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The figures born on this date are few, but the weight of one is considerable. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix served as Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs in Vichy France from 1942 to 1944, overseeing the bureaucratic apparatus that facilitated the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps — including the mass roundup known as the Vél d'Hiv. A virulent antisemite and fraudster long before the war handed him institutional power, he fled to Spain after the Liberation and was convicted of collaboration in absentia. He died in 1980, never having faced justice in person, and notorious to the last for an interview in which he denied the Holocaust.

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December 19, 1897 - Louis Darquier de Pellepoix

As Commissioner-General for Jewish Affairs under Vichy, he oversaw the administrative machinery that facilitated the mass deportation of Jews from France to Nazi concentration camps beginning in 1942. His appointment was made at Nazi Germany's insistence, and he had been openly calling for the expulsion or massacre of Jews in public forums years before taking office. Removed for corruption rather than any change of conscience, he escaped justice by fleeing to Francoist Spain, where he lived out his life protected from extradition — and in 1978 used an interview with a French magazine to deny the Holocaust outright.

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