Bobigny Former Deportation Train Station

Ancienne gare de déportation de Bobigny

As the successor to the Le Bourget train station, the Bobigny train station became a hub for the deportation of Jewish children, women and men held at the Drancy internment camp to Auschwitz from 1943 onwards. Inaugurated in July 2023, a newly designed memorial site on the grounds of the former Bobigny train station commemorates the key role it played in the persecution and extermination of the Jewish population in France.

History

After France surrendered to the German Wehrmacht in June 1940, the Germans occupied northern France. In the same month, they seized a social housing complex in Drancy, a suburb northeast of Paris, to detain prisoners of war there. However, following the first raids against Jews in 1941, the German authorities converted the complex into an internment camp for Jewish prisoners.

After the Wannsee Conference on 20th January 1942 in Berlin, at which the »Final Solution to the Jewish Question« was discussed, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of the Jewish population in France. The French authorities also took a leading role in the arrests and the subsequent deportations. Drancy became a centre for the deportation of the Jewish population from France to German extermination camps located in German-occupied Eastern Europe: until its liberation in August 1944, around 64,000 Jewish children, women and men passed through the camp. From June 1942 to June 1943, transports initially departed from the Le Bourget train station. During this period, about 40,000 prisoners were deported from Drancy to Auschwitz in 41 transports.

The situation changed in June 1943 when SS-Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner (1912– died after 2001) was appointed head of the Gestapo’s special unit for the Drancy internment camp. From July 1943 onwards, the Bobigny train station was used as the new departure point for deportations. By August 1944, 21 trains carrying over 22,500 deportees had departed from Bobigny. Almost all transports headed for Auschwitz, except for transport 73 on May 15, 1944 with 878 men, some of whom were taken to Kaunas in Lithuania and others to Tallinn in Estonia, and the last transport on August 17, 1944, which left for the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Bobigny, undated, Route des Petits-Ponts near the Bobigny train station, Historic postcard, public domain

Drancy, 1942, Jewish prisoners lining up for food, Yad Vashem

Victims

A total of 25 percent of the Jewish population in France fell victim to the Shoah. Around 76,000 Jewish children, women and men were deported from France to German concentration and extermination camps, including more than 11,000 children.

More than 22,500 Jewish prisoners from the Drancy internment camp were deported from the Bobigny train station to German extermination camps, including 10,222 women and 3,285 children. Almost all of the transports left for the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where most of the deportees were murdered upon arrival.

With the defeat of the French army in June 1940 the country came under German control. Northern France was governed by the German military administration, whilst the south was initially unoccupied. A government under German influence was established in the spa town of Vichy in the south of France. At the beginning of the Second World War, there were around 300,000 Jews living in France. The exact number is not known as there were no records of religious affiliation in France. The first anti-Jewish laws were passed in northern France at the end of 1940. The Jews were forced to register with the authorities, excluded from society and stripped of their possessions. These policies were followed by systematic arrests by the French police. Jews without a French passport were the main targets of the German SS and police as well as the French authorities. In an attempt to deter growing French resistance, the German military commander General Otto von Stülpnagel (1878–1948) started to have those not involved in the resistance shot and to have Jews in particular arrested. Those arrested were among the first to be deported to the death camps in occupied Poland from March 1942 onwards. A total of 75,000 people were deported to their deaths in the course of over seventy deportation operations. Most of the French Jews survived, mainly in hiding in the south of the country. Around 600,000 people died in France as a result of war and persecution, including 270,000 civilians. There continues to be little distinction drawn between the different groups of victims. However, since the late 1980s there has been increased research into the murder of patients of care homes and clinics. It is now estimated that around 50,000 people fell victim to these operations. Both northern and southern France experienced persecution, collaboration and resistance during the occupation. After the war, remembrance of both the campaign of the »Résistance« as an expression of French patriotism and the suffering associated with the »Déportation« provided a way of bridging the differences between the Gaullist conservatives and the Communists affiliated with Moscow. Consequently, many museums and memorial sites are dedicated to the resistance or remember the deportations, for example the »Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation« (Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation) in Paris, inaugurated in 1956, and the »Centre Européen du Résistant Déporté« (European Centre for Deported Resistance Fighters), which opened in 2005 at the memorial site at the former Natzweiler concentration camp. Since the early 1990s a number of sites of memory have been established, such as the Maison d’Izieu (Izieu Home) memorial near Lyon, which remembers the deportation of 44 Jewish children, the national memorial site at the former camp at Gurs as well as a memorial centre in Oradour sur Glane – a village destroyed by the SS in 1944. The central memorial site dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust is the »Mémorial de la Shoah« in the centre of Paris, which was opened in 2005. French presidents have since then acknowledged shared French responsibility for the Holocaust in France. The memorial site in Caen,commemorating the Normandy landings of 1944, was opened in 1988 and extended in 2002, is the most-visited memorial site outside Paris. The annual national commemorations marking the victory over Nazi Germany take place here. In addition, there are numerous regional museums in France, where the exhibitions focus on the themes of persecution, resistance and deportation.

Remembrance

In the post-war period, the history of the Bobigny train station was initially neglected. Although three commemorative plaques had already been unveiled there in September 1948 on the initiative of two organizations (»Confédération générale des internés déportés politiques« and the »Union internationale contre le racisme«), the Bobigny train station continued to be used as a freight station by the French national railway company SNCF until the 1970s. In addition, a scrap metal recycling company settled on the grounds of the train station in 1954.

The resistance of the then mayor of the city of Bobigny, George Valbon, and the Association Fonds Mémoire d’Auschwitz (AFMA, in English »Auschwitz Remembrance Fund Association«) to the planned demolition of the passenger building by the SNCF in 1988 gave the initial impetus to preserve the Bobigny train station as a memorial site. This set in motion a long process of research and historical reappraisal, which ultimately led to the train station being listed as a historic monument and handed over to the city of Bobigny in 2005.

In January 2011, the city of Bobigny and SNCF signed a memorandum planning the establishment of a memorial site on the grounds of the former Bobigny train station in the presence of Auschwitz survivor and former President of the European Parliament Simone Veil (1927–2017) and historian Serge Klarsfeld (1935–). The architecture firm Atelier d’architecture Philippe Prost (AAPP) was the winner of the architectural competition. After three years of construction, the memorial site was provisionally opened to the public on 18th January 18, 2023 and officially inaugurated on July 18, 2023, exactly 80 years after the departure of the first deportation train from the Bobigny train station.

Bobigny, 2023, The Bobigny former deportation train station after its renovation 1, Wikimedia Commons / Chris93, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bobigny, 2023, The Bobigny former deportation train station after its renovation 2, Wikimedia Commons / Chris93, CC BY-SA 4.0

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition on the history of the Bobigny train station, temporary exhibitions on various topics, guided tours, cultural events

Open

Wednesday to Sunday: 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. and 2.00 p.m. to 5.00 p.m.
Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays
Guided tours by appointment

Contact

https://garedeportation.bobigny.fr/52/accueil.htm

gare.deportation@ville-bobigny.fr

+33 1 89 57 21 57 / +33 6 26 49 91 96

69-151 avenue Henri Barbusse
93000 Bobigny, France

Bobigny, 2023, The Bobigny former deportation train station after its renovation 3, Wikimedia Commons / Chris93, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bobigny, 2023, Global view of the Bobigny former deportation train station, Wikimedia Commons / Chabe01, CC BY-SA 4.0

Bobigny, 2012, View of the Bobigny former deportation train station from the tracks, Wikimedia Commons / Geralix, CC BY-SA 3.0

Nützen

Kaltenkirchen Concentration Camp Memorial in Springhirsch

In 2000, a memorial was opened in Springhirsch, a district of Nützen, on the premises of the former Kaltenkirchen satellite camp. Up to 1,000 prisoners were subjected to forced labour in this camp bet...

Bremen

Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin«

Since May 2011, the Memorial Submarine Bunker »Valentin« commemorates the victims of the satellite concentration camp in Bremen-Farge and six other camps in the region. Between 1938 and 1945, the pris...

Nordhausen

Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial

Since 1954, a memorial on the site of the former Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, close to Nordhausen on the edge of the Harz mountains, commemorates the fate of the prisoners who were slave laboure...