Fort de Romainville, Les Lilas

Fort de Romainville, June 1940. The 401st anti-aircraft artillery regiment, housed here since the 1920s, leaves without a fight. Paris is declared an “open city” and German troops enter the capital. The German occupation begins. Many places were requisitioned, including the fort. By October 1940, it was housing German army troops. On November 1, 1940, the first prisoners were registered.

History and layout of the fort

The total area of the fort, including its glacis, is close to 25 hectares. Created in 1840-1842 to defend Paris alongside 15 other detached forts and fortifications encircling the capital, the fort is made up of defensive bastions linked by an outer rampart enclosure covering firing posts and technical premises, known as casemates. It also houses two barracks and a parade ground, and is unusual in that it is built on two levels on a hillside.

The fort becomes a detention camp

Following a decree issued on December 12, 1940 by the German military command in charge of the occupied zone, the Romainville fort officially became the first camp for “administrative detention as a security measure”. In its first six months of operation, more than seven out of ten inmates are nationals of “enemy powers at war with the Reich”, notably British and Yugoslav nationals. It operated in conjunction with the Swiss barracks camp in Saint-Denis.

A hostage camp

The invasion of the USSR in June 1941 had consequences for the German camp system in occupied France. Fort de Romainville became part of Frontstalag 122, a network of camps whose hub was the Royallieu camp at Compiègne. In August 1942, the number of inmates rose from 60 to 360, as the fort became a “hostage reserve” for reprisals against resistance actions. Each time the German occupying forces were attacked by the Resistance, a certain number of the fort's inmates were chosen for execution at Mont-Valérien. A total of 209 prisoners were shot, mainly between August 1942 and October 1943.

The 31,000-strong convoy

Most of the 230 women resistance fighters deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 24, 1943 were part of this group of hostages interned at the fort, who were exceptionally not shot. Many were communist activists. Transferred to Compiègne on January 22 and 23, they were integrated into a convoy of resistance fighters containing over 1,500 men. They occupied the last four carriages of the train. The train was split in two in Germany: the men went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, while the women were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. On arrival, the women were registered in the 31,000 number series. No further convoys of women resistance fighters and victims of repression were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most of them were subsequently deported to Ravensbrück, the camp reserved for women in the Nazi concentration camp system.

A transit camp for deportation

From the spring of 1943 until the Liberation, mass deportation convoys became the primary tool of repression against the Resistance and the French population, as well as for supplying the Nazi concentration camp system with forced labor. With the Royallieu camp in Compiègne, the fort became a transit camp for departures to concentration camps.

A camp for women resistance fighters

In February 1944, the roles of the Fronstalag 122 transit camps were changed. Men continued to be deported from Compiègne, while women were interned exclusively at Romainville Fort. This became the sole point of departure for women deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Prisoners from all over France, whose deportation had already been decided, were sent there. They usually waited a fortnight for their departure. Nearly 1,000 of them left in two convoys in April and May 1944 from the cattle platform at Pantin station. From the end of May, they were deported from Paris stations in small contingents, in transports made up of passenger cars.

The liberation of Romainville Fort

The majority of the fort's remaining inmates were deported from the Pantin railway station on August 11 and 15, 1944, while 47 internees were liberated on August 19 and handed over to the Red Cross. In the hours that followed, the German garrison began to leave. That same evening, however, eleven Resistance fighters and civilians were taken to the fort and handed over. They were shot and their bodies burned on August 20.

The central role played by the camp in German repressive policy in occupied France is decisive for the history of the site. Nearly 7,000 people were detained there, the majority of whom – around 3,900 – were women. 90% of these women were deported. More than 40% of France's deportees passed through the Romainville fort as a result of repressive measures. Men and women combined, 30% of those deported from the fort did not return.

The fort site has been largely preserved. Returned to military use at the end of the war, part of it was still in use in 2024. Since 1984, it has also housed a television broadcasting tower.

However, the Romainville fort has suffered from a “weak” memory, which can be explained by the post-war military occupation of the site, but also by the difficulty of finding common ground between the internees and the events that took place there during the war. As a result, several different memories coexisted at the site, in the form of plaques at the entrance.

At the Liberation, two figures from the Communist resistance were associated with him and celebrated. The first was Danièle Casanova. A Communist activist, she was in charge of the Union des Jeunes Filles de France before the war, then a leader of the underground Communist Party in the Resistance. She was interned at the fort for several months and deported to Auschwitz on the January 24, 1943 convoy. She did not return. The second outstanding personality was Colonel Fabien, whose civilian name was Pierre Georges. On August 21, 1941, he carried out the first gun attack of the Communist armed struggle against the Germans. Arrested in November 1942, he was interned several times before arriving at the Romainville fort, from which he managed to escape on June 1, 1943. He was killed in action in Germany on December 27, 1944. However, these two figures embody only part of the fort's history.

A ceremony was also organized in 1945 for the last 11 prisoners massacred at the fort, reflecting the shock of the local population at the mass grave they had discovered in 1944. This event blurred the memory of the site, making the fort primarily a place of massacre.

From 1954, a ceremony was held there as part of the national deportation day at the end of April, which became an important event in Seine-Saint-Denis after the department was created in 1968. Other commemorations emerged, carried out by a variety of actors, to pay tribute to the 46 hostages shot at Mont-Valérien on September 21, 1942, or to the women deported in 1944.