Concentration Camps in France - World War II Camps

World War II Camps

• Aincourt, in Seine-et-Oise, is the first internment camp in the Northern Zone. It was opened on October 5, 1940, and quickly filled with members of the French Communist Party (PCF)
• Les Alliers, near Angoulême, in Charente
• Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans (Saline royale d'Arc-et-Senans) in the Doubs, used for Gypsies
• Avrillé-les-Ponceaux in Indre-et-Loire, camp of the Morellerie for Gypsies
• Le Barcarès in the Roussillon
• Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp at Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret
• Bourg-Lastic in the Puy de Dôme, a former military camp where Jews where detained (André Glucksmann was detained there during four years). The camp was used to intern Harkis in the 1960s and Kurdish refugees from Iraq in the 1980s (see below).
• Bram in the Aude (1939–1940)
• Brens in the Tarn, near Gaillac (1939–1940)
• Choiseul, in Chateaubriant in Brittany, in Loire-Atlantique (1941–1942)
• Camp of Royallieu in Compiègne in Picardie (June 1941 to August 1944). It was used to intern the Jewish detainees arrested during the January 1943 Battle of Marseille. Robert Desnos (1900–1945) and famous French Resistant Jean Moulin (1899–1943) transited through this camp.
• Coudrecieux in the Sarthe, used to intern Gypsies
• Douadic in the Indre department
• Drancy internment camp: On 20 August 1941, French police conducted raids throughout the 11th arrondissement (district) of Paris and arrested more than 4,000 Jews, mainly foreign or stateless Jews. French authorities interned these Jews in Drancy, marking its official opening. French police enclosed a police barrack with barbed-wire fencing and provided Gendarmerie to guard the camp. Drancy fell under the command of the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs in France and German SS Captain Theodor Dannecker. Five subcamps of Drancy were located throughout Paris (three of which were the Austerlitz, Lévitan and Bassano camps)
• Fort-Barraux in the department of Isère. It had already been used as a prison during the French Revolution; Antoine Barnave was imprisoned there.
• Gurs internment camp in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques), created in 1939 for the Spanish refugees. During the Phony War, the Third Republic used it to intern "indésirables", that is Germans who were found in France, without regard to ethnicity or political orientation, as foreign citizens of an enemy power. Among them stands out a significant number of German Jews who had fled the very Nazi regime; citizens of countries who were in the orbit of the Reich, like Austria, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Slovak Republic, Fascist Italy, or Poland; French activists of the left (trade unionists, socialists, anarchists, and especially, communists), following the proscription of the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) by Daladier after the German-Soviet Non-aggression Pact; the first of these arrived 21 June 1940, and the majority were relocated in other camps before the end of the year. In Gurs were also interned during this period: anti-militarists, representatives of the French extreme right who sympathized with the Nazi regime, ordinary prisoners evacuated from prisons in the north of the country ahead of the German advance, common criminals awaiting trial. Then, under Vichy, Camp Gurs was used to detain foreign Jews, German Jews deported by the SS from Germany, persons who had illegally crossed the border of the zone occupied by the Germans, Spaniards fleeing Francoist Spain, Spaniards coming from other camps that had been condemned for being inhabitable or due to their scarce contingent, stateless persons, people involved in prostitution, homosexuals, Gypsies and indigents.
• Jargeau, near Orléans, used for the internment of Gypsies
• Lalande in the Yonne,
• Linas-Montlhéry in the Seine-et-Oise for Gypsies
• Marolles in the Loir-et-Cher
• Masseube in the Gers
• Les Mazures in the Ardennes department, where a Judenlager was opened from July 1942 to January 1944
• Mérignac in the Gironde. This is where Maurice Papon had Jews of the Bordeaux region interned before going to Drancy. Among others, Robert Aron was detained there.
• Meslay-du-Maine, in Mayenne department (1939–1940) Leon Askin held here 1939}
• Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence in the Bouches-du-Rhône, which was the largest internment camp in the southeast of France. 2,500 Jews were deported from there following the August 1942 raids. Novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, Surrealist artists Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst were among the most famous inmates detained in this concentration camp.
• Montceau-les-Mines
• Nexon in the Haute-Vienne
• Noé - Mauzac in the Haute-Garonne
• Montreuil-Bellay in the Maine-et-Loire, created to intern Gypsies
• Les Tourelles in Paris
• Pithiviers transit camp in Pithiviers. Jewish novelist Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942) was interned there.
• Poitiers in the Vienne department to intern Gypsies
• Port-Louis, in Morbihan, in the fort
• Recebedou, in Haute-Garonne, in the suburbs of Toulouse
• Camp of Rieucros in Lozère (the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was interned there)
• The Camp de Rivesaltes, in the Pyrénées Orientales, "The Drancy of the zone sud";
• Fort de Romainville ("Fort of Romainville"), was a Nazi prison, located in the outskirts of Paris. The Fort was invested in 1940 by the German military and transformed into a prison. From there, resistants and hostages were directed to the Nazi concentration camps: 3,900 women and 3,100 men were interned before being deported to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald and Dachau. 152 persons were executed by firing-squad in the Fort itself. A few escaped, such as Pierre Georges, alias "Colonel Fabien." From her cell, Danièle Casanova, motivated and encouraged her comrades to confront their torturers. From October 1940, the Fort held only female prisoners (resistants and hostages), who were jailed, executed or redirected to the Nazi concentration camps outside of France. At the time of the Liberation in August 1944, many abandoned corpses were found in the Fort's yard.
• Saint-Cyprien in the Pyrénées-Orientales. 90,000 Spanish refugees were interned there in March 1939, and it was officially closed on 19 December 1940 for "sanitary reasons", its occupants transferred to the Camp of Gurs.
• Saint-Maurice-aux-Riches-Hommes in the Yonne, for Gypsies
• Saint-Paul d'Eyjeaux in the Haute-Vienne
• Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe. Located near Toulouse, this transit camp was set up after the beginning of the Phony War. It was to house "individuals representing a danger to national security" - mostly militant communists. In June 1940, with the first German attacks on the Soviet Union, people with Russian citizenship were interned there. Later, foreign Jews who had been living in hiding in the south of France and were rounded up in the summer of 1942 were also sent to the camp. The inmates, especially the communists, organized many cultural activities, a "little university", in which each one contributed their knowledge for the collective good. From the summer of 1942 to the closing of the camp in August 1944, most of its inmates were deported to camps in Eastern Europe, to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
• Saliers concentration camp near Arles in the Bouches-du-Rhône, interned Gypsies
• Schirmeck in Alsace in the part not annexed by the Third Reich
• Septfonds
• Thil in Meurthe-et-Moselle
• Le Vernet Internment Camp in the Ariège which concentrated 12,000 Spanish refugees as early as 1939. It was used later on for the internment of the harkis.
• Vittel in the Vosges department, where US or British citizens were interned
• Voves in the Eure-et-Loir
• Woippy in the department of Moselle, created in 1943.