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The 1985 law
concerning Jewish deportees

After 1945, when it appeared that many deportees had "disappeared", their families obtained official acts equivalent to a death certificate. In the beginning, it was decided that the "death place" would be the last internment camp where the future deportee was detained (Drancy, Pithiviers...) and that the "death date" would be the date of departure of the convoy.

This was obviously a strong distortion of history so that on May 15, 1985, forty years after the end of WW2, a French law was promulgated to correct this nonsense.

According to this law, the death records of all people deported from France should be modified and carry the mention "dead in deportation". When nothing is known concerning the actual fate of the deportee, the death is presumed to have occurred 5 days after the departure of the convoy.

Note that this concerns all deportees, Jews or non-jews. An important source exists therefore, it is the French Journal Officiel where are published, since 1986, the decrees which contain the lists of people officially declared “dead in deportation”.

At the present day (March 2010), i.e. 25 years after this law was promulgated, these rectifications of the death acts are not completed.

From the figures given on the Website of the "Fundation for the Memory of the Deportation" (not to be confused with the Fundation for the Memory of the Shoah), one finds:
85,000 people deported as an effect of the nazi repression : resistants, political opponents, hostages or victims of reprisals (figures known in 1999). Among these, 40 % did not come back, i.e. about 34,000 persons.
76,000 people deported (including 11,000 children) as an effect of the antisemitic persecutions. Among these, 97 % did not come back, i.e. about 74,000 persons.
115.500
The total number of persons who did not come back from deportation is thus about 108,000. (115.500 according to the last official numbers given by the French Ministry)

The ministerial orders ("arrêtés") published in the Journal Officiel give the official nominative lists of the persons "dead in deportation". On August 8, 2003, the total number of names in these arrêtés was only 48,000 and not much was done since. Therefore almost 60,000 people are scandalously missing, including almost all children. Moreover, many mistakes can be found in these lists.

Where can these lists be found ? In the Journal Officiel and in two Websites. See also the website Mort en déportation.