Internment camp Le Vernet

Camp du Vernet

In the Occitan community of Le Vernet (Ariège), a small memorial site commemorates the internment camp that existed there between 1939 and 1944, in which the French authorities of the Vichy government imprisoned political opponents and Jews under appalling conditions. Hundreds of Jews were deported from Le Vernet to German concentration camps.

History

Le Vernet is a small community about 40 km south of Toulouse in the region of Occitania. Here in 1918 the French army set up a camp for soldiers from Senegal. For a short time after the end of the First World War it was used as a camp for prisoners of war from Germany and Austria-Hungary.
As the Republicans slipped more and more into the defensive in the Spanish civil war, thousands of fighters fled over the Pyrenees to France, including many members of the so-called International Brigades. The French government detained the refugees in internment camps, mainly because it feared a strengthening of the Left in the country. One of the largest of these camps was set up in Le Vernet in February 1939. From September 1939, France was at war with Germany. The government arrested »undesirable« aliens and Frenchmen classified as »suspicious« and sent them to camps, including Le Vernet. Among them were many Communists and Leftists, but also right-wing radicals and hundreds of foreign Jews. In February 1940 the camp had 2,000 inmates, including 800 Jews. After France's surrender in the summer of 1940, the number of prisoners doubled. Among the new prisoners were also many German communists. The camp was located in the unoccupied part of France and was managed by the authorities of the collaboration government in Vichy. The conditions in the overcrowded camp were catastrophic. The prisoners, who had to do futile and often humiliating work suffered from hunger, violence and cold.
From September 1942 to May 1944 Jews were deported from Le Vernet to Dachau and Auschwitz. Jewish women and children from the region were also passed through the camp. On June 15, 1944 the Germans took over the camp and dissolved it. On June, 30 1944, the last 400 prisoners were crammed into a train and sent to Dachau, where it arrived on August 28 with only 291 people on board.

Le Vernet, 2012, Station building, Thierry Llansades

Le Vernet, 2012, Camp cemetery, Thierry Llansades

Victims

All in all approximately 40,000 people from more than 50 countries passed through the camp between February 1939 and June 1944. Among the prisoners were numerous well-known Communists, anti-fascists and artists, such as the German Communist Friedrich Wolf (1888-1953), the writer Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) or the Hungarian Communist László Rajk (1909-1949), who was later executed in his homeland after a Stalinist show trial. Between summer 1942 and May 1944, a total of 1,200 Jewish children, women and men were deported from Le Vernet to the Dachau and Auschwitz concentration camps. The deportees included not only political prisoners, but also Jews from the region who were collected before their deportation in Le Vernet.

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

After the war for a long time little was reminiscent of the former internment camp, which in French was officially called a concentration camp (»camp de concentration«). Only a few remnants of the buildings remained, including the two supporting pillars of the former camp gate. The camp cemetery was preserved, as was the former station of the camp. In the parish of Le Vernet, a small museum on the history of the camp was established. In 1973 former detainees founded an association (»Amicale«) to preserve the memory of the camp. The association is still active today and organizes, amongst other things, an annual commemoration ceremony on November 1. In 1996 the association bought a train carriage of the same type in which the prisoners were deported to German concentration camps. This carriage stands next to the former railway station.
The writer Arthur Koestler described his term of imprisonment in Le Vernet in his book »Scum of the Earth«, which first appeared in England in 1941.

Le Vernet, 2012, Memorial plaques at the station building, Thierry Llansades

Le Vernet, 2012, Memorial at the camp cemetery, Thierry Llansades

Possibilities

Exhibition, annual commemoration on November 1

Open

The former site of the camp, the installation of the train carriage and the camp cemetery are accessible at all times. The museum is only accessible on request in the town hall.

Contact

http://www.campduvernet.eu/

amicale@campduvernet.eu

Le Vernet, 1942, Aerial view of the camp, public domain

Le Vernet, 2012, Train carriage, Thierry Llansades

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