Wartime Detention in France: Drancy and Les Milles
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Wartime Detention in France: Drancy and Les Milles Tessa Bouwman Thesis supervisor: dr. K.C. Berkhoff 10156011 Second reader: Dr. N. Immler MA Holocaust and Genocide Studies University of Amsterdam June 2015 Index Acknowledgments…………………………………………….……………….. …i Introduction………………………………………………………………………..ii Thesis statement and objectives…………………………..………………ii Historiography……………………………………………..……………..iii I Drancy and Les Milles, 1930s-1944…………………………….………………1 Drancy……………………………………………………...……………..1 Les Milles……………………………………………………...………….9 II Politics of memory in France…………………………………………………..16 Vichy Syndrome…………………………………………………………..16 From Jacques Chirac to Nicolas Sarkozy…………………………………21 III Drancy 1944-1987……………………………………………………….…….24 IV Drancy 1988-2012……………………………………………………….…….31 V Les Milles 1944- 2012……………………………………………………..….. 36 VI Drancy and Camp des Milles in traditional and social media since 2012……..42 Conclusion…………………………………………………………..……….……47 Literature and sources……………………………………………………..………50 ii Acknowledgements This master’s thesis would not have been possible without the support of my supervisor dr. Karel Berkhoff, who has given me useful advice and who has encouraged me to challenge myself in finding the information I needed. I would also like to thank the rest of NIOD staff for the often thought-provoking courses and lectures, which have further enriched my knowledge and sparked my interest. I also need to thank Noémie Tajszeydler, head of the documentation center in the Drancy memorial. When I first visited Drancy, she welcomed me with great enthusiasm and she has been very eager to help me find literature and answer my questions. Due to my difficulties in contacting other French institutions, it was great to have someone helping me and giving me advice. I am also grateful for the people working at the Memorial de la Shoah in Paris, who have helped me obtaining some interesting documents and who have given me advice on the topics of my research. I also want to thank my classmates for the discussions, serious talks but above all the fun we have had. It is great to be able to talk to people who are indulging themselves in the same material and to be able to speak freely about subjects others rather want to skip. This is why I am also very grateful to my family and to my girlfriend Sarah. Even when my rants about the Holocaust, France then, and France now must have been hard to endure, they gave me their support and distracted me when I needed it. i Introduction The role of France in World War II has been much discussed and disputed. While the country ‘collaborated’ with the German oppressor in the Vichy regime, there was also resistance by the famous Charles de Gaulle. This resistance was emphasized in the early postwar years, when De Gaulle became France’s new president and the French perceived themselves as heroes who freed themselves from the German yoke. However, when one looks in detail at the events during the war years, one could conclude that the degree of collaboration with the Germans and the indifference towards the fate of the Jews was more remarkable than most French are willing to admit. Many anti-Semitic measures were taken and often even proposed by the French government. France also housed a large number of camps that were used to incarcerate Jews before their deportation eastwards. The fact that these camps were often under French command with only minor interventions by the Germans, sparked my interest. The French played a big role within their own country in arresting, interning, and deporting Jews and this is most likely a factor that causes difficulties. In this thesis I want to look at this remembrance of the Nazi past in France, by looking at two case studies: Drancy (just outside of Paris) and Les Milles (just outside of Marseille), which both housed internment camps for Jews, and political prisoners. Thesis statement and objectives I want to focus on the history of the two locations, during wartime but most importantly after the war. I will do this by using secondary literature on the history of the camps, but also by using primary sources such as testimonies by Jews that were incarcerated and are therefore able to describe the inner workings of the camps in more detail. The first chapter, which will deal with the wartime history of the camps will be written in a describing fashion: I will not provide a detailed comparison between the two. In the second chapter I will explore the “Vichy syndrome”, a term coined by the historian Henry Rousso. I also want to examine to what extent we can see the general French developments in politics of memory at work in Drancy and Les Milles. In chapters three up to five, I will discuss the postwar history of the sites by focusing on the presence or absence of memorialization efforts and I will reflect upon the state of the memorialization process. In the sixth chapter I will elaborate on how the two sites have been featured in the media since 2012, looking both at traditional media and social media. In the conclusion I hope to be able to ii formulate an answer to my most important research question: why has it taken so long at both sites for a memorial center or museum to be established? Historiography Various works have been published on the internment of the Jews, starting directly after the war in the late forties. They were mostly autobiographical and written by people who had been incarcerated in one of the camps. Later on, more research was done using these testimonies and supplementing them with other sources. In this historiographical overview I would like to discuss some of the works that have been published on the war-time history of Drancy and Les Milles and I will briefly discuss available eyewitness accounts and works on memory studies in France that could help to successfully conduct this research. Drancy during World War II One of the first works that was published on war-time Drancy was George Wellers’ De Drancy à Auschwitz. In this book that first appeared in 1946, Wellers describes the camp throughout the years. The first part is dedicated to the history of the camp and its different commanders (Donnecker, Röthke and Brunner), while the second part contains stories of people who were incarcerated in the camp. Because the book is based upon Wellers’ personal experiences and those of others, the information is presumably very accurate and can help to successfully reconstruct the camp’s functions during the war. The book was edited and republished in the 1970s under the title L’Étoile jaune à l’heure de Vichy: de Drancy à Auschwitz. It might be useful to compare the two editions to see what was changed. Another work that was written by a former Drancy internee is Drancy 1941: camp de represailles. In this book Noël Calef describes his time in the transit camp in the second half of 1941, when it had just been opened. He was one of the 4223 Jewish men that were arrested in August 1941 and brought to Drancy. After a few months he was released, thanks to the work of Italian diplomats, and went to Italy where soon he was incarcerated again in some Italian camps. He started working on a manuscript about his time in Drancy that was first published in Italian in 1945 and was later edited and translated into French. Although the book is written novel-style, it contains useful information about the first months of the camp and the circumstances the men had to live in. iii The French edition of Calef’s book contains a preface by Serge Klarsfeld. This French-Jewish author, historian and lawyer has spent his live hunting down Nazi criminals together with his wife Beate. He has also been actively involved in keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive and making sure the French state would acknowledge her role in the deportation and murder of the Jews. He published le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France in which he lists the victims of the Holocaust in France. Furthermore he has delivered a detailed four-volume account on the deportations between September 1942 and August 1944 in France. His work is very useful as it contains a lot of factual information such as names and numbers of victims but also documents that illustrate the decision-making processes at work during the war years in France. Maurice Rajsfus has provided the academic world with another work on the history of Drancy. His book starts with a description of the first months of the Drancy camp. It shows how those first months were characterized by famine and disease and it contains statistics on the illnesses that proliferated in the camp. Furthermore, it contains of a list that shows how many internees of a certain nationality were incarcerated in the camp: it shows that in December 1941, the biggest group was that of Polish Jews, followed by Turks and Russians. 1 Then the book focuses on the camp’s administration that was in the hands of the French in the first years. It describes the attitude of the gendarmes and their views towards the Jewish question. The next few chapters deal with Drancy as a transit camp describe the circumstances in the camp, the Jewish administration that was set up, and the constitution of the deportations. The fourth part of the book describes the camp under the command of Alois Brunner and the SS. This part also deals with people who escaped and the final months and the liberation of Drancy. Another relevant study is Annette Wieviorka’s A l’intérieur du camp de Drancy. This work is divided in four parts which successively deal with Drancy as a camp de represailles; Drancy as a transit camp; Drancy as a concentration camp; and Drancy after the liberation of France in 1944.