New photos reveal first roundup of Jews in Paris in 1941

Five contact sheets, 98 photographs in all, have added a rare visual record to one of the darkest episodes in occupied Paris. The Mémorial de la Shoah said the images document the “Billet vert,” or Green Ticket, roundup of May 14, 1941, the first mass arrest of Jews in Paris under the Vichy regime. Taken by a German soldier on propaganda duty, the photos show the arrest scene from several angles and capture the people involved, not just the handful of images historians had previously known.

Most of the pictures were shot at the Japy sports hall in Paris’s 11th arrondissement, where close to 1,000 people were arrested. The roundup was carried out by French police at the initiative of German authorities, and it targeted about 3,700 to more than 6,000 foreign Jews in Paris and nearby areas. Many of those summoned were Polish and Czech Jews, called in by a green ticket that made the arrest look like an administrative check rather than the start of mass detention. The collection was acquired from two specialist collectors, giving historians a broader, harsher view of how the operation unfolded.

The new images matter because the 1941 roundup has long been overshadowed by the better-known Vél d’Hiv roundup of July 16 and 17, 1942. That later operation led to the arrest of 12,884 to 13,152 Jews, including 4,115 children, and remains the largest mass arrest of Jews in western Europe during the war. Many were sent first to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, with very few surviving. The newly surfaced photographs do not change that chronology, but they deepen the record of how France’s wartime persecution of Jews began, and how ordinary police procedures were used to mask persecution.

The exhibition opened in May 2021, exactly 80 years after the roundup, first outside the Gymnase Japy before moving to the Mémorial de la Shoah. A plaque commemorating the Green Ticket roundup was unveiled in Paris in 2022, part of a broader effort to confront French collaboration and to restore names, faces and stories to the victims. In a country still reckoning with the scale of its role under Vichy, the photographs do more than document an arrest. They widen the historical frame, forcing Paris to look again at how the persecution started, and who helped make it happen.