Jews Deported From Baden
The most painful period in the camp's history began in October 1940. The Nazi Gauleiter ("governor") from the Baden region of Germany had also been named Gauleiter of the neighboring French region of Alsace. In Baden resided some 7,500 Jews; they were mainly women, children, and the elderly, given that the young and middle-aged men had fled from Germany or had disappeared in the Nazi concentration camps.
The Gauleiter received word that the camp at Gurs was mostly empty, and on October 25, 1940, it was decided to evacuate the Jews from Baden (between 6,500 and 7,500) to Gurs as part of Operation Wagner-Bürckel. There, they remained locked up under French administration. The living conditions were even more difficult, and during the year that they remained in the camp, more than a thousand fell victim to illness, especially typhus and dysentery.
Of the survivors, some 700 managed to escape and almost 2,000 obtained visas that permitted them to emigrate. The rest, numbering several thousand, remained in the camp, and males in the best physical condition were imprisoned in French work gangs.
The deportation of the German Jews to Gurs in October 1940 is a unique case in the history of the Holocaust. On one hand, it deals with the only deportation of Jews carried out toward the west of Germany by the Nazi regime. On the other hand, the Wannsee conference in which the above mentioned extermination program was delineated, did not take place until January 1942.
Precise information on the motive of this deportation have not been found. There only exists the suspicion that it could have involved setting into motion the Madagascar Plan, an initiative of Adolf Eichmann designed to transport the entire Jewish population of Europe to the island of that name. If this was the case, this deportation would be the only known attempt to carry this plan forward. The protests of the French government avoided subsequent actions in this direction.
Read more about this topic: Gurs Internment Camp, Internees
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“Seventy-five million Jews deported or murdered, that’s cleansing. I admire such thoroughness, such methodical patience! When one has no character, one must have a method.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
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