even starvation. What they do show is the careful, methodical beginnings of racially motivated separation that later enabled the mass murder. The noted historian Raul Hilberg called this phase of the Nazi genocide “concentration.” There is no sign of outright violence; indeed, the despair of the ensnared Jews and their bewildered spouses is shown with a strange sensitivity by the German photographer.

 

At first the photos were kept on file by the German Propaganda Unit in Paris. After the war, six of the 98 photos were found in the archives of the N.I.O.D. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, an indication that they were shared among the various propaganda units across Western Europe. A few others circulated among archives. But the vast majority were languishing, unseen, on contact sheets, until 2020, when two amateur collectors came upon them at a flea market. They brought the sheets to Ms. Lalieu, the director of photo collections at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, who analyzed the images in an effort to identify as many people as possible. Ms. Lalieu also identified the photographer as Harry Croner, a man from Berlin, who had gone on to have a stellar career in postwar West Berlin, as a famous cinema and opera photographer. (Half Jewish himself, he spent the end of the war in a labor camp.)

 

After the photos were found, Ms. Lalieu invited first and second-generation survivors to the memorial in an attempt to identify their parents or grandparents in the pictures. There were some extraordinarily moving moments. Though only five attempts at identification were successful so far, each marks a small victory against the backdrop of Nazi cover-up and of the looming loss of memory. A few of the photographs were shared publicly for the first time in 2021.

 

One year after these photos were taken, in mid-July 1942, about 13,000 Jews — mostly women and children — were rounded up, pulled out of Paris apartments and taken to an indoor sporting arena, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in southwestern Paris. They received little food or water and were subject to abject conditions. Depleted and distraught, they were sent from there to the internment camps of Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Later, a majority were sent on to Auschwitz.

 

It was an arrest of mass proportions, a stain on French history. We know this history from eyewitness testimonies, from memoirs of the few survivors and from the mass of police documents. Only a single photograph of the roundup is known. In it five buses are parked alongside the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The image was most likely taken clandestinely from an overlooking window. With the discovery and exhibition of this new group of photographs, the picture and understanding of the Holocaust in France have deepened.

 

The value of an image is entirely dependent on context. Taken to prove racial superiority, these 98 photos on display through December now show depravity. They also jar awake memory, shore it up against time. In an ephemeral era of mass documentation — of our own lives, of our public and private existence — the re-emergence of these photographs is a tangible reminder that some images refuse to be erased from our collective past.