A social housing complex built in the 1930s, the Cité de la Muette in Drancy was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1941 as the main internment and transit camp for French Jews being deported to the killing centers. In the summer of 1942, the camp became a transit camp. 80,000 Jewish men and women were interned at Drancy, and 63,000 were deported directly from the camp.
Now once again a social housing complex, the site is listed as a historic monument.

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Cité de la Muette, Drancy

1941-1944, main internment and transit camp for French Jews

History

Cité de la Muette, Drancy, August 20-25, 1941. 4,230 Jewish men rounded up in Paris are interned in a vast U-shaped building, part of the Cité. This marked the opening of what was soon to become the main internment camp.

In the beginning: a city born of a modern, ambitious architectural project

Postcard of the Cité de la Muette still under construction, circa 1935. In the center, you can see the U with the skyscrapers in the background © Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis

Before being an internment camp for Jews, the cité was a Habitations à Bon Marché (low-cost housing) complex designed by Henri Sellier, director of the Seine department's housing office. He commissioned the architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods, who teamed up with designer Jean Prouvé. The architecture of this social housing complex, and the innovations inherent to the project, make it one of the most modern and ambitious projects of the 1930s. The complex comprises several parts: five fourteen-storey towers and ten associated blocks of flats known as “les peignes”. Put up for rent, they struggled to find residents, and by 1938, the housing estate was home to a mobile unit of gendarmes and their families in the towers and combs, which had been converted into barracks. Two parts remained unfinished due to the economic crisis in 1934: the redents facing the towers and combs, and the long, four-storey, U-shaped building. Shaped like a horseshoe, it includes a central courtyard 200 meters long and 40 meters wide. This building was used as an internment camp.

1940: the housing estate transformed into a prisoner-of-war camp

When the Wehrmacht (German army) arrived in Drancy in June 1940, the site was spotted. It was requisitioned as Frontstalag 111, a detention center for soldiers. French prisoners of war were held here, both officers and ordinary soldiers, many of them colonials, before being transferred to other camps in the Reich, or to camps in France for colonial soldiers. In early 1941, the new camp was also used to relieve overcrowding at the Swiss barracks in Saint-Denis, where “nationals of the Reich's enemy powers” were interned.

The unfinished U is empty inside: it consists of large rooms called “chambrées”, with no insulation, sanitary facilities or partitions. Internment conditions were therefore extremely precarious.

1941: From internment to the first deportations

The roundup from August 20 to August 25, 1941 marked the beginning of the internment of Jews at Drancy. They were hastily installed in very poor hygienic and nutritional conditions. The camp was guarded inside and out by French gendarmes. By autumn 1941, a number of internees were dying. Until March 1942, internment was not followed by deportation.

The Drancy camp was used as a “hostage reserve”. This policy was introduced by the Nazis in connection with the war being waged against the USSR. For the Nazis, the aim was to intern and sometimes shoot “in retaliation” for what they called “Judeo-Bolshevik activities”. Indeed, since June 1941, the Nazis had invaded the USSR. In response, the first Resistance attacks took place against Germans in France. Jewish internees from Drancy were among those shot at the Mont-Valérien fort in December 1941. However, from March 1942 onwards, these hostages were placed in hostage convoys that mixed Jewish internees from the Drancy and Compiègne camps. On departure from Compiègne, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau (Poland). Although there were a few women in convoy no. 3 on June 22, these convoys were mainly made up of men.

Clandestine photograph of a deportation. © Fonds Liégibel, City of Drancy, Shoah Memorial.

Drawing of a deportation from the Drancy camp © Georges Horan-Koiransky, Archives départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis

1942: Transit camp to death centers

The tipping point came with the Vél' d'hiv roundup on July 16 and 17, 1942. 12,884 men, women and children were arrested in the Département de la Seine (Paris and its inner suburbs), then distributed between the Vélodrome d'hiver, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, and the Drancy camp. Families were rounded up at the Vel d'hiv before being sent to camps in the Loiret department. Only single adults and couples without children under 16 are sent to Drancy.

The Vel d'hiv' roundup marked the beginning of the internment and deportation of Jews of all ages, conditions and nationalities. Drancy became a transit camp, where most deportees stayed only a few days.

The internees experienced overcrowding, but also a life punctuated by the incessant departures of deportation convoys, directly to the killing centers: one every two days until the end of September 1942. In August 1942, men, women and children arrested throughout France, occupied or not, were deported one after the other in rapid succession. The genocidal process was fully underway, with the collaboration of the Vichy government, which facilitated the transfer of all Jews interned in camps in the non-occupied zone to the Drancy camp until October.

1943-1944: at the heart of the extermination process

The pace of deportations slowed down at the end of 1942. This is no doubt why, in May 1943, the Nazi administration sent one of its most loyal SS officers, Alois Brunner, to relaunch the persecution in France. He was appointed both to organize persecution throughout the country and as head of the Drancy camp. In so doing, he altered several aspects of the deportation process.

He closed the Loiret camps and concentrated the deportation process around Drancy, which became the final stage before deportation. Arrested all over the country, internees sometimes arrived after being held in several different places, but also after long, exhausting journeys.

Brunner altered the internal workings of the camp. On July 2, 1943, the Drancy camp was run solely by a Nazi administration. French gendarmes were confined to external surveillance. He adopted the German concentration camp model, placing the entire camp administration in the hands of the internees. However, with the support of the Union générale des israélites de France (UGIF), he undertook to improve the camp. This improvement was only a facade: Austrian SS troops were used to spread terror among the internees.

Brunner continued to organize deportation convoys until the end of July 1944. Faced with the advance of the Allies, he left Drancy on August 17, taking 51 internees hostage via the Bobigny train station, after having destroyed most of the camp's documents. The following day, thanks to an agreement between the Swedish consul and the German command, the camp was liberated, leaving only around 1,400 internees.

63,000 of France's 74,000 Jewish deportees left Drancy. Around 4,000 returned.

1944-1945: a camp for suspected collaborators

After the Liberation, between September 1944 and December 1945, those suspected of collaboration with the enemy were in turn interned at the Drancy camp. From 1948 onwards, the housing estate reverted to social housing.

To remember

The Drancy camp was located in the U-shaped Cité de la Muette building designed by architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods.
It was the main internment and transit camp for Jews in France between 1941 and 1944.
Around 80,000 Jews passed through the Drancy camp.
The administration and management of the Drancy camp symbolize the policy of collaboration established between France and Nazi Germany during the Second World War.

Memory

More than the cité de la Muette, “Drancy” evokes one of France's best-known Holocaust memorial sites, both nationally and internationally. Yet the construction of the site's memory has been slow and complicated.

The role of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine and the creation of the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr

As early as September 1944, ceremonies were held on the Muette site in memory of those who had been deported. Several testimonies were published in the post-war period, such as that of Georges Wellers, who was interned in the camp for almost three years. The Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) also preserves the lists of internees and deportees smuggled out before the destruction of administrative documents by Brunner, the camp's last Nazi commander: these resources provide valuable evidence of the camp's history. Ceremonies were also held at the Paris synagogue on rue de la Victoire. In 1956, the CDJC built the Mémorial du Martyr Juif inconnu (Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr) in the 4th arrondissement, near the old Jewish quarter of Le Marais, in memory of the Jews deported from France.

In Drancy, from the first plaques to the Shelomo Selinger monument

In Drancy, commemorative plaques were also erected in 1947 and 1951 to honor the memory of Jewish victims and prisoners of war. In the run-up to the twentieth anniversary of the Liberation, new ceremonies were held to build a monument to the memory of former internees and deportees, on the initiative of associations and the Communist town council at the end of 1963. Similar projects had failed in 1945 and 1957.

In 1973, the town of Drancy organized an exhibition on the history of the camp, which it entrusted to Abbé Raymond Liegibel, founder of the Drancy Historical Society. In 1976, the 1963 project came to fruition, and in May the monument was inaugurated, entrusted to the sculptor Shelomo Selinger following an international competition three years earlier. Financed by subscription, the sculpture designed by this Polish survivor of the Holocaust has the particularity of alluding directly to Jewish culture. It depicts the suffering and the journey of the deportees, as well as the “kaddish” or prayer of the dead. Inscriptions in Yiddish and Biblical Hebrew complete the picture.

Early attempts to protect the cité de la Muette

The memory of the site is also linked to its social and architectural history. Rehabilitated as social housing in 1948, the U stands alongside towers, combs and redents still occupied by gendarmes and their families. In 1956, the Office d'HLM commissioned the construction of new large housing units by Marcel Lods alone, in the immediate vicinity of the U. In 1973, the buildings occupied by the gendarmes were handed over to the Ministry of Defense for demolition and reconstruction. In 1976, when the towers and combs were demolished, the site was considered for protection as a historic monument, but this was not pursued. In 1980, the first major discovery was made during the construction of the gymnasium adjacent to the housing estate and the nearby school complex: a tunnel dug by internees in September 1943 was uncovered before it came to an end.

The Klaus Barbie trial and the installation of a witness wagon

In 1987, the town of Drancy joined the Klaus Barbie trial as a civil party. At the same time, mayor Maurice Nilès and the associations decided to add a memorial wagon to the Shelomo Selinger monument. This was chosen from the remaining K-type wagons at the Le Bourget depot. Shelomo Selinger redesigned the commemorative space and linked his monument to the memorial wagon. The wagon was inaugurated in November 1988, and in March 1990 it was listed as a movable object by the French Monuments Historiques. Over the course of the decade, the Association Fonds Mémoire d'Auschwitz (AFMA) set up an exhibition and reception area on the first floor, particularly for school groups. At the end of September 1997, the Church of France chose the Drancy site to make its declaration of repentance for the insufficient stance it took during the Occupation to condemn the persecution of French Jews. This declaration of repentance echoes the Vél' d'hiv' speech delivered by French President Jacques Chirac in July 1995.

Shelomo Selinger memorial in front of the Cité de la Muette. In the background, the memorial car inaugurated in 1988. © Shoah Memorial

Graffiti discovery

Important new discoveries were made at the turn of the 20th century. In 1998, photographer William Betsch discovered graffiti in the city's cellars. Although some of the graffiti had already been photographed in 1945, this discovery shows that traces of it still remain in the building. A name, a date, a sentiment can be read. Finally, Betsch alerted the Île-de-France Regional Department of Cultural Affairs, as the window frames designed by Jean Prouvé were in the process of being replaced by the local social housing office.

Graffiti on plaster tile visible at the Shoah Memorial in Drancy, Archives nationales depot. © Jean-Bernard Vialles, Région Île-de-France, Inventaire général du patrimoine culturel, Département de la Seine-Saint-Denis, Archives nationales, ADAGP, 2011.

Graffiti found in 2009 at Cité de la Muette and exhibited at the Shoah Memorial. Manolo Mylonas, Départementales de la Seine-Saint-Denis

Classification of the Cité de la Muette as a Historic Monument

The Cité de la Muette was listed as a Monument Historique on May 25, 2001, following a classification procedure that put an end to the replacement of Prouvé's window frames. It is protected as a “major architectural and town-planning achievement of the 20th century [...] and also because of its use during the Second World War, first as an internment camp, then as a regrouping camp prior to deportation, which today makes it an important place of national remembrance”. On May 6, 2002, the tunnel was also listed. In 2009-2011, the reconstruction of part of the door and window frames led to the discovery of new graffiti.

The Shoah Memorial in Drancy

Envisaged as early as 2006, the Drancy Shoah Memorial was finally inaugurated in September 2012 opposite the Cité de la Muette, on a plot of land identified by Serge Klarsfeld. Behind a glass façade that gives a clear view of the cité from inside the museum, the Memorial comprises a permanent collection, a temporary exhibition and mediation rooms for the general public and schoolchildren. The museum team organizes guided tours and educational and cultural programs for residents of the département and beyond.
While the history of the Drancy camp is well known, the presence of such an institution on site is a reminder of the importance of continuing research into this place and the 80,000 Jewish internees who passed through it.

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Sources

Further information

I wish I could see you again

Antoine Feuer & Grégoire Osoha

A Pelican Productions’ project

Les lettres des déportés
There are thousands of them. Written by teenagers, mothers, men bent by the weight of time. Letters from more than 60,000 people arrested because they were Jewish and interned in the Drancy camp while waiting for their deportation by the Nazis to death.

Download the leaflet

The Shoah memorial in Drancy

The Drancy Shoah Memorial was created in 2012 opposite the Cité de la Muette in Seine-Saint-Denis, an architectural complex built in the 1930s, initially designed for social housing. Requisitioned by Nazi Germany during the Second World War, with the complicity of the Vichy regime, these buildings became an internment camp for French Jews in 1941, in order to exclude them from the rest of society.

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