Daniel LEE

Project at the MaCI

April - June 2024

As a MaCI fellow, Daniel Lee will be working on his third monograph, The Roundup: Marseille, January 1943. Lee’s research project reconsiders the Vél d’Hiv roundup of July 1942 in Paris as the key moment of the Holocaust in France. By examining the untold story of the Marseille roundup of Jews in January 1943, and exposing its unique features, he will transform understanding of the mechanisms of violence and discrimination during the Holocaust in France.  To decentre the story of the roundups of Jews away from Paris, suggests a new way to understand the experiences of Jews in Vichy France.

A case study of Marseille considers other sections of France’s Jewish population which remain invisible when placing a Parisian and Ashkenazic-centric version of events at the heart of the narrative. The stakes of this research extend beyond France: a study of Marseille will illuminate the transnational nature of the Final Solution. To examine the life trajectories of lower-ranking Nazis brought to Marseille from the killing fields of eastern Europe exposes how ideas developed in the east were put into practice in the west. Following these biographies brings together two historiographies – The Holocaust in Eastern versus Western Europe – that are usually considered separately.  Lee’s research will be the first to reveal how the roundup was executed and experienced. It will employ microhistory as a methodological approach, which until now has featured only sporadically in studies of the Holocaust in France, to piece together events. This project relies on sources available in archives in France, Germany and Israel, some of which have only recently been declassified.

« By the end of this two-month fellowship, I will have completed reading a large part of the secondary literature and will be familiar with all the relevant historiographical debates. I will also have began looking at some primary materials. »