Drancy internment camp

Coordinates: 48°55′12″N 2°27′18″E / 48.92000°N 2.45500°E / 48.92000; 2.45500
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Drancy
Websitehttp://drancy.memorialdelashoah.org/en/

Drancy internment camp (

extermination camps during the German occupation of France during World War II. Originally conceived and built as a modernist urban community under the name La Cité de la Muette, it was located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, France
.

Between 22 June 1942 and 31 July 1944, during its use as an internment camp, 67,400 French, Polish, and German Jews were deported from the camp in 64 rail operations,[1] which included 6,000 children. Only 1,542 prisoners remained alive at the camp when the German authorities in Drancy fled as Allied forces advanced and the Swedish Consul-General Raoul Nordling took control of the camp on 17 August 1944, before handing it over to the French Red Cross to care for the survivors.[2]

Drancy was under the control of the French police until 1943 when administration was taken over by the

SS, which placed officer Alois Brunner in charge of the camp. In 2001, Brunner's case was brought before a French court by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, which sentenced Brunner in absentia to a life sentence for crimes against humanity.[3]

Operational history

After the 1940

Third Reich's extermination camps
.

The Drancy internment camp became identified by the northeastern suburb of Paris in which it was located. It was originally conceived by the noted architects

Jews
and other people labeled as "undesirable" before deportation.

Map of Holocaust sites, with the Drancy camp and routes by Paris

On 20 August 1941, French police conducted raids throughout the

Auschwitz
.

Drancy was under the control of the French police until 3 July 1943 when Germany took direct control of the Drancy camp. SS officer Alois Brunner became camp commandant as part of the major stepping up at all facilities needed for mass extermination. The French police carried out additional roundups of Jews throughout the war. Some Drancy inmates died as hostage pawns. In December 1941, 40 prisoners from Drancy were executed in retaliation for a French attack on German police officers.[5]

In November 1943 around 350 inmates of the Borgo San Dalmazzo concentration camp in Italy were deported by train to Drancy and, soon after, on to Auschwitz. The inmates from Borgo, Jewish refugees from a number of European countries, had been arrested after the Italian surrender in September 1943, having mostly come to Italy from France in search for safety from Nazi prosecution.[6]

Prisoners

Jews at Drancy in 1941

The Drancy camp was designed to hold 700 people, but at its peak held more than 7,000. There is documented evidence and testimony recounting the brutality of the French guards in Drancy and the harsh conditions imposed on the inmates. For example, upon their arrival, small children were immediately separated from their parents for deportation to the death camps.[5]

On 6 April 1944, SS First Lieutenant Klaus Barbie raided a children's home in Izieu, France, where Jewish children had been hidden. Barbie arrested everyone present, all 44 children and 7 adult staff members. The next day, the Gestapo transported the arrestees to Drancy. From there, all the children and staff were deported to Auschwitz. None of the children survived.[5]

Weill, Théodore Valensi [fr], Azoulay, Albert Ulmo, Cremieux, Eduard Bloch and Pierre Massé held at Drancy in 1941

Many French Jewish intellectuals and artists were held in Drancy, including

SS but was murdered in September 1943.[8] Jewish Austrian footballer Max Scheuer was sent to Drancy, and then on to Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was murdered in the early 1940s.[9][10]

There were also many non-French Jews captured in France and deported to Drancy to await final deportation to

pregnant
. She was transported to Auschwitz on 7 October 1943 and was probably murdered by gas on the same day that she arrived there (10 October).

The prisoners dug a tunnel to escape, but it was discovered before completion.[11] A TV documentary was made about the attempt.[12]

As the Allies were approaching Paris in August 1944, the German officers fled, and the camp was liberated on 17 August when control of the camp was given over to the French Resistance and Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling.[2]

Present-day

Auschwitz
and now displayed at Drancy

The camp was used after the war for the

low-income housing.[13]
In 1977, the Memorial to the Deportation at Drancy was created by sculptor Shelomo Selinger to commemorate the French Jews imprisoned in the camp.

Until recently,[

Vichy 80 refusing this vote, historians have argued it was anti-Constitutional, most notably because of pressure on parliamentarians from Pierre Laval
.

Drancy Internment Camp Receipt
Receipt for French francs taken from Jewish inmate at Drancy, stating that "the Aeltestenrat [Council of Elders] at the new place of settlement is under obligation to (re)pay its countervalue in [Polish] zloty"

However, on 16 July 1995, president

French police which organized the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv) of July 1942, for seconding the "criminal folly of the occupying country".[14]

On 20 January 2005, arsonists set fire to some railroad

freight cars in the former camp; a tract signed "Bin Laden" with an inverted swastika was found.[citation needed
]

On 11 April 2009, a swastika was painted on a train car used for the deportation of Jews, a permanent exhibit. This was condemned by the French Minister for the Interior, Michèle Alliot-Marie.[15][16]

New museum

A new

Auschwitz and their death. They include messages written on the walls, many graffiti
, aluminium drinking mugs and other personal belongings left by the prisoners, some of which are inscribed with the names of the owners.

The archive also includes the cards and letters written by the prisoners to their relatives before deportation, and they are a moving contribution to the memory of the camp, and the crime of their detention. The ground floor shows a changing exhibit of prisoners' faces and names, as a memorial to their imprisonment and murder by the Nazis, assisted by the gendarmerie of Occupied France.

Documentary films

  • Drancy: A Concentration Camp in Paris 1941–1944, Worldview Pictures, 1994.
  • Drancy Avenir, 1997.

Literature

Nicolas Grenier, Cité de la Muette (poem), in honor of Max Jacob, who died in the Drancy camp, 2011.

The concentration camp also featured in a part of Sebastian Faulks' 1999 novel Charlotte Gray. The character of Levade was an inmate here, as well as young brothers André and Jacob Duguay. Charlotte was staying at a small hotel nearby to try and pass on a message to Levade.

Journal d'Helene Berr, Editions Tallandier, 2008, (English translation Journal Helene Berr, MacLehose Press, 2008 and 2009). Berr was a young French Jewish graduate who kept a diary between April 1942 and February 1944. She was beaten to death, suffering typhus, five days before the camp was liberated. She worked in Paris to save Jewish children by escorting them to the Free Zone.

Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just uses as reference De Drancy a Auschwitz, by Georges Wellers.

References

  1. Auschwitz and remaining number to Sobibor
    were murdered.
  2. ^ a b "Drancy". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 19 November 2014.
  3. ^ "Alois Brunner". Jewish Virtual Library.
  4. ^ https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/19631/chapter-abstract/178392721?redirectedFrom=fulltext. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  5. ^ a b c d e United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. "Drancy". Holocaust Encyclopedia.
  6. ^ "BORGO SAN DALMAZZO". ANED – National Association of Italian political deportees from Nazi concentration camps. Archived from the original on 28 August 2018. Retrieved 28 August 2018.
  7. ^ "Drancy". Britannica.
  8. ^ "Wim Scholtz (ed.) et al (1986) Max van Dam Joods Kunstenaar 1910–1943". Archived from the original on 7 April 2014. Retrieved 2 April 2014.
  9. ^ David Bolchover (2017). The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide To Football Glory; The Story of Béla Guttman
  10. ^ Heffernan, Conor (20 November 2014). "Hakoah Wien and Muscular Judaism". Physical Culture Study.
  11. ^ "The Drancy Camp | Sciences Po Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network". www.sciencespo.fr. Sciences Po. 12 January 2016. Archived from the original on 18 November 2019.
  12. ^ "Les évadés de Drancy". IMDb. 6 March 2017.
  13. ^ "Ensemble de logements HBM, Cité de la Muette – Patrimoine – Atlas de l'architecture et du patrimoine". 15 April 2022.
  14. Archive-It, Le Monde
    , 25 January 2005 (in French)
  15. ^ Swastikas painted on French memorial. Jerusalem Post. 11 April 2009
  16. ^ Des croix gammées tracées au Mémorial de la déportation à Drancy[permanent dead link]. Le Monde, 11 April 2009.
  17. ^ "Shoah Memorial in Drancy". Fondation pour la Memoire de la Shoah.

External links

48°55′12″N 2°27′18″E / 48.92000°N 2.45500°E / 48.92000; 2.45500