Directive from German 'Security Police' to remove Jews from Poitiers Jan 1944

I’ve put this up because a) it was the local directive that would prove fatal for my father’s uncle and b) because it gives us all an insight into the methods and processes of the Nazi genocide machine. Note the precision about logistics but the lie about Jews’ supposed collective guilt. Remember it’s the Nazis who are the illegitimate occupying army. 

This command went from the regional prefect to the local prefect to the police who arrested 31 Jews and shipped them to Drancy, to Paris and then Auschwitz. Note also it’s ‘of all nationalities’ by this point. These commands had been directed to foreign-born Jews up till then. One way Vichy claimed these acts were 'legitimate' was because it was getting rid of people who weren't French. At this point, Vichy's collaboration crossed a line because it was collaborating with people (the Nazis) who were deporting French people whose only 'crime' was that they were born Jewish. This is not me legitimating the deportation of foreign-born Jews (of course not) but it's worth noting the line being crossed here.

From: Kommandant der Sicherheitspolizei und des S.D. in Poitiers

Poitiers, le 27 janvier 1944 (January 27)

To Mr Regional Prefect, in Poitiers

Subject: the removal (‘écartement’) of the Jews from the Poitiers Region.

In recent times, there have been multiple cases of Jews being involved in acts of terrorism and sabotage, discovered taking part in the communist movement and being known as principal actors or instigators in other anti-German organisations. As a result, I am requesting you, in this case of security measures which must be taken out of all necessity, to arrest in the first hours of January 31, 1944 and then later at 3 o’clock in the morning, all Jews still present in the region, without regard for their nationality or their age and to transfer them as soon as possible to the closed camp for Jews in Drancy. The families must be taken in groups. This measure also extends to Jews who live in a mixed marriage, and also to people who count as Jews and to Jews by religion (‘confession‘) who come from a mixed marriage, also to Jews working for French or German households [‘maisons’ nb this might mean ‘businesses’] or in work camps (for example, O.T.) ** [see below] The Jews are authorised to take winter clothes with them on the journey and the usual necessary utensils, as well as some food for 3 days. We will let them take money (‘argent des devises’) and valuable objects.

The sick - that is, those who will not be able to manage the journey - must produce a medical certificate and should be interned in the nearest hospital.

You will present to us in three letters - one for each ‘département‘ [like a ‘county‘ in Britain] a list of arrested Jews and a list of Jews interned in the hospitals. These lists must include the following points:

the order number, surname, first name, date and place of birth, country of residence, street and number, profession and day of arrest.

The Jews’ lodgings must be closed and placed under German seals.

[Original written in French, source: in facsimile p.97
‘La Traque, le destin des juifs de Vendée pendant la seconde guerre mondiale’
Louis Gouraud
Éditions Les Chantuseries (2015)]

** "O.T." =

About this website

FR.WIKIPEDIA.ORG

Organisation Todt — Wikipédia

L’Organisation Todt[a] (OT en abrégé) était un groupe de génie civil et militaire du Troisième Reich. Elle portait le nom de celui qui a été son fondateur et son dirigeant jusqu'en 1942, Fritz Todt, un ingénieur et une figure importante du nazisme, en tant que mandataire général pour la ...

Chain of command

Hitler wanted to remove and eliminate Jews from Germany and from Europe.
In his power elite, there was Himmler who was head of the SS, an 'elite' corps whose job was in part to implement all 'security' arrangements.
Eichmann was one of Himmler's officers who implemented the 'idea' of eliminating Jews in various parts of Europe, including France.
Knochen and Oberg were the main officers in charge of implementing the eliminating of Jews from France.
Laval was the 'chief of government' for the Vichy regime and who did what he could to carry out Nazi ideas and instructions.
Bousquet and then Darnand were in charge directly of carrying out Laval's and Eichmann's instructions.
Regionally,, the 'Prefects' and 'sub-Prefects' in France, were in charge of the police and 'security' so in Poitiers, this was Bourgain.
In the Vendée this was Jammet.
In the villages of the Vendée the gendarmes implemented the new instructions of January 1944.
In one village, on January 30, and 31 in Sainte-Hermine, this was officers Le Papu, Salomon, Mazouin and Cabanetos.
They arrested Martin Rozen, a naturalised Frenchman, who was transported from Sainte-Hermine to Auschwitz on a convoy of trucks that left Paris on February 10 1944.

Martin Rozen 1890-1944 or 45

On 31 January 1944, officers Salomon, Mazouin, and Cabanetos 

under command of Adjutant Le Papu,

from the Fontanay-le-Comte station,

in the Sainte-Hermine Brigade

and under instructions from the Prefect,

according to the decree of Jan 20 1944

called at 2.30 in the morning

at the living quarters of Martin Rozen

in a property owned by Mme Bobières née Meunier

in the village of Sainte-Hermine in the Vendée, in western France.

The officers say in their report that Martin Rozen opened the door. They took him and drove him to the station.

Martin Rozen, the report goes on,

was born on 18 August 1890

at Krosniewice in Poland. He was a jeweller

son of Jonas and Rachel. He was naturalised

French, Jewish race.

1 metre 62 in height,

brown eyes

oval face

straight nose

regular mouth

dressed in yellow cotton trousers and grey cotton jacket

wearing a Basque beret and low-heeled shoes.

He had a scar on his left cheek.

He was taken to the Parish Hall at La Roche-sur-Yon where he met up with 30 other Jews taken that night.

They were taken to the train station, put on a wagon for La Rochelle, then Poitiers, then Drancy internment camp. From there he was taken to Paris Bobigny, put on Convoy 68 on February 10 and taken to Auschwitz.

On March 28 1944,

Mme Bobières wrote to the Prefect of the Vendée at 

Roche-sur-Yon informing him that the ‘Feldgendarmerie’ and the ‘Gendarmerie’ came to her house on January 31st and took Mr Rosen, of Jewish nationality, who had been staying in her house for more than a year.

A wicker basket containing some linen belonging to Mr Rosen had been left in the room, which had been sealed up by the Gendarmes.

In this room, Mme Bobières writes, "is my furniture, including a large cupboard, containing things that are indispensable for my personal use: sheets, clothes, linen, blankets and family papers. 

Besides that, Rosen’s brother-in-law who lives in the next room, and who is French, would look after the wicker basket, which is the only piece of furniture belonging to Rosen. 

I am 71 years old and infirm. I have the honour of soliciting your goodwill in taking off the seals to this room. 

I thank you, Monsieur Le Préfet and hope you will accept my respectful compliments.

Mme Bobières."

On the 15 April

the Prefect informed Mme Bobières that she would only be able to take the seals off as and when the Occupation authorities would allow it.

Martin Rozen is my father’s uncle.

He didn’t return from Auschwitz.

His name is engraved on the commemorative wall at the 

Museum of the Shoah in Paris.

New 'Alice in Wonderland' manuscript discovered: 'Alice in the House'.

Alice walked into the house and it was very noisy. People were standing up and sitting down and nearly everyone was shouting things like ‘Here!’ and ‘No!’. That’s funny, thought Alice, where I come from it’s ‘here and now’. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing, she thought. 

Some people started talking about a motion. She had heard the doctor talking about that when her mother had had digestion difficulties and that’s what it seemed like when a lot of the people started shouting about passing the motion which was, sad to say, proving to be very difficult. Never put off till tomorrow, what you can do today, thought Alice to herself, remembering what her mother said.

Everyone was getting very cross and and shouting in particular at the Queen of the May. 

‘She’s called that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘because she may. Then again, she may not.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Alice.

‘Neither do I,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘why should I understand everything I say? I certainly don’t say everything I understand.’

‘Order!’ shouted the man everyone was calling Mr Squeaker. 

‘Is he called Mr Squeaker because he squeaks?’ said Alice.

‘No,’ said a particularly angry, sneery creature called the Gibblet, ‘he’s Mr Squeaker because he’s a little pip squeak and we hate him.’

‘Oh,’ said Alice, ‘I think we’ll all get on much better if we don’t hate each other quite so much.’

‘Rubbish,’ said the Gibblet, ‘I hate teachers and it’s never done me any harm.’

‘Has it done the teachers any harm?’ said Alice.

‘Who cares about them?’ said the Gibblet looking happier for a moment than he had looked ever since he first met his little friends the Phonics.

Just then, one of the people who had been shouting ‘Here!’ and ‘No!’ got up to speak. 

‘What we need now is impagination...’ 

At least that’s what Alice thought he said. 

‘...otherwise we’ll never get out of this hole,’ he went on.

Oh, thought Alice, he knows about the rabbit hole I fell down, but why does he think we’ll get out with...what was it? ...impagination? 

‘We need to get off this page,’ he want on.

‘Ah, I see,’ said Alice, realising what this impagination meant. They need more pages.

Rather hoping she could make the Gibblet less angry and less sneery, Alice turned to him and said, ‘That’s nice,they need more impagination.’

For some reason this annoyed the Gibblet even more. 

‘Impagination! Impagination!’ he snorted. ‘What sort of lily-livered, antsy-fancy, snowflakey stuff is that?’

He didn’t wait for an answer.

‘We need Norwich and Phonics,’ he shouted, ‘we need a Norwich-led Funiculum and more and more and more Phonics.’

This seemed to be a signal because about a hundred little Phonics rushed up to the Gibblet like a host of puppies and started licking him and making funny noises: ber, ber, ber and ker, ker, ker. 

The Gibblet stood up and the Squeaker called out in his very loud voice: ‘The Gibblet!’

And then the Gibblet said, ‘I love you, Queen of the May. Your deal is wonderful. It’s the nicest deal I’ve ever seen. I want to take it home and clutch it to me like a long lost friend. I wish everyone else thought your deal was as nice as I think it is.’

At this a very large lugubrious-looking cat, the Rees Mog, gathered together an enormous amount of cat mucus in the back of its throat, swirled it round its mouth and gobbed it on the floor. 

‘Fie on thee,’ it said in a tired, languid, mournful way, ‘I will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness. Herein do I imitate the sun who doth allow the base, contagious clouds cover up his beauty from - ‘ 

‘We need impagination!’ shouted someone behind him.

‘I abolished impagination!’ shouted the Gibblet back at him.

The whole house went very quiet.  

‘Yes,’ said the Gibblet, his eyes gleaming while the little Phonics nuzzled his knees, ‘when the Mimsy Borogove brought in the Norwich-led Funiculum, we abolished impagination. How can you have impagination if you haven’t got Norwich?’ he said looking at the people around him as if they might just possibly be the kind of idiot who did think you could have impagination without Norwich. 

He sat down.

Strangely no one in the house congratulated him for making this speech, for the only people who loved him were the little Phonics.  

‘When you’re a big boy like me,’ said the Rees Mog, purring at himself in a large mirror he carried with him, ‘you’ll get subordinate claws like mine.’

This only enraged the Gibblet even more, because he remembered that time when an irritating woman called Mirther Kernel asked him whether he knew what subordinate claws were. And he didn’t. And Mirther Kernel laughed. 

Alice walked on. 

Leave, Remain, Bremain, Rexit - it's not our battle.

1. I assume that groups of capitalists and their sponsors in public and in government try very hard to do things which they think are best for capitalism.

2. This often brings them into conflict or disagreement with each other. This is mostly because the whole point of capitalism is that capitalists are in competition with each other (for markets, for labour) but also because there are 'sectional interests' e.g. finance capital may not think in exactly the same way as manufacturing capital, agri-business may not think in the same way as say the drugs business and so on. Similarly the supply chains or the markets for different sections of capital may be different.

3. The Leave or Remain episode in history is one of these moments of sectional and intersectional disputes within capitalism. Different capitalists, different sections and blocs of capital with different views on how best to keep labour costs low (wages), how best to secure markets, how best to keep raw materials costs low etc. 

4. At any given moment it may seem as if one or other scenario or outcome posed by one or other of these sectional interests of capitalism may be favourable to working class people (here meant to refer to anyone whose sole source of income is the wages they earn by working) but in reality and in the long terms, surely, these are illusions - and as much an illusion as when governments announce that going to war will be in the interests of 'the public'. 

5. I hate the fact that so much energy is being expended by socialists and left democrats in trying to conjure up the 'best' scenarios for Leave or Remain as if these are 'solutions' for austerity - the latest and most potent phase in the employing class's efforts to keep wages low, and to cut back or eliminate the welfare state. I genuinely wish that the Labour Party had taken the stance of militant abstention, saying instead that the battle going on is 'not ours' and that their first and only priority was and is to fight for the NHS, Education, the welfare state and wages. 'Hey Tories, you get on with it...you will come up with some arrangement or other, within which some (maybe most) capitalists will be content and get on with what they do. In the meantime, we will fight for these things that mean we can raise the standard of living of working people, and in so doing enable millions of people to see that the obstacle to us having a safe, fair, peaceful and just world is not 'Remain' or 'Brexit' but the ownership and control of the resources of the planet being in the hands of a tiny minority.

Thoughts on education, the arts, assessment and schools

1. Spluttered coffee moment: heard people on radio saying that to get out of this Brexit impasse,  May and/govt need ‘imagination’ and ‘creativity’. What???!!! The govt (Gove and Gibb) abolished that stuff. We do eBacc, ‘rich knowledge’ with ‘right/wrong’ answers now.

2. When you squash and squeeze the arts out of schools, you not only deprive students of a chance to get arts qualifications, you deprive everyone in a school community of what the arts can offer as a way of interpreting the world - the mix of feeling and ideas.

3. People in power in education have prioritised ‘knowledge’ and downgraded the arts unless they can be turned into their idea of ‘knowledge’ = the western canon, right-wrong answers, ‘info necessary to understand this’, and what can be instructed/tested.

4. People in power in education think if you turn knowledge into ‘that which can be tested’, demand teachers teach it, test children for their ability do it right/wrong, and if  scores go up  = ‘raising standards’ . 

But

There

Are

Other

Kinds

Of

Knowledge.

5. If only the imposition of the present ‘assessment’ methods in education had instead been a matter of open discussion about pros and cons re ‘formative’, ‘summative’, ‘criterion’ v ‘norm’, locally monitored or national, high/low-stakes, league tables or none, we could’ve arrived at age-appropriate, education-appropriate, thought-appropriate systems.

6. It is vital for the government to get as many people as possible thinking and saying that higher exam grades is identical to ‘raising educational standards’. The fact that exams change, teachers’ familiarity with systems increases and the results are ‘managed’ must be ignored.

What does it mean to read and understand a text: short bibliography

Some Reader-Response titles especially in relation to education:


The Dynamics of Literary Response by Norman N. Holland

Where Texts and Children Meet, eds Eve Bearne and Victor Watson

The Social Construction of Meaning, reading literature in urban classrooms, by John Yandell [secondary]

The Reading Environment, Aidan Chambers

Reading and Response, eds Michael Hayhoe and Stephen Parker

Talking, Listening, Learning, effective talk in the Primary Classroom by Debra Myhill, Susan Jones, Rosemary Hopper

How texts teach what readers learn, Margaret Meek 

Creativity in Language and Literature, the state of the art, edited by Joan Swann, Rob Pope Ronald Carter

Readers, Texts, Teachers, Bill Corcoran and Emrys Evans

Understanding Teenagers' Reading, Jack Thomson