| The Holocaust |
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Part of: Jewish history
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Camps
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Remembrance
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The Camp de Rivesaltes is a military camp in France (also called camp Joffre) located on the territory of the commune of Rivesaltes in Pyrénées-Orientales in the South of France. The camp was also used for interning several civil populations during 1939–2007. The darkest period of the camp was in 1942 when 2,251 Jews, including 110 children, were transferred from Rivesaltes via the Drancy internment camp to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
In 1935, the commune of Rivesaltes, situated on a rail route and 40 km from the Spanish border, was considered a strategic position for the French Army. 5 km from the city of Rivesaltes, the army took over 612 hectares between Rivesaltes and Salses to construct a camp, which was originally intended to be used as a military base.
At the same time, southern France became a major haven for Jewish refugees attempting to flee to neutral countries, whether legally or illegally.
The "Camp Joffre" military camp was built in 1938, a few miles from Perpignan; four-fifths of the camp was situated within the commune of Rivesaltes and one-fifth within the commune of Salses.
Following the Retirada, the government decided to use Camp Joffre to intern more than 15,000 Catalan refugees. This decision was never fully put into action, athough a small influx of Catalan refugees was brought in (1939).
On the December 10, 1940, the Ministry of Defense set aside 600 acres (2.4 km2) south of the camp, to house individuals expelled from Germany. The military camp was then run parallel to the civilian camps.
In 1939, at the start of the World War II, the camp became a military transit base and in 1940 a refuge for Spanish refugees fleeing the Franco dictatorship. After the signing of the armistice, France was split into two. The zone libre, in which the Pyrenees-Orientales was included, came under the administration of the Vichy government.
Gradually, the Joffre camp became a place of internment for families of gypsies, Jews and Spanish refugees. With a capacity of 8000, it was not long before the camp was overcrowded, families were separated, and conditions deteriorated greatly.
When the first internees arrived on January 14, 1941, the status of the camp was not yet fixed. It was decided that this is a "accommodation center" for families. Initially planned for a maximum of 17,000 "guests", it included 150 large barracks, adding up to a housing capacity of 10,000 individuals. The particularity of the place was that families were housed in the same camp, but in separate barracks: there were barracks for men, others for women and children. By May 31, 1941, the camp had 6,475 internees from 16 nationalities, more than half from Spain. Jewish refugees from other countries made up more than one-third.
On August 26, 1942, at five o'clock in the morning, the foreign Jews in the southern zone were rounded up. They were brought to the 'Centre national de rassemblement des Israélites' at Rivesaltes. This "Center" was newly established in the camp, in blocks J (for women and children), F (for men; this block had previously been reserved for workers) and K (reception, screening and sorting). It was planned as a transit camp for a total of 10,000 internees who would be housed there for 15 days before being deported. The 1,176 Jews already in the camp prior to the round-up were included in this group.
Convoys left from Rivesaltes for Drancy on August 11 (400 people), August 23 (175 people), September 1 (173 people), September 4 (621 people), September 14 (594 people), September 21 (72 people), September 28 (70 people), October (101 people) and October 20 (107 people).
Serge Klarsfeld called the Rivesaltes camp "the Drancy of the free zone", noting that from September 4 to October 22 it played the same role as the Drancy camp in the occupied zone: a transit camp for deportees whose ultimate destination was the Nazi extermination camps. Rivesaltes was, during that time, the camp where the Jews arrested in the "free zone" were gathered and from which many of them (about 1,700) were sent to Drancy itself.[1]
In November 1942, as Germany invaded the southern, previously unoccupied zone of France, German troops moved into Camp Joffre. Accordingly, the camp was closed as an internment camp on November 25. There were 277 staff members when it closed.
During those two years, the camp of Rivesaltes housed about 21,000 internees; about 5,714 of them were interned in the "special camp" or transit camp, of whom 2,313 were sent to Drancy and 2,251 were excluded from deportation by the screening committee. 215 internees died in the camp, including 51 children one year old or younger.
The German army left Rivesaltes on August 19, 1944.
While the military in Rivesaltes camp resumed its original purpose, a new "guarded residence center" was established at Rivesaltes (September 12, 1944). Located chiefly in block Q, this center housed people interned under Vichy's "épuration" policy. This new camp had a maximum capacity of 1,080 internees.
The center continued to receive people from other European countries: the Spanish, interned for crossing the border illegally, were put to work to secure the center. Then in January and March 1945 several hundreds of Soviet POW, arrived.
The closing of the center was decided upon on December 10, 1945 and completed early in October 1946.
The military authority transformed the camp into Depot No. 162 for prisoners of war. Housing mostly German and Italian soldiers, this camp counted less than 10 000 prisoners in October 1944, and around 6000 or 7000 men in May 1945. It closed on May 1, 1948. The prisoners worked extensively in the reconstruction of the Roussillon region. But between May 1945 and 1946, 412 German prisoners of war died in the camp.
Under the stiffening of the French state caused by the Algerian War, the French government planned in 1957 to create an "internment camp" on the site. The Prefect attempted to dissuade them, because the site contained, in addition to a training center mainly populated by North Africans, a Professional Military Training Center particularly for North Africans and young soldiers mobilized for war.
The plan was not carried out in its entirety, but, discreetly, a prison was set up for people convicted of being supporters of the Algerian independence. 527 prisoners entered the center between March 9 and April 18, 1962.
Harkis is the generic term for Muslim Algerians serving as auxiliaries with the French Army, during the Algerian War, 1954–1962.
June 1962, the "1st regiment of Algerian riflemen" was repatriated to the Camp Joffre. They brought with them hundreds of civilians, women and children running away from the new independent Algeria. In October 1962, about 8000 Harkis were staying at the transit and reclassification camp of Rivesaltes (including those from the camp of Larzac and Bourg-Lastic). In all, according to the calculations of Abderahmen Moumen, about 20 000 people passed through and piled up in the camp from 1962 to 1964. The stay varied according to the families a few days for some, years for others.
The families considered "irretrievable" — a term used by administrative employees at the time — were sent at the end of the year 1964 to the camp / host city of Saint-Maurice-l'Ardoise in the Gard (until 1975). A "civil village" hosted several hundred more families (who had employment but no housing) in the Rivesaltes camp during the 1960s. In 1963, a forestry village was also created in Rivesaltes for about 25 families of former auxiliaries (about a hundred people). The next decade saw the bulk of this population moved to the HLM of Rearte, built in the city of Rivesaltes to finalize the situation of these families. The last residents lef the camp in February 1977.
Other French Colonial Forces, Auxiliaries from Africa and French Indochina came, accompanied by civilians, with the decolonization of the French colonial empire: from 1964 to 1966 about 600 Guineans arrived, and other former soldiers and their families coming from French Indochina.
Created in 1986, the administrative detention center was first made for Spanish nationals who had entered French territory illegally. With more than a thousand arrested on French soil in 1994, it was one of the largest detention centers in France. In 2007, the authorities moved the center.
The memorial museum project has its origins in the publication of the list of deported Jews and Jews who died in the camp of Rivesaltes, by Serge Klarsfeld in 1978.
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