VICHY (May. 17)
The expulsion of all Jews from France is demanded today in the Paris Soir, a German-controlled evening paper.
Asserting that there are now 1,200,000 Jews in France, which is, of course, not true since the Jewish population in France never exceeded a quarter of a million people, the Paris paper says that “the expulsion of the Jews is imperative, otherwise their growing number will eventually reach a point where it will equal the French population.”
The appointment of an assistant commissioner for Jewish affairs to aid Commissioner Darquier de Pellepoix in his work of “solving the Jewish problem” is announced today in the Official Gazette of the Vichy government. It is assumed that the assistant will operate in unoccupied France, while Pellepoix himself will direct the work from Paris in collaboration with the German occupation authorities there. In the meantime the Paris radio intensified its anti-Jewish broadcasts, demanding that the authorities in Vichy “should not go about solving the Jewish question in a half-hearted fashion, but should find a radical solution for it.”