Template talk:Holocaust France

Resistance - individuals and organizations
Would it not be appropriate to add header and suitable content?  Deborahjay (talk) 11:19, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

Notable perpetrators
I'm uncomfortable having names listed in the perpetrators section that are red links. That would seem to indicate that they're not considered important enough to have their own article. The list is: Horst Ahnert, Kurt Blanke, Hans-Dietrich Ernst, Herbert Hagen, Ernst Heinrichsohn, Carltheo Zeitschel. While red links in articles are one thing, I don't feel they belong in a Navbox. We should either get rid of them (my preference) or make interwiki links out of them, showing that at least one other wiki has them. These links could serve, if we go that way: Note that the whole point of this template, is that as soon as someone creates the English article, the red link goes away and so does the little parenthetical lang indicator so it becomes just a normal-looking link. My reason for preferring removing the links, is that their lack of notability outweighs the small numbers who cold read the articles in a foreign language. Mathglot (talk) 06:12, 7 July 2015 (UTC) Edited by Mathglot (talk) 06:15, 7 July 2015 (UTC)


 * Added the interlanguage links for now. Mathglot (talk) 22:34, 10 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Have thought some more about this, and at this point, I'm in favor of keeping the interlanguage links. Whether English speakers can read the foreign language articles or not is secondary, imho, to the fact that the template becomes a centralized location to gather related links about the topic, some of which may draw the attention of interested translators prepared to translate some of the missing articles into English (at which point, the red links will automagically become blue links to the English article with no further action required). Mathglot (talk) 02:13, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Witness testimony group
I recently added the Witnesses group to the Template to highlight the names of those people who witnessed the Holocaust first-hand and later wrote or spoke about their experiences publicly. This edit was deleted within hours with the somewhat cryptic edit summary "Wrong. imates are witnesses and Survivors".

I believe the revert was due to a misunderstanding about what the new group is about, perhaps because the original group name, "Witnesses," was unclear. So I wanted to explain the purpose of the new group, show how it differs from the existing template groups 'Victims,' and 'Survivors', and demonstrate why the new group is an improvement to the template.

The goal of the (now renamed) Witness testimony group is different from that of the Survivors group. Its purpose is to highlight those people with first-hand knowledge of the Holocaust in France who later wrote, spoke, testified, or otherwise shared their experiences with the public in one form or another. Most often, that testimony came in the form of books or memoirs written about their experiences of deportation and concentration camps, but some shared their experiences in the form of speeches, interviews, addresses to schools, testimony in war crimes trials, partipation in Holocaust-related memorial organizations, or public exchanges in local or national government. It is in good measure due to their testimony, along with documents and archives, that we know the details of the Holocaust insofar as it affected French Jews.

As such, the new group overlaps the "Survivors" group, but it is not congruent with it for two reasons: one, not all survivors gave witness; and two, some who witnessed the camp conditions were not Holocaust survivors.

About 2,500 French Jews survived deportation and the concentration camps. By far the majority of them did not write about their experiences or give speeches, they simply tried to pick up their lives and move on. Only a tiny proportion of survivors published books or spoke publicly. That is what the new template group is for&mdash;namely to enumerate those who spoke out publicly about their experiences, and in so doing, helped preserve the memory of the Holocaust in France.

Secondly, by some people's reckoning, non-Jewish political prisoners who were deported to the camps because of their Resistance activities would not be considered "Holocaust victims" per se, because they were not rounded up because of their religion; but if they witnessed what happened to Jews in the camps and published their accounts of it, then they are eyewitness reporters of the French Holocaust, and they are part of this group as well. Included in this category for example, are Edmond Michelet, André Rogerie, David Rousset, and Germaine Tillion. Furthermore, those in the Allied armies under General Eisenhower who liberated the camps and saw the horrors, and the journalists and photographers that were called in to witness and write about it could also be part of this group, to the extent that they interviewed or photographed French survivors.

Here are some of the figures who both witnessed, and spoke out publicly in some form about the Holocaust in France:


 * - Auschwitz survivor. Published Sans armes et sans bagages [Without Weapons or Luggage] in 1947; secretary general of Amicale d'Auschwitz; publishes articles regularly in the Patriote Résistant; updated accounts published in 1980 as Le Temps écartelé.
 * - Auschwitz survivor. Published his survivor memoir fr:C'est en hiver que les jours rallongent [The Days Get Longer in Winter] in 2002, and in 2009, 186 marches which tell the story of the deaths of thousands of deportees at the hands of the nazis
 * - escaped Auschwitz. Testifies to his experiences, e.g., in various filmed memoirs and documentaries, and published Merci d'avoir survécu [Thanks for Surviving] in 2011.
 * - Resistance member, hid and helped families, Auschwitz survivor and death march escapee. Heads three Holocaust-related deportee associations, participated in the 1987 Barbie trial, and gives testimony in speeches, articles, conferences, interviews, and colloquia.
 * Simon Gronowski - [removed from list; he was from Belgium, not France.]
 * - teenage survivor of Auschwitz and death march. Published Si tu t'en sors] [If You Make It] in 1992.]
 * - One of two survivors of 210 deported from Rouen to Auschwitz and Sobibor. In the 1990s, she begain to recounted her experiences in schools across France, then appeared on television, and published her 1945 memoir, led and filmed various group excursions to Auschwitz,
 * - rabbi, resistance member, hid and helped children of Toulouse to escape, arrested, freed, arrested, escaped, arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, sent to Auschwitz but jumped from the train, arriving in Paris the day of its liberation. Published his memoirs about the war years in 1985.
 * Sarah Kofman - A philosopher with numerous books to her credit, she was eight when her father was arrested by Vichy polic and deported; she later wrote of those early memories in one of her books.
 * Edmond Michelet - French politician and Resistance member; a Catholic, he helped many Shoah victims in France. Sent to Dachau and survived, beatified for his works in saving French Jews. Published his book about Dachau in 1955.  French Minister of Justice.
 * André Rogerie - a Catholic and member of the Resistance, he was arrested and deported to Buchenwald (and Auschwitz and other camps). Published his memoir in 1945. When Holocaust denial began to gain notice, he began again to write and give speeches to fight against Holocaust revisionism.
 * David Rousset - French writer and survivor of Neunegamme and Buchenwald. He published two books about his experiences in the camps,
 * Jorge Semprún - Spanish writer who lived and wrote primarily in French. Resistance member, survived Buchenwald. He published books in 1963 and 1980 about his deportation and camp experiences.
 * Germaine Tillion - Raised in a bourgeois Catholic family, became a Resistance member, assisted Jewish families, deported to Ravensbruck. Wrote a detailed account of the camp, including the gas chamber. She received numerous awards, including Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor.
 * Simone Veil - French politician, survived Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and death march. Served as Minister of Health under Estaing, President of the European Parliament, President of Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah; numerous honors including Academie Francaise.
 * - Survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald; testified in the trial of Maurice Papon.

The words of the people in this list constitute an important part of the historical record, and are one foundation upon which historians base the story of the Holocaust in France.. They are the first bulwark against Holocaust denial or revisionism. These people saw what happened with their own eyes and shared it with the public to preserve the record. Listing their names in a named group as Witnesses to the Holocaust is an improvement to the template, and should remain. There may still remain a question as to what the name of the template group should be; 'Witnesses' was apparently too short or unclear, as it provoked a revert; I hope 'Witness Testimony' is clearer, but I'm open to suggestions. Mathglot (talk) 02:06, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

References for "Witness testimony" group

New entries and categories
Hi Folks, I plan to add a new category and some additional entries:
 * Henri Manen I think he was Righteous amongst the nations.
 * Jewish resistance in France New category possibly?
 * Union générale des israélites de France New category possibly?
 * Police for Jewish Affairs Possibly. Don't know how it fits.
 * Royallieu-Compiègne internment camp. Internment camp if not already on it.
 * Raymond-Raoul Lambert Don't know how it fits in.

 scope_creep Talk  23:58, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

I was planning to put laws in as well, the most important ones anyway.  scope_creep Talk  10:58, 27 July 2021 (UTC)


 * As far as laws, some of this is covered at Template:Vichy France and if we wanted to add some laws we could copy from there. When thinking about adding new sections, like laws, we have to think about what really counts as "The Holocaust" and what isn't strictly part of the Holocaust, but maybe, say, "Antisemitism in France". For example, wearing of the yellow badge, or the propaganda exhibition Le Juif en France are both clearly antisemitic actions, but they are more lead-ins, or precursors of the Holocaust, so I wouldn't consider them part of the Holocaust, the same way that, say, the deportation convoys were definitely part of it.
 * On the other hand, the yellow badges, the antisemitic propaganda, and the restrictive laws all played a role in laying the groundwork making the Holocaust in France possible, so I think a new section right at the top called "Precursors" or "Prelude" or "Background" or something like that could be added to include things like those that weren't strictly part of it, but led to it. As an example, see the top section at Template:Vichy France; the Dreyfus Affair and the War Guilt Clause are clearly not part of Vichy, but each in its own way were important factors that led to Vichy. We could do something similar in this template. Mathglot (talk) 20:16, 11 November 2021 (UTC)