French President Emmanuel Macron marked 80 years since Nazi forces raided a Jewish orphanage in the southeast of France and sent almost all its occupants to extermination camps.
The event is among the first of a sequence of ceremonies Macron will lead this year to mark eight decades since the penultimate year of World War II that in the summer of 1944 saw D-Day followed by the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.
On April 6, 1944, the 44 Jewish children aged four to 12 then hosted in the orphanage were rounded up by the Gestapo with their seven instructors, also Jewish.
The raid was carried out on the orders of Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon”. Barbie fled to South America after the war but was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 and in 1987 was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of crimes against humanity. He died in prison in 1991.
All the Izieu victims were deported to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland or to German-occupied Estonia. Only one instructor survived.
The event was intended to celebrate “the commitment of those who stood up against Nazism by welcoming the victims of persecution, and of those who opposed the abomination of republican values, by bringing the executioner Klaus Barbie to justice,” the French presidency said.
