Gurs

Gurs, large concentration camp near Pau, in southwestern France at the foot of the Pyrenees, that was used successively by independent France, Vichy France, and Nazi Germany.

Gurs was built initially to house Republican refugees from the Spanish Civil War and later held refugees fleeing persecution in Germany and Austria. When France capitulated to the Germans in June 1940, Gurs became the main concentration camp for Marshal Philippe Pétain’s collaborationist government in unoccupied (Vichy) France, receiving Jews and various dissidents. By 1941 there were 15,000 inmates, including Jews expelled from Germany and Belgium. Malnutrition and wretched sanitation killed great numbers. In late 1942, many inmates were deported to the extermination camps of German-occupied Poland. Most Jews from Gurs were sent to the transit camp Drancy, near Paris, and from there to the death camps of Auschwitz and Sobibor. When deportations ended in August 1943, only 1,200 inmates remained, 48 of them Jews.