Montreuil Bellay : the forgotten concentration camp

Not many have heard of the concentration camp of Montreuil Bellay where Gipsies and nomads were interned during the war and if this wasn't enough it remained open after the liberation and was only closed in 1945, not because the gipsies were freed..... but transferred to other camps until there case was reexamined. In the meantime, the camp was used to intern German civilians. Almost nothing is left of the camp except the fundations and the cooler where so many were locked up.
The French have recently classified the ruins so they will now be preserved.

Montreuil Bellay was a former powder factory . It was turned into a Front Stalag by the Germans in 1940 and in 1941 it was turned into a concentration camp for "unwanted nomads" by Vichy.
Up to 1096 people wer elocked up there at the same time for a total of 1096. The last gipsies were liberated in Jargeau , another camp in 1946.










File:Montreuil-Bellay - Camp tsigane 01.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

 

Thanx Skip!

It´s incredible how much you still learn about the bad things....

 

You'd be surprised to learn how many "forgotten" camps there are .

 

You have to wonder exactly what sort of a threat these people were seen to be. Too few in numbers and with no political representation, they cannot have been anything more than racial trash to their captors. They don't represent a threat for anything else.

Germany and her policies in this war were so morally bankrupt. All of that human resource that they wasted with the Final Solution. What a mess,....they deserved to get their asses kicked.

 

I look at those holes in the ground and wonder how many times it may have been used since it's day of service. I always think how many times escaping students of the Fort Wingate boarding school run by the BIA had students wanting to run away to home, that would often be found traversing the hardened bunkers that lay between their school in Fort Wingate town, and their destinations that would take them across the 800 bunkers and other ruins of the depot....a dangerous route but much shorter than the highways path to the school. We tried to keep all bunkers well buttoned up but a hole in the ground would be a great invitation to many for so many reasons good and bad, for the area I now live in. To think of its original purpose and realize the underground part remains, is a bit of shock to see such a thing still intact and seemingly unsupervised. I suppose other places may not have populations that would utilize such a place.

 

Germany had not much to do with the actual locking up of these particular Gypsies. They built the camp in 1940 , but as a Front Stalag. It was Vichy France which turned it into a Gypsie camp in 1941 and it was kept open AFTER the liberation and both France and the allies were in no hurry to close it either (this was was closed at the end of 1945 but another remained open until 1946). In fact no-one "cared" about these people, hence there ordeal which lasted so long .