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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 August 1941 by the German authorities in an unfinished U-building, originally designed as social housing. Requisitioned in 1940 for prisoners of war, he became under the occupation the main gathering place of the Jews before their deportation to the extermination camps, particularly Auschwitz. The camp, headed successively by SS Theodor Dannecker, Heinz Röthke and Alois Brunner, was the starting point for 66 convoys (1942-1944), deporting 63,000 of the 76,000 Jews arrested in France.

The first major raid took place from August 20 to 24, 1941, targeting 4,232 Parisian Jews interned in Drancy. The conditions there were deliberately inhumane: undernourishment, diseases (117 deaths from cachex or untreated pathologies), and brutality of the French gendarmes and SS guards. From March 1942 Drancy became a transit camp to the gas chambers, with convoys leaving the Bourget station (1942-1943) and then Bobigny (1943-1944). Among the famous victims were the poet Max Jacob, who died in camp in 1944, and the 44 children of Izieu, deported via Drancy.

Released on 17 August 1944 by the Red Cross and the consul of Sweden Raoul Nordling, the camp was briefly used for purification before becoming a housing complex again. In 1976, a memorial was erected by Shelomo Selinger, symbolizing the Hebrew letter Shin and the 10 Justs of Jewish tradition. Ranked a historic monument in 2001, the site now houses a centre of history and education inaugurated in 2012, while the buildings of La Muette remain social housing, their past often unknown to residents.

The camp included several Parisian appendices: Austerlitz (tribe of looted furniture), Levitan (baggage), Bassano (couture for SS), and places such as Rothschild Hospital or UGIF. After the war, 15 collaborator gendarmes were tried in 1947, but only two were sentenced to two years in prison, despite testimony of brutality. Drancy remains the only French site cited in Yad Vashem among the emblematic sites of the Shoah.

The convoys, organized with SNCF logistics, were escorted by French gendarmes until 1943 and then by German policemen. The last convoy, on 17 August 1944, allowed Alois Brunner to flee with 51 hostages, including Marcel Dassault. Of the 76,000 deported from France, less than 2,000 survived. The archives also reveal graffiti on plaster tiles, preserved at the National Archives since 2012.

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