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Origin and history

The Drancy internment camp, located in the city of La Muette in Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis), was created in 1941 in a U-building originally designed as social housing by architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin. Requisitioned by the German army in 1940, he served first as a camp for French, Yugoslav and Greek prisoners of war, then for British and Canadian prisoners. From August 1941, under Nazi control, he became the main centre for the internment of Jews in the occupied area, run by SS officers such as Theodor Dannecker, Heinz Röthke and Alois Brunner.

Between 1942 and 1944 Drancy became the antichambre de la Shoah in France: 63,000 of the 76,000 Jews deported from France transited through this camp before being sent to Auschwitz, Sobibor or Majdanek. The conditions there were deliberately inhumane: undernourishment, diseases (dysentery, cachexia), brutality of the French gendarmes and systematic humiliation. Nine out of ten deportees passed by Drancy, where 132 internees died between 1941 and 1944, including Max Jacob and Rose Berkowicz.

The camp was jointly administered by the German (Gestapo) and French (Police Prefecture) authorities, with a guard provided by gendarmes. The convoys initially left the Bourget station (1942-1943), then from Bobigny (1943-1944). Released in August 1944 by the Red Cross and the consul of Sweden Raoul Nordling, the site was briefly used for purification before becoming a social housing complex again. Today, a memorial designed by Shelomo Selinger and a witness car recall his story.

Drancy had several Parisian appendices, such as the Austerlitz camps (sort of looted furniture), Levitan (baggage) and Bassano (couture for SS). These sites employed mixed Jews (aryans or half-Jews). After the war, trials were held against accomplice gendarmes, but the sentences were light or even cancelled. The camp is today a major symbol of the memory of the Shoah in France, classified as a Historic Monument since 2001.

The current memorial, inaugurated in 2012 by François Hollande, complements the duty of memory. The graffiti of the deportees, discovered in 2009, are kept in the National Archives. Despite its historic importance, the majority of the 500 inhabitants of the city of La Muette ignore its past. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem cites Drancy as the only French place engraved in its crypt, alongside the most notorious Nazi camps.

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