The Deportation

From 1938, the dimension of the concentration system of the nazis becomes bigger and bigger. After the establishment of the first camp in Dachau (created in 1933) other concentration and extermination camps are built. Flossenburg in Austria, Stutthof and Auschwitz in Poland, Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, Struthof in France, all under the authority and control of the S.S. These camps involve the creation of appendices called Kommandos and thus forming a real concentration network. Men and woman all over Europe are added to the German, Austrian and Czech prisoners.

A document of the 29. September 1941 establishes that all prisoners will be forced to work. The S.S becomes the largest economic company of the Reich, disposing of a renewable manpower for the german companies and which doesn't cost them anything. The deportees are just numbers on a list, submitted to promiscuity, maltreatments, humiliations, bad treatments and brutality, to sickness and famine. Dressed with striped uniforms and marked with a triangle of a distinct colour in order to distinguish the different categories (stateless, policy, etc.). They become shades and always threatened by death.

With the low of 1935, after the ?crystal night? of November 38, The german Jewish are excluded from the community and imprisoned in the camps. Ghettos are created in the different invaded countries. The 20th January 1942, the conference of Wannsee defines the application methods for ?the final solution of the Jewish matter? for all Europe. In the occupied countries millions of women, children and men are arrested and transferred by railway convoys towards the extermination camps in Auschwitz II (Birkenau), Belzec, Maïdanek, Kulmhof, Sobibor, Treblinka. At the arrival it is the terrible selection : the deferment in slavery for the strongest and healthiest ; death in the gas chamber for the weakest.

The government of Vichy establishes on the 3rd of October 1940 the first statute of the Jews. The camps that once have been used to lodge the Communists and the spanish refugees fleeing the civil war are from now on used to imprison the Jews. Gurs, Le Vernet, Les Milles, Rivesaltes in the south zone, Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande in the north zone. From these camps will leave railway convoys towards the camp in Drancy, which became the principal transit camp before reaching the different deportation camps. In France, more than 75 000 Jews, among them 10 000 children have been deported. Moreover from the camp of Royallieu, in Compiègne, 60 000 arrested resistants have been deported.