Joseph Weill

Origins and early life

Joseph Weill was born at Bouxwiller in Alsace on 3 July 1902, son of Ernest Weill, chief rabbi of Colmar and of the Haut-Rhin, and of Clémentine Weill; he trained in medicine at Strasbourg, became a clinic head under Professor Léon Blum, and was one of the first diabetologists in Europe.

Work and career

When the war came he worked as a doctor inside the French internment camps of the south, saw what the administration was doing to the foreign Jews held there, and wrote it down. As medical director of the Œuvre de secours aux enfants he made the decision that saved the greatest number: instead of keeping Jewish children together in the OSE's own homes, where a single raid would take them all, he argued for dispersing them one by one into French families and institutions under false names, and with Georges Garel and Georges Loinger he built the networks that did it.

Several thousand children came through the war that way. Hunted for this work, he crossed clandestinely into Switzerland at Annemasse in March 1943 under the name Jean Valois and went on directing the operation from there. In 1946 he published Contribution à l'histoire des camps d'internement dans l'anti-France, which the historian André Kaspi called the pioneering work on the French camps. He died at Besançon on 11 March 1988.