THE VEL' D’HIV ROUND UP: ANATOMY OF A CRIME

On 16 and 17 July 1942, 13 152 Jews were arrested in their homes by French police officers before the French State handed them over to the Nazis. This collaboration would lead to their mass extermination. This crime against humanity, born in the minds of the Nazis, but executed under the authority of Marshal Pétain, would leave an everlasting stain on History, Germany, and France. The event would be called the Vel’ d’Hiv round up, after the old Paris velodrome where 8 160 Jews were held, of which 4 115 children. This was just the start of a long ordeal that would take them from the velodrome to the Loiret camps and from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

How was the "round up" carried out? What games of power and ambition did the Vichy policymakers bring into play? What was the French population's inside experience of this event? 

Thanks to the eye-witness accounts of the last survivors, to research by historians Serge Klarsfeld and American Robert Paxton, to recently exhumed archives, and CGI, which will, for the first time recreate the since demolished velodrome, 79 years after the facts, like a post-mortem, this documentary will relate the events that led France to write one of the darkest pages in its history.