Les Milles
Coordinates: 43 ° 30 ' N , 5 ° 23' E
Les Milles is a district of Aix-en-Provence ( Département Bouches-du-Rhône ) in southern France and the name of the French internment camp located there (also called Camp des Milles ; it is sometimes also referred to in French as a concentration camp).
The most famous prisoners , among whom were Jews , communists , intellectuals and artists , include Lion Feuchtwanger , Golo Mann , Franz Hessel , Max Ernst , Heinrich Maria Davringhausen , Anton Räderscheidt , Walter Hasenclever , Karl Wilczynski , Samuel Schmitt and Georg Scheuer .
The Aix-Les Milles airfield is also located here .
History of the camp
The internment camp was built in an old brick factory. After the start of the war, the first prisoners , German and Austrian, but also Eastern European Jews and intellectuals who had fled Hitler and Stalin and were now considered "étrangers indésirables" (undesirable foreigners) in France, came to Les Milles at the beginning of September 1939 . At the beginning of November 1939 there were about 1,500 prisoners in the camp; in March 1940 there were only 140 left after their releases.
In June 1940 the Germans marched into France ( Western campaign, Red case ). Germans and Austrians were interned. Former Spanish fighters also came here from other camps. In mid-June, 3,000 prisoners were living in the camp under catastrophic conditions. After the surrender-like armistice in Compiègne on June 22, 1940, the commandant of the camp tried to bring 2,010 prisoners to safety from the Germans. He sent her on a train to Bayonne , where a ship was waiting for her. During the journey the rumor spread that 2,000 German soldiers were on their way to Bayonne, whereupon some refugees tried to get away on their own, which few succeeded.
On September 30, 1940, Ernst Kundt reported this number for the camp: " Internees: 152, including 55 Aryans " (the rest were therefore Jews according to Hans Globke's definition) to the Foreign Office in Berlin, which was involved in the deportation preparations. In 1942, 2,000 people were deported from here to Auschwitz .
After the capitulation of France, the camp in the "Free Zone" was increasingly used as a deportation camp . The first prisoners in the converted camp were Jews from Baden who were deported here at the end of October 1940 as part of the Wagner-Bürckel campaign and supposedly - according to the Madagascar Plan - were to be deported. But nothing came of it, and after the Wannsee Conference , Jews were deported from Les Milles to extermination camps. The Vichy regime committed itself to the German occupiers to hand over all the prisoners requested by them. The Vichy regime had promised Nazi Germany that it would extradite 10,000 foreign - mostly German and Austrian - Jews. This happened in August and September 1942. Although the occupiers hadn't asked for it, the French authorities also included children - because they didn't want to look after orphans later. From Les Milles, five trains with a total of 2,000 Jews took the route via the Drancy assembly camp near Paris to Auschwitz.
From September 1943 to August 1944 which maintained naval one in Les Milles naval hospital . After the war ended, American troops used the site as a material store. In 1946 the brick factory was returned to the owners, an entrepreneurial family from Marseille. In view of the great need for building materials to repair the war damage, the production of bricks and roof tiles was resumed here.
The murals
There were 40 painters among the camp inmates, including some of the greatest artists of the 20th century such as Max Ernst , Anton Räderscheidt and Wols . In 1940/41 the wall paintings in Les Milles, which are now known far beyond France, were created. One of the deportees was Karl Robert Bodek , born in Chernivtsi , one of the artists who created the murals. The murals are preserved in the memorial.
memorial
When the technically obsolete brickworks were to be demolished in 1983, historians from the University of Aix-en-Provence , who were the only ones interested in the history of the camp, suggested setting up a memorial in the only completely preserved camp from that time. The then socialist minister of culture Jack Lang then put the camp on the listed building. It was not until 2002 that the decision was made to build a memorial in the former camp, and another ten years passed before it was completed. With funds from the state and private foundations, the site was purchased and made available to the Les Milles Foundation. The opening of the memorial took place on September 10, 2012 by the French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault , exactly 70 years after the last of five trains with a total of 2,000 Jews left for Auschwitz on September 10, 1942.
Movie
There is also a war film on the same subject called Les Milles , produced in France in 1994. It was directed by Sébastien Grall and the book was written by Jean-Claude Grumberg and Sébastien Grall. The actors include Jean-Pierre Marielle , Ticky Holgado , Rüdiger Vogler , Bruno Raffaeli , Philippe Noiret , Kristin Scott Thomas , Francois Perrot , Eric Petitjean , Jean-Marie Winling and Rafael Walentowicz . Above all, the film depicts the grueling journey on the special train through half of France before it arrives in Bayonne.
See also
literature
- Angelika Gausmann: German-speaking visual artists in the internment and deportation camp Les Milles from 1939 to 1942. Möllmann, Paderborn 1997, ISBN 3-931156-17-6 .
- Doris Obschernitzki: Last hope: departure. The Les Milles brickworks 1939–1942: From the camp for unwanted foreigners to the deportation center. Hentrich & Hentrich, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-933471-06-0 .
- Ralf Nestmeyer : Provence and Côte d'Azur. Literary travel pictures from the Midi. Klett-Cotta , Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-608-93654-8 (including a detailed chapter on Les Milles).
- Edwin Maria Landau and Samuel Schmitt (eds.): Camp in France. Survivors and their friends. Evidence of emigration, internment and deportation. v. Brandt, Mannheim 1991, ISBN 3-926260-15-7 ; in particular: André Fontaine: From the minutes of the research on Les Milles. Pp. 35-53; with bes., individual representations of the wall paintings.
-
Lion Feuchtwanger : Fiends France. El libro libre , Mexico 1942.
- further ed. udT: The Devil in France. frequent editions, e.g. B. Aufbau, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-7466-5018-6 (Experiences in Les Milles 1940, while the German front is moving towards the country in the north).
Web links
- Homepage Camps des Milles - UN LIEU TEMOIN PREND LE RELAIS DES TEMOINS
- List of French internment camps , also in North Africa, at apra
- Les Milles in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Mémorial de la SHOAH (French) Documents of all kinds from victims and survivors are also collected here to complement the memorial exhibition.
- Ralf Nestmeyer: Recovered memories. In: The time of January 11, 2012.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kate Deimling: The Camp des Milles as a museum: Former camp opened by Hans Bellmer and Max Ernst in France ( memento of July 11, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), blouinartinfo.com, accessed on October 21, 2013
- ↑ Aliette de Broqua: Ayrault au mémorial du camp des Milles , in: Le Figaro , September 10, 2012, accessed on October 21, 2013