Between March 1942 and the liberation of France from Nazi rule, some 80,000 French and foreign-born Jews, including 11,400 children, were deported from France to their deaths in the concentration camps, mainly Auschwitz.
They included Jacques Heilbronner, president of the Israelite Central Consistory, the country’s leading Jewish body, the Chief Rabbi of Lyon Bernard Schonberg and many other leading members of the Jewish community who had been desperately negotiating with the Germans in the occupied zone and the authorities in the Vichy zone on behalf of France’s Jews, who were being slowly squeezed of all their rights.
But they had also been appealing for help from the country’s leading Catholics, notably Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon, and Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard, archbishop of Paris. Despite the Catholic Church’s huge importance as a moral guardian, both preferred to sympathise privately with the Jews while avoiding public protests at the appalling tragedy unfolding in front of their eyes.
Yet from the moment Hitler had taken over in Germany in 1933 and started subjecting Jews to the worst forms of persecution, Suhard’s predecessor Cardinal Jean Verdier had been outspoken in his opposition to Nazism, as indeed had Pope Pius XI in Rome. But by 1940 both were dead and had been replaced by more cautious leaders, Suhard and Pope Pius XII.
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