Thread by @RudiGeerts

1/n June 8, 1993: Rene Bousquet, who led the police during the Vichy regime and was responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to German concentration camps during World War II, was assassinated in his Paris apartment

2/n Bousquet's address in Paris was well known because demonstrators placed a plaque in front of his apartment building to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the killings at Vel d'Hiv, a stadium where 4,000 Jews were held before being deported on July 16th and 17th in 1942.

3/n They were among the nearly 13,000 Jews arrested by Paris police on those two days in the biggest single roundup carried out during the war. Nearly all were to die in German concentration camps.
As secretary general of the Vichy police in the Vichy Interior Ministry between

4/n April 1942 and December 1943, Bousquet was a key figure in the deportation of Jews to the Nazi camps.
From 1942 to 1945, 75,721 French Jews were deported to Germany, including 11,000 children, according to figures established by historians. Of these, almost 43,000 were

5/n immediately taken to the gas chambers, with 2,566 survivors counted at the end of the war in 1945.
The Vichy government, directed by Pierre Laval under the authority of Petain, hoped that in return for its collaboration in deporting Jews it would be granted greater freedom of

6/6 action in the liberated zone.
Bousquet was first deprived of his civil rights in 1949 for five years, but the sentence was immediately lifted by a higher court for his alleged role in the resistance.
#JusticeMatters