The Concentration Camp at Gurs (France)

There were 6,555 Basques interned in the Gurs concentration camp in 1939. The year before, the French authorities had reorganized the placement of the internees in the camps in the Eastern Pyrenees department. The Basques from the so-called “Gernika Berri” (New Gernika) of the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer were transferred to the “Basque camp” in Gurs on the border with the French Basque region of Soule-Ziburu. The first arrived there on 5 April 5. The camp, which had a capacity of 15,000, would come to house as many as 18,500 refugees. 

The Gurs camp was 400 metres wide and had two entrances separated a central road two kilometres long. There were 328 barracks housing around 60 people. The barracks were divided among thirteen compounds, each of which had its own laundry, kitchen, latrines, punishment cells and wholly inadequate infirmary, and was enclosed by barbed wire. The Basques were put into compounds A through D. The rain flooded the floors, which turned into quagmires and the lack of hygiene brought lice and diseases such as syphilis, scabies and scurvy.  

From the first moment, the Basque government and other institutions and international organizations did what they could to get people out of the camp. For example, once Germany invaded Poland, thousands left Gurs. Some were repatriated while many others, fearful of the Franco regime’s repression, went into exile in the Americas. By January 1940, fewer than 200 Basques remained in Gurs. 

After May 1940, the camp started taking in refugees from across Europe. In addition to the Jews unsuccessfully trying to escape the Nazi horror, 800 “Basque political emigrants” were imprisoned. Then, the history of the camp became much darker. Experts calculated that some 14,000 prisoners were transferred from Gurs to the Nazi extermination camps, an unknown number of Basques among them.   

In November 1943, a maquis unit attacked the camp and robbed its arsenal, but this did not stop the Vichy government from interning “undesirables” there. Then, after the Liberation of France, Gurs became a prison for German prisoners of war. The camp was closed on December 31, 1945. 

The camp was dismantled soon afterwards and no trace of what happened there remained. In June 1980, a year after the 50th anniversary of the camp’s opening, the Association of the Friends of the Gurs Camp (L’Amicale du Camp de Gurs) was created. Since then, it has worked to maintain the history and memory of what happened there. 

UB / MJV