Cracking Down
As Germany's capital in France and the Vichy regime's judicial headquarters, Paris was particularly touched by crackdowns that seldom received any publicity. Neither the occupying forces nor the Vichy authorities wished to publicly inform the people about the realities of the regime or the scale of Resistance activities. Internments, executions, and torture did not become public spectacles, and deportations were kept secret. Only a few executions were publicized through "notices" or small posters. Prisons were over-crowded, as widespread crackdowns caused the number of ordinary citizens who were incarcerated to double. The Nazis further reduced prison space by requisitioning parts of some prisons to serve as "German Quarters" or German military barracks. In Paris, Vichy's "Special Sections" and "Courts martial" condemned approximately forty death row prisoners to death. The German crackdown surpassed by far the scale of Vichy’s repressive activities. The Oberg-Bousquet Accords of 1942 and 1943 reveal that the French police were directly involved in German crackdowns, however. During the Occupation, over 800 prisoners sentenced by the German military justice of "Gross-Paris," as well as nearly 400 hostages, were executed, most of them at Mont-Valérien.
In addition to firing squads, there were also deaths by torture. Jean Moulin was held in a cell at the "villa Boemelburg" in Neuilly for two weeks before dying in transit to Germany. Paris was the deportation hub for German prisons as well as concentration and extermination camps. Over 120,000 deportees left from the Gare de l'Est and the Gare du Nord, as well as stations at Pantin, Compiègne, and Bourget-Drancy. Deportees included 71,000 Jewish children and adults, nearly 50,000 resistance fighters, and a range of other internees. Inhabitants of the Department of the Seine comprised approximately half of the convoys bound for Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Treblinka and roughly one-fifth of those transported to Buchenwald, Neuengamme, Dachau, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler and Ravensbrück.
