98 Unseen Photographs from 1941 Paris Jewish Roundup Exhibited Publicly for First Time

Ninety-eight photographs taken during the 'Rafle du billet vert' (the Green Ticket Roundup) of May 14, 1941 — the first large-scale French police roundup of Jewish men in Nazi-occupied Paris — were exhibited to the public for the first time at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris on May 10, 2026, and at the French Embassy in Berlin on May 11, 2026, the 85th anniversary of the raid. The photographs were taken by Harry Croner, a Berlin photographer of partial Jewish heritage who had been drafted into the Wehrmacht and assigned to document the arrests for Gestapo officer Theodor Dannecker. During the raid, French police arrested approximately 3,800 Jewish men — mostly Polish, Czech, and Austrian citizens — and interned them at the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande transit camps in the Loire region. Of those arrested, approximately 3,100 were subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in July 1942 and murdered. Croner's photographs, preserved in the German Federal Archives, were largely unknown to the public until their discovery and authentication by Holocaust researchers affiliated with the Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany). Euronews reported that the images 'give victims of the Nazi era a face' — humanizing the thousands of men who passed through the French police's roundup system before the far larger Vél d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942. The Berlin exhibition ran through July 9, 2026. The May 10, 1940 date was also significant as the 86th anniversary of the German invasion of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg — the assault that enabled four years of Nazi occupation across Western Europe.