Internment camps in France

First World War and later

The first internment camps were opened during the First World War (1914–1918) to detain civilian prisoners (mainly German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman). These prisoners were detained in

Other internment camps were used for Armenians in the 1920s-1930s (Mirabeau camp, Victor Hugo camp and Oddo Camp in Marseille);^[2]: 130 Gypsies after the 1912 Act on nomadism^[2]: 132 (for instance in the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, but also in iron mines in the Manche and other disaffected industrial centers in Mayenne, in the Manche, in Loire-Atlantique, in the Sarthe, in the Maine-et-Loire, etc.^[2]: 45).

Spanish Civil War

The most infamous internment camps before World War II were used to intern the

• Agde in the Hérault department (near Montpellier)
• Argelès-sur-Mer, between Perpignan and the border
• Irún. From there they were transferred to the Miranda de Ebro camp for purification according to the Law of Political Responsibilities
  .
• Camp Vernet near Pamiers, in the Ariège.
• Moisdon-la-Rivière and Juigné-des-Moutiers in Loire-Atlantique department (Brittany).^[6]
• The
  camp Gurs.^[7]

After 1940 when the Nazi Germany divided France in occupied and free zone, the camps were also used to imprison Jews, Gypsies, and sometimes gays, and the original prisoners were used as forced labor to make the camps larger.[4]

During World War II and the Vichy regime

Beside Jews, Germans and Austrians were immediately rounded-up in camps, as well as Spanish refugees, who were later deported. 5,000 Spaniards thus died in Mauthausen concentration camp.^[8] The French colonial soldiers were interned by the Germans on French territory, instead of being deported.^[8]

The Third Republic and the Vichy regime would successively call these places "reception camps" (camps d'accueil), "internment camps" (camps d'internement), séjour camps (camps de séjour), "guarded séjour camps" (camps de séjour surveillés), "prisoner camps" (camps de prisonniers), etc. Another category was created by the Vichy regime: the "transit camps" ("camps de transit"), referring to the fact the detainees were to be deported to Germany.^{[citation needed]} Such "transit camps" included Drancy, Pithiviers, etc. In particular, Pithiviers was used in 1941 for the green ticket roundup, and Drancy in 1942 for the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup, before the victims were deported.^[9]

During the 1944 Battle of Marseille and urban scaping operations^[clarify] in the center of town, 20,000 people were expelled from their homes and interned during several months in military camps nearby Fréjus (La Lègue, Caïs and Puget).^[2]: 129

The camp of

• Aincourt, in Seine-et-Oise, was the first internment camp in the Northern Zone. It was opened on 5 October 1940, and quickly filled with members of the French Communist Party (PCF)^[10]
• Les Alliers, near Angoulême, in Charente
• Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans (Saline royale d'Arc-et-Senans) in the Doubs, used for Gypsies^[11][12]
• 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 were 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)
• Chateaubriant in Brittany, in Loire-Atlantique (1941–1942)^[13]
• Camp of Royallieu in Compiègne, Picardy (June 1941 to August 1944). It was used to intern the Jewish detainees arrested during the January 1943 Marseille roundup. Robert Desnos (1900–1945) and the famous French Resistance member Jean Moulin
  (1899–1943) transited through this camp.
• Romanis
  .
• 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)^[14]
• Fort-Barraux in the department of Isère.^[15] It had already been used as a prison during the French Revolution; Antoine Barnave was imprisoned there.
• stateless
  persons, people involved in prostitution, homosexuals, Romani people and indigents.
• Jargeau, near Orléans, used for the internment of Romani people
• Lalande in the Yonne,
• Linas-Montlhéry in the Seine-et-Oise for Romani people
• 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
• The Merignac internment camp 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)
• Surrealist artists Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst were among the most famous inmates detained in this concentration camp.^[16]
• Montceau-les-Mines
• Natzweiler-Struthof
  a German-run concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the Alsatian village of Natzwiller (German Natzweiler)
• Nexon in the Haute-Vienne
• Noé - Mauzac in the Haute-Garonne
• Montreuil-Bellay in the Maine-et-Loire, created to intern Romani people
• 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 Romani people
• Port-Louis, in Morbihan, in the fort
• Recebedou, in Haute-Garonne, in the suburbs of Toulouse^[17]
• Camp of Rieucros in Lozère (the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was interned there)
• The
  Pyrénées Orientales, "The Drancy of the zone sud";^[17]
• Colonel Fabien." From her cell, Danielle Casanova, motivated and encouraged her comrades to confront their torturers.^[18] From October 1940, the Fort held only female prisoners (resistance members and hostages), who were jailed, executed or redirected to the Nazi concentration camps outside 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.^[19]
• Saint-Maurice-aux-Riches-Hommes in the Yonne, for Gypsies
• Saint-Paul d'Eyjeaux in the Haute-Vienne
• 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, Auschwitz and Buchenwald.^[20]
• Saliers concentration camp near Arles in the Bouches-du-Rhône, interned Romani people
• 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.