ABSTRACT
When Germany defeated France in 1940, that country contained approximately 300,000 Jews, a significant number of whom were nonFrench.1 It is calculated that 76,134 were murdered in the Nazi gas chambers in Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka, or were shot by the Germans in France, or died in French concentration camps established in pursuit of France’s own anti-Jewish policies.2 Approximately 74.6 per cent of Jews in France thus escaped extermination under the Nazi Endlösung programme. But in a situation full of paradoxes, which hardly made for good humour in the German camp, the chief paradox is that the majority of the approximately 74,000 Jews deported from France to their deaths in the extermination camps were entrained in 1942. After Germany annexed the unoccupied zone on 11 November 1942, the number of transports and Jews deported dropped significantly.3
