Southern France is dotted with the numerous overlooked sites where hundreds of thousands of people where interned throughout a swathe of mid-twentieth century history.

At the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939, tens of thousands of defeated Republican troops and their families fled over the border, where they were interned by a panicking French government in increasingly harsh and rudimentary camps, under the guard of the French Army. Some of these camps merged later into holding centres for French Jews and gypsies en route for the death camps of the German occupiers. (Arthur Koestler’s book Scum of the Earth recounts his detention at Le Vernet near Toulouse.)

After 1962 other camps such as Rivesaltes received the impoverished pieds noirs fleeing newly independent Algeria. Although most of the camps were razed by the 1970s, the last vestiges are still in existence. Official policy of the French government for many years was to obliterate and forget the camps, a movement of historians and citizens, including children of the internees, has long campaigned to create memorials, maintain graveyards and generally keep the memory of the camps alive.

tx 4 May 2009 at 8pm

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France's Forgotten Concentration Camps

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