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The exhibition is based on the discovery of five photographic contact sheets containing 98 images. Only a small number of them had previously been known to specialists and published. The rest remained unseen for decades. Together, they form a complete photographic report of the so-called “green ticket” roundup, ordered by the German occupiers and carried out by French authorities.
The name of the roundup comes from the green summonses sent by the French police to foreign Jews living in Paris. Between 9 and 13 May 1941, 6,494 men received orders to report on 14 May, bringing identity documents and accompanied by a relative or friend. Many obeyed, believing that the summons might concern the regularisation of their legal status. Around 3,700 men were arrested. At the Gymnase Japy alone, nearly 800 people were summoned before being transferred via Austerlitz station to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
The photographs show not only the men who were arrested, but also the women and children who accompanied them that day, bringing suitcases, waiting, saying goodbye, or trying to understand what was happening. Their fate is an essential part of the story. The internment of the men meant the loss of income, fear, isolation and uncertainty for their families. A year later, many of the women and children present during the “green ticket” roundup would themselves become victims of the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 16 and 17 July 1942.
The exhibition also reconstructs the investigation that led to the identification of the photographer: Harry Croner, a Berlin photographer who served in the Propaganda Kompanie of the Wehrmacht between 1940 and 1941. This context is crucial. The images were not taken from a neutral position. They were produced from within the German military and propaganda apparatus, before censorship selected what could be used. Looking at them today therefore requires both historical attention and ethical caution.
Croner’s biography adds another difficult layer to the story. Born in Berlin in 1903, he became a portrait photographer before being drafted into the Wehrmacht. He was later declared unfit for military service after the Wehrmacht discovered that his father was Jewish. In 1943, he was arrested as a Jew, and in 1944 interned in a labour camp in France. After the war, he returned to Berlin and became a well-known press photographer. In 1989, he donated his photographic archive to the city of Berlin.
The fact that the raw photographic sequence has survived allows historians and visitors to see more than a censored propaganda product. It reveals moments of separation, anxiety, humiliation and administrative violence. It also restores visibility to individual people who were caught in the first large-scale arrest of Jews in France, an event still less widely known than later roundups.
The exhibition was scientifically curated by Lior Lalieu, head of the photographic archive at the Mémorial de la Shoah, and historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus. It is accompanied by the book La Rafle du billet vert. 14 mai 1941. Les photos retrouvées, published by Calmann-Lévy and the Mémorial de la Shoah.
Images of the “Green Ticket” Roundup is more than the presentation of a rare photographic discovery. It is an invitation to look carefully at historical evidence, to question the circumstances in which it was created, and to restore names, faces and human presence to people whom the machinery of persecution sought first to isolate, then to erase.