Liberté • Égalité • Fraternité

RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

MINISTÈRE DE LA DÉFENSE

MEMORIAL TO THE MARTYRS OF THE DEPORTATION

Between 1933 and 1945, the political regime established by the Third Reich, based on Adolf Hitler's theories, gave rise to a system of concentration camps, designed to imprisonment, deport, indeed wipe out political opponents, members of the Resistance, social misfits, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and any person who did not meet the «criteria of the Aryan race» (Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, the handicapped).

As early as 1933, concentration camps were opened in Dachau and Oranienburg, and as the Reich spread across Europe, so did the camps and their work Kommandos, forming a solid network throughout the territories that had been occupied or annexed.

That is how in 1941 the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, in Alsace, was created.

During that same year, the genocide began, aimed primarily at the Jews and the Gypsies.

At the same time, with the conflict now spreading across the globe and the war economy taking hold, the Nazi regime farmed out the deportees to German industry. They were subjected to exhausting work and unparalleled physical and mental suffering: hunger, exhaustion, beatings, torture, hanging, execution by firing squad, and medical experiments, all of which claimed a high number of victims. Many others perished during the death marches when the SS evacuated the camps, in the face of the advancing Allied armies.

Jews had to bear a yellow star in Germany as well as throughout the territories that had been occupied, including inside the ghettos, internment and transit camps, up to the concentration and extermination camps.

The triangle was the distinctive mark of the internees in the concentration camps. Its colour pointed out the reason of their internment. A letter stated the nationality of foreigners. A mark painted on some prisoners' backs brought them to the attention of the SS.

In 2002, historical research statistics indicate that the measures imposed by the Nazis and the Vichy government resulted in over 160,000 French and foreign men, women and children being arrested in France and then deported:

- 85,000 as a result of crackdowns against resistance to the occupying forces, including members of the Resistance itself, political opponents, and hostages or victims of retaliation. Most passed through the internment and transit camp in Compiègne-Royallieu or the Fort de Romainville, near Paris.

More than half were to die, including around 1,000 in the concentration camps gas chambers or euthanasia centres.

- 76,000, including 11,000 children, as a result of antisemitic persecution, part of the «final solution to the»

Jewish question» in Europe. Most spent time in the Drancy internment and transit camp in the suburbs of Paris. They were exterminated in trucks or gas chambers, at Maidanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno and Belzec, except for the few that were deemed fit for work and destined for slave labour in the concentration camps. Only 3% were to come back.

This monument was inaugurated on April 12th 1962 by General de Gaulle, President of the French Republic, as a place of contemplation and remembrance of the suffering caused by the deportation.

It was created by the architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, and depicts certain features that define the concentration camp environment: narrow passages, tight staircases, spiked gates, restricted views with no sight of the horizon, and frequent references to the triangle, the distinctive mark of the deportees.

Triangular recesses inside the crypt show the names of the main camps, enclosing earth and ashes that were gathered from each one.

The thousands of sparkling lights that can be seen in the gallery represent the deportees who never returned.

The ashes of an unknown deportee from the Natzweiler-Struthof camp are interred at the entrance to the gallery.

Texts and poems recalling the deportation, from Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, have been reproduced on the walls of the crypt.

MAH

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- 85 000, die Besiedel-

Tsigane

Gipsy

Témoin de Jéhovah

Jehovah's Witness

Apatride

Stateless person

Asocial

Anti-social

Asozialer