May 14, 1941
Green Ticket Roundup Arrests Foreign Jews in Paris
Historical context
On this day, May 14, 1941, French police arrested 3,710 foreign Jewish men in Paris who answered green-ticket summonses and sent them to camps in the Loiret.
Archive record
Read the event, then follow its documented sources and archive threads.
- Date
- May 14, 1941
- Verified sources
- 2
- Archive threads
- 4
On this day, French police carried out the rafle du billet vert, the first mass arrest of Jews in occupied France. Green summonses had gone to foreign Jewish men, mostly Polish, for a supposed status check. The Mémorial de la Shoah records that 3,710 men who appeared were arrested and sent that day to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
Those camps were then under French administration. Many of the men were deported to Auschwitz in 1942. Yad Vashem’s France overview gives a higher arrest figure, “more than 5,000.”
Research trail
Sources and further reading
- 98 photos inédites sur la rafle du « Billet vert » · Mémorial de la Shoah · Mémorial de la Shoah View source
- The First Wave of Arrests in France: May 1941 · Yad Vashem · The Holocaust in France View source
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