page_title: Camp de Rivesaltes
section_title: Creation (1938–1940)
hierarchical_section_title: Camp de Rivesaltes / History / Creation (1938–1940)
caption_attribution_description: Rivesaltes
context_page_description: The Camp de Rivesaltes, also known as Camp Maréchal Joffre, is a military camp in the commune of Rivesaltes nearby Perpignan in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales in the South of France. The camp was also used to detain civil populations several times between 1939 and 2007. Its darkest period was in 1942, when 2,251 Jews, including 110 children, were transferred from Rivesaltes via the Drancy internment camp to the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
context_section_description: The 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. The camp was named "Camp Joffre" after General Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief of the French army during World War I.
  Following the Retirada (the exodus of about half a million refugees from Spain to France in early 1939 during the Spanish Civil War), the French government decided to use Camp Joffre to intern more than 15,000 Catalan refugees. This decision was never fully put into action, although a small influx of Catalan refugees was held there in 1939.
  On December 10, 1940, the Ministry of Defense set aside 600 acres (2.4 km²) south of the camp to house people expelled from Germany. The military camp was then run in parallel with the civilian camps.
  In 1939, at the start of World War II, the camp became a military transit base, and in 1940 a refuge for Spanish refugees fleeing from  Francoist Spain. After the signing of the armistice, France was split into two. The zone libre ("free zone"), in which the Pyrénées-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, before long the camp became overcrowded, families were separated, and conditions deteriorated greatly.
caption: Commemorative stele for survivors of the Spanish Civil War
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