Two swastikas were discovered in the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, Seine-Saint-Denis, a site where nearly 63,000 Jews were interned during the Second World War before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The symbols were found in separate apartment building entrances: a small swastika on the ground floor and a larger one, nearly one metre in diameter, on the fifth and top floor of the dilapidated building, which is currently undergoing renovation.
The Friends of the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation (AFMD) condemned the act in a Facebook post, expressing “their disgust and condemning this reprehensible act in the strongest terms.”
The association added: “At a time when the values of Liberation are being challenged and the groundwork laid for dangerous ideologies, we call on authorities to ensure that the perpetrators are caught and punished and that the remnants of this tragic past no longer taint our society.”
The Drancy internment camp was the main departure point for Jewish deportees from France to Nazi extermination camps between August 1941 and August 1944. A nearby memorial, close to where the swastikas were found, had previously been vandalised in March 2024.
