The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

[Editor’s Note: Within the section of this volume that deals with prisoner of war (POW) camps, the Frontstalags occupy a unique position. There is little information on most of the individual camps. At the same time, there is important material on the camp category as a whole, more than fits logically into the introduction on the POW camp system and also more than we have for any of the other categories. For that reason, in contrast to what we have done with the other types of POW camps, and in order to provide information that would not be available otherwise, we have chosen to include a broad introduction to this group of camps.]

The German army established approximately 70 Frontstalags in France during and shortly after the campaign of May–June 1940 as well as perhaps another 50 related temporary detention sites. The function of these camps, like the Dulags, was to serve as intermediate stations, to hold prisoners temporarily until they could be sent back to permanent POW camps. In fact, many Frontstalag staffs were later used to form Dulags on the eastern front. Contrary to their original mission, however, some Frontstalags remained in operation throughout most of the war.

Many Frontstalags were installed in French barracks or internment camps that had previously housed French or Allied troops and refugees from the Spanish Civil War or Nazi Germany.¹ Some early camps consisted simply of tents surrounded by barbed wire. All camps were overcrowded, poorly supplied, and unhygienic in the summer and early fall of 1940. By November, however, the departure of all British and most metropolitan French prisoners of war to camps in Germany had mitigated the overcrowding, even though nearly 40,000 colonial prisoners who had initially been brought to Germany returned to the Frontstalags in France.

Until the late summer of 1944, the Frontstalags served primarily as the internment center for French colonial prisoners as well as hundreds of soldiers of color who lived in France and had French citizenship.² In 1943–1944, between 6,000 and 9,000 British colonial soldiers captured in North Africa and Italy also arrived in the Frontstalags. Most of them came from South Africa and British India. They were usually confined to separate facilities and came into contact with the French colonial prisoners mostly inside the hospitals and camp infirmaries. In the summer and fall of 1944, several Frontstalags briefly served as transit camps for Frontstalag prisoners being evacuated to Germany and for Allied soldiers captured in Normandy.

The Frontstalags and work commandos (Arbeitskommandos) covered the initial German-occupied section of France with the exception of the two northernmost departments of France, which belonged to the administrative area of the German military commander in Belgium, and Alsace-Lorraine, which the Germans informally annexed. Frontstalags were never in the “free” zone of France, although the German army temporarily deployed a few work commandos there after the Germans and Italians occupied this area on November 11, 1942. Prisoners who escaped to the “free” zone of France were generally safe from recapture, even after November 1942.

Many Frontstalags consisted, in fact, of a number of branch camps (Zweiglager and Teillager), one of which (the main camp, or Hauptlager) served as the administrative center and held the commander and his staff. The staff deployed and supervised guard units, kept a registry of prisoners, and organized the reception and distribution of aid packages and mail. All Frontstalags supervised work commandos, generally between 10 and 100 of them, whose size varied from 1 to 1,000 prisoners. The commandos were dispersed across a large region around the main camp, often encompassing several French departments. In accordance with Article 43 of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War (1929), every camp and [End Page 132] every commando had a “man of confidence” (French: homme de confiance) who was the prisoners’ spokesperson to the camp commander, the protective power, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In theory, the prisoners were supposed to select the man of confidence, but, in practice, the Frontstalag commander often appointed him.

The network of Frontstalags in France was constantly in flux. The Frontstalag administration might move from one subcamp to another, and the same subcamp or commando could belong to two or three different Frontstalags between 1940 and 1944. Most of the 120 early Frontstalag administrations, few of which left archival traces, were disbanded or returned to Germany in late 1940 and early 1941, once the vast majority of metropolitan French and Allied prisoners had left for Germany. Only 20 Frontstalags survived the first wave of Frontstalag closures, which came to an end in July 1941, but another round of consolidations occurred in late 1941 and early 1942, leaving no more than 8 camps (numbered Frontstalag 133, 141, 153, 194, 195, 204, 221, and 222). Some of these Frontstalags absorbed other camps in the second half of 1943, leaving only Frontstalags 133, 194, 221 (with two separate sections), and 222.

Detailed occupancy numbers exist from July 1941 on. At this time, the Frontstalags held approximately 70,000 French colonial prisoners (down from an estimated 90,000–100,000 colonial soldiers at the end of June 1940) and a few hundred metropolitan French prisoners, mostly officers and translators. Between 2,000 and 3,000 colonial prisoners were still in Germany, either because they were assigned to propaganda camps or because they were overlooked; the majority of them returned to France over the next two years. North Africans (foremost Algerians, but also Moroccans and Tunisians) were the largest group among the colonial prisoners (approximately two-thirds until December 1941), followed by the tirailleurs sénégalais, who came predominantly from French West Africa but included some people from Central Africa (20%).

In addition, the Frontstalags housed a few thousand Madagascans and Indochinese as well as several hundred prisoners from the French Caribbean (called Martinicans or Antillais). A few prisoners came from the French territories in East Africa, India, and the southern Pacific. The Germans also considered prisoners of color living in France as colonial prisoners, even though most of these people, like some inhabitants of the French colonies, had French citizenship. The classification of Jewish prisoners by the German army was inconsistent: a number of North African Jews (predominantly from Algeria) as well as some French Jews were kept in the Frontstalags as “colonial” prisoners, while others were sent to Germany.

Perhaps the most famous Frontstalag prisoner was Léopold Sédar Senghor, later an eminent poet, philosopher, and the first president of the Republic of Senegal (1960–1980). Senghor spent some time in poorly installed provisional camps before arriving in Frontstalag 230 (Poitiers) in October 1940. He was transferred to Frontstalag 221 in Saint-Médard-en-Jalles in November 1941 and dismissed from captivity on the grounds of a faked illness on February 14, 1942. After his release, Senghor wrote an anonymous report on his last two camps, highlighting German propaganda efforts and the susceptibility of some North African prisoners to German pro-Islamic messages.³ Other well-known prisoners were Guy Tirolien, a poet and colonial administrator from Guadeloupe who spent some time with Senghor in Poitiers, Édouard Kouka Ouédraogo, who became minister of education in Burkina Faso and was interned in Frontstalag 221 until his escape in August 1942, and Papa Guèye Fall, a teacher from Dakar who escaped from Frontstalag 121 in Épinal on January 2, 1941, after German secret service officers had asked him whether he would support a future German administration in French West Africa. In 1956, Guèye Fall founded and directed a school in Dakar that is still named after him (Institution Papa Guèye Fall).

The capture of nearly 1.8 million French and 40,000 British prisoners during the western campaign of 1940 created a vast organizational challenge for the German army. The great majority fell into German hands in the last two weeks of the campaign, June 11–25. The prisoners experienced overcrowded transit camps with poor water and food supplies, and most of them had to march to Germany under appalling conditions. German guards targeted them for random violence. Diseases related to poor nutrition and hygiene became rampant. The barracks and fortresses used as camps were sometimes in poor shape due to damage caused by the retreating French troops or by the fighting. French colonial prisoners, particularly prisoners of color, suffered the worst abuses and received the poorest supplies and accommodations, as German soldiers were still under the influence of a Nazi propaganda campaign that had helped to trigger widespread massacres of black French prisoners during the fighting.⁴

In July 1940, the transport of French prisoners to Germany slowed down because of a clogged infrastructure, leaving over 400,000 prisoners from metropolitan France as well as 50,000 to 60,000 French colonial soldiers in France for the time being. Most of the approximately 40,000 French colonial soldiers who had already arrived in Germany were sent back to the Frontstalags in France in the remaining months of 1940 following an order by Hitler, who did not want prisoners of color on German soil. Meanwhile, the majority of the metropolitan French prisoners remaining in France, after helping to bring in the harvest, were transferred to Germany. Escapes succeeded frequently in the early phase of the Frontstalags, particularly among white French prisoners who, unlike colonial soldiers at this time, could work outside the camps.

Conditions in the Frontstalags remained precarious throughout the summer of 1940, even though changing German propaganda and colonial interests helped to improve the treatment of the colonial prisoners.⁵ The German authorities refused to allow the protective power of French prisoners at this time, the United States, to inspect the Frontstalags in France because they argued that France was still a war zone [End Page 133] (in anticipation of an invasion of Britain). At the insistence of the American diplomat charged with prisoner of war matters at the embassy in Berlin, Jefferson Patterson, the Germans permitted Patterson and an American physician to visit 10 camps in northeastern France in September 1940, but they did not agree to Patterson’s demand to allow the American embassy and consulate personnel in France to inspect nearby camps regularly (as was the practice in Germany).

The diplomatic impasse was only overcome when Hitler requested that Vichy France replace the United States as the protecting power for its own prisoners in German captivity, leading to the Agreement of November 16, 1940, signed by Hitler himself.⁶ The Diplomatic Service of Prisoners of War (Service diplomatique des prisonniers de guerre, SDPG, also called the Scapini Mission) in Paris, under the leadership of Ambassador Georges Scapini, received the right to inspect all camps containing French prisoners and to negotiate with the German authorities. Scapini, a blind World War I veteran with connections to some German officials, finalized procedures for camp visits in France with the Armed Forces High Command (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, OKW) in January 1941, and the first inspections of Frontstalags by the Scapini Mission took place a few weeks later. The Scapini Mission gathered detailed information on most camps based on its official inspection reports and on informal letters from aid workers, local officials, and the prisoners themselves. A major exception was the crisis in the wake of the escape of General Henri Giraud from captivity in Germany in April 1942, which threw Hitler into a fit of rage and induced him to prohibit inspections of camps with French prisoners in Germany and France from May to October 1942. In a personal letter to Hitler, Scapini offered himself as a prisoner instead of Giraud if Hitler withdrew his prohibition, but Hitler turned down the offer.⁷

Conditions in the Frontstalags improved markedly in early 1941. The Germans began to allow colonial prisoners to work outside the camps in commandos, giving them access to better food supplies. A new group of German camp commanders reined in the abuses and worked hard to improve the physical conditions of captivity. Moreover, new Home Guard Battalions, consisting of men who were too old or unfit for frontline service (Landesschützen) took over the guard duty, and they were much friendlier than the frontline troops and the military police (Feldgendarmerie) units that had at first guarded the prisoners.⁸ The camp commanders often hired local companies and deployed the prisoners in improving the setup of the camps (drainage work; insulation of barracks; repairs or creation of medical facilities; sports fields), as Senghor describes in his captivity report with reference to Frontstalag 230.⁹

French colonial prisoners in the Frontstalags did not generally benefit from concessions the German government made in Franco-German negotiations on POWs. According to the Agreement of November 16, 1940, for example, fathers with four children living in poverty had to be dismissed from captivity. Yet, the German authorities balked at applying this agreement to colonial prisoners by arguing that almost all colonial prisoners were poor by European standards and by claiming that documentation would be impossible. Pressed hard by the Scapini Mission, which consistently requested the dismissal of all colonial prisoners, the Germans only let go a few North Africans under this agreement.

In May 1941, Hitler rewarded some French concessions with the decision to dismiss French World War I veterans with the exception of professional officers, but, once more, the agreement benefited only a few French colonial prisoners, mostly North Africans. On July 3, 1941, the German Military Command in France decided to dismiss most remaining metropolitan French prisoners from the Frontstalags (approximately 2,800—and with the exception of Jews), a measure that irritated many Frontstalag prisoners, especially those who had French citizenship and lived in France but had to remain in captivity as prisoners of color. Colonial prisoners also did not benefit from the relief (relève) program of 1942, which liberated one French prisoner for every three French workers who were transferred to Germany. Although German officials were responsible for these discriminatory acts, colonial prisoners often blamed the French authorities for them. The discrimination fed demands for equal treatment, especially in light of the fact that the colonial troops had fought hard in May–June 1940. As many prisoners argued, bullets had not distinguished between white and nonwhite soldiers, and decrees should not do so either.

The Germans did, however, dismiss a large number of colonial prisoners due to health and propaganda considerations. Pulmonary disease, including tuberculosis, was widespread among the colonial prisoners. While it remains unproven that non-European soldiers had a special susceptibility to pulmonary diseases (European and African prisoners held in cramped and unsanitary conditions in 1940 became sick at very similar rates), there is no doubt that the Scapini Mission used the widespread belief in this susceptibility as an argument for the wholesale dismissal of colonial prisoners. The Germans, though aware through intelligence reports that the French were dramatizing the health situation of the colonial prisoners, became surprisingly generous in letting sick prisoners go.

In addition, the Germans decided in December 1941 to dismiss 10,000 North Africans as a propaganda measure. German agents and propaganda specialists, with the assistance of Arab nationalists inside and outside the prisoner of war camps, had developed an intense propaganda campaign that highlighted Germany’s championship of Islam, vilified France and Britain as colonial powers, and asked the prisoners to come to terms with an allegedly inevitable German victory. German propaganda won over a few North Africans, particularly among the more educated prisoners and religious persons, and also a few West Africans. The French secret service and police interviewed the dismissed and escaped prisoners, especially the North Africans, to identify spies and to confirm the prisoners’ loyalty to France. [End Page 134]

Together, the dismissals due to disease and propaganda reduced occupancy in the Frontstalags by approximately 50 percent from July 1941 to July 1944. Moreover, several thousand prisoners managed to escape. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the colonial prisoners captured in 1940 were free by July 1944. Of the remaining one-third (30,000 to 33,000), over half were liberated in the summer of 1944. The Germans transferred only approximately 13,500 French colonial prisoners—as well as several thousand British colonial prisoners—to Germany in August and September 1944. Despite the discriminatory policies on prisoner dismissals, French colonial prisoners were therefore much more likely to be free before the end of the war than French prisoners in Germany (with nearly one million still in the Reich in April 1945). Dismissal or escape from captivity, however, rarely meant a return home for colonial prisoners. It sometimes led them straight into a colonial labor battalion under Vichy command, some of which had to work for the German army or the Organisation Todt after November 1942—often under worse conditions than they had experienced as prisoners of war.

Frontstalag prisoners worked predominantly in agriculture, forestry, and public works, sectors that were particularly hurt by the absence of French laborers in German prisoner of war camps. As was the practice in the German Stalags, the German army in France hired the prisoners out to private companies, farms, and public employers such as town administrations. The vast majority of Frontstalag prisoners therefore stayed in the labor commandos. There was some seasonal shifting, especially from agriculture to forestry at the end of the fall and back in the spring. Prisoners received a daily wage for their labor by the employer (usually 10 francs a day, of which the Frontstalag withheld 1 or 2 francs for administrative costs). In addition to paying this small wage, the employer often also had to contribute to the feeding and accommodation of the prisoners.

Work commandos generally offered more freedom but fewer services than large camps. Guarding was lax in most commandos, but prisoners had less access to medical and religious services and fewer opportunities to enjoy sports and entertainment. Agriculture offered the best conditions in terms of food because the farmers often helped feed the prisoners. Forestry commandos demanded hard work, usually in isolated and hence poorly supplied locations. Given that most forestry work was performed in the winter, prisoners—who were always short of mittens, shoes, and warm clothing—also suffered greatly from the cold. The German army required large amounts of wood for construction purposes and as fuel, and the exploitation of the French forests with the help of colonial prisoner labor was therefore a high priority of the German Military Command in France. Prisoners staying in big camps often worked for the upkeep of the camp (a labor that did not have to be paid according to the Geneva Convention) or in nearby work sites, for example, factories or public works.

Many colonial prisoners (and some metropolitan French prisoners in Germany) had to perform war-related work, in violation of Article 31 of the Geneva Convention; for example, prisoners worked in armaments factories or directly for the German armed forces. The Vichy government tacitly condoned this practice—at least until 1943. Prisoners working for the Wehrmacht and armaments factories usually received the highest wages (up to 40 francs a day) and decent supplies. In 1943–1944, however, many colonial prisoners had to load and unload munitions at train stations and airports—workplaces that exposed them to frequent air attacks, sometimes with deadly consequences. In the same period, the German army also forced several hundred French colonial prisoners to work on fortifications in Belgium and the Netherlands under harsh and unhealthy conditions. The Scapini Mission was not allowed to inspect these commandos and protested repeatedly until the Germans withdrew the prisoners in the spring of 1944.

The food supply of the Frontstalag prisoners was uneven. Prisoners in agricultural commandos, the majority, fared well, but the situation was worse in some large camps and in isolated commandos. According to the Geneva Convention, the detaining power was responsible for feeding and accommodating the prisoners, but, in practice, the German army increasingly relied on French employers and a range of offi-cial and nonofficial charitable organizations to supplement and sometimes replace German supplies. The French authorities grudgingly noted this trend but did not oppose it resolutely because they saw in the care for the colonial prisoners a precious tool of French counterpropaganda.¹⁰ Yet, French agencies often could not keep up with prisoner transfers, and their increased role in supplying the prisoners meant that prisoners blamed them for glitches in the system. In addition, the aid deliveries sent to prisoner groups varied by territory of origin. North Africans, especially Moroccans, always received the most generous supplies, and this created jealousies and conflicts.

Corruption networks among the prisoners and sometimes the guards existed in many camps and commandos and made conditions worse by plundering aid packages and selling their contents to the other prisoners or to civilians at inflated prices. A particular supply problem affected the three Frontstalags in the Southwest of France (195, 221, and 222) in 1941–1942. Pressed by the Scapini Mission and the ICRC to house colonial prisoners in milder climates, the Germans transferred too many people to these camps in the arguably warmest zone of German-occupied France. When the German secret services in the fall of 1941 discovered that the most important aid organization supplying these three camps, the French Red Cross section in Périgueux, had smuggled people and letters across the demarcation line, they ordered a halt to the deliveries, exacerbating the shortages for several months.

Guard behavior in the Frontstalags was generally decent after the harsh first phase. In some small work commandos, guards and prisoners even developed a comradely relationship. There were very few guards, and prisoners had much freedom; for example, they could go to town after work and on the weekends without guards. Wherever the supervision [End Page 135] of guards was tighter—and this was particularly the case in northeastern France, where many commandos worked for the German agrarian organization Ostland—the guards tended to be harsher. Camp commanders often found their guards (“good old Papas”) too lenient and tried to enforce stricter guard behavior, especially during escape attempts, but to no avail.¹¹ In January 1943, the Military Command in France, faced with persistent personnel shortages, requested that the French government provide cadres for the colonial prisoners. The Vichy government agreed, hoping to offer the prisoners better conditions and to counter the effects of German propaganda.

Some French cadres, however, were corrupt and abusive, and French-led commandos in general did not offer better conditions than German-led commandos. In some places, the prisoners under French cadres even asked to get their German guards back. Civilians frequently insulted and attacked the French cadres. Views of this arrangement varied among the 6,000 colonial prisoners affected by it: some saw it as a betrayal by France, while others appreciated the French cadres and found that they allowed them more freedom than the German guards. The Germans ended the arrangement soon after the Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, because they feared that French-led commandos might defect to the resistance, as occasionally happened.¹²

Relations among the prisoners in the Frontstalags were often tense. Soldiers who were serving in separate territorial units were suddenly mixed with people from all areas of the French empire and initially from France itself.¹³ The Germans tried to keep commandos homogeneous by territory of origin, but there also were tensions among prisoners from different ethnic groups from the same territory. In larger camps, moreover, prisoners remained mixed, although they were often housed in separate barracks. Strong tensions existed in particular between North Africans and blacks from West Africa. But Moroccans, Tunisians, and Algerians also did not always get along with each other. Corruption networks centering on the man of confidence from a particular ethnic group, unequal supplies, and the divisive effects of German propaganda exacerbated these tensions. In some camps, ethnic gangs who controlled the camp police terrorized the other prisoners. A particularly bad case was Frontstalag 221 in Saint-Médard, which Senghor and other prominent prisoners experienced. Usually, such abuses came to the attention of the Scapini Mission and the German authorities, who tried to stop them.

The prisoners of the Frontstalags were members of the French army and also foreigners in France. While it was generally possible for North Africans to communicate with their homes, many prisoners from the more distant colonies had no contact with their families for the entire duration of the war. This strongly affected the mood, in particular, of the Indochinese, Madagascans, and West Africans. Relations with French civilians could mitigate homesickness, however. Some prisoners were very close to the farmer family on whose land they worked. The French authorities also encouraged a “war godmother” program, whereby French women would send letters and packages to a prisoner. Sometimes, the prisoner could visit the war godmother. Several of these relationships became amorous.

In general, the lax guarding in the commandos made relations between prisoners and French women relatively easy even outside the war godmother program. A number of colonial prisoners, cut off for years from their homes, decided to marry French women and hoped to settle down in France. Such plans were difficult to carry out, however, because the prisoners were still mobilized soldiers and therefore required official permission to marry. Although pregnant French women or their mothers urged Ambassador Scapini to secure permission for Frontstalag prisoners to marry, the Vichy administration (and later the Free French authorities) rarely granted the permission, because they saw these amorous relationships as a threat to French prestige in the colonies. For that reason, some prisoners got married without official papers, and some couples had children.

Relations between French civilians and colonial prisoners were generally friendly. There were cases of racism and rejection, and mixed couples often suffered ostracism, but many civilians were grateful for the contribution the colonial soldiers had made to France’s defense in 1940. The Scapini Mission and the other French agencies responsible for prisoners of war actively encouraged supportive relations between civilians and prisoners (short of amorous relationships). The Scapini Mission, for example, admonished town mayors and department prefects if colonial prisoners in their area suffered public hostility or received inadequate supplies. Mayors and prefects sometimes countered the criticism by arguing that the labor of the colonial prisoners was not needed in their area and that the prisoners were not as diligent as hired workers in peacetime.

Escapes from the Frontstalags were frequent, particularly among the North African prisoners, who had good chances of reaching their homes until the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942. Blacks and other prisoners from the more distant colonies were less likely to flee. Escape was dangerous because German guards had strict orders to fire immediately on every prisoner making an escape attempt, and guards undoubtedly shot and killed a number of prisoners during escape attempts (which was legal) and in a few cases after recapture (which was a war crime). However, the laxity of the guards as well as their poor marksmanship in most cases allowed escapes to succeed, and very few prisoners were ever recaptured. Early resistance networks helped to hide the prisoners and escorted them to the “free” zone of France.¹⁴ Several escaped prisoners joined resistance groups. The most famous was Addi Bâ, a black soldier who escaped soon after capture and founded a resistance network in the Vosges Mountains. He was arrested on November 18, 1943, and executed a month later in Épinal.¹⁵ Most escaped prisoners either [End Page 136] took up a civilian job in wartime France or were integrated into a labor battalion under the Vichy authorities.

In September 1943, the Germans transferred many British colonial prisoners held in Italy to France after a short stay in German Stalags. At least 2,000 soldiers from Africa and British India arrived in four camps in France in October 1943 (Frontstalag 133, 194, 221, and 222), and more than 3,000 Indians came to Stalag 315 in Épinal in the first months of 1944. Most of these prisoners were in poor health because they had to undertake long marches in Italy without adequate supplies. The German Frontstalag commanders ordered that all British colonial prisoners receive rations for heavy workers to restore their strength. The inspection reports of the ICRC and the Swiss government (as protecting power) suggest that conditions were fairly good for them. They performed work similar to that done by the French colonial prisoners, although usually in separate commandos.¹⁶

After the Allied invasion of Normandy, the Germans began to concentrate the prisoners from commandos in the bigger camps. In proximity to the fighting, French colonial prisoners often had to perform war-related work under dangerous conditions, such as digging antitank trenches and clearing bombed streets and towns. In August 1944, with the German position in France rapidly crumbling, the German army tried to evacuate the Frontstalag prisoners to Germany. On their way to Germany, the prisoners (both French and British colonial soldiers) spent time in the camps in the northeast of France, closest to the German border (mostly the camps of Charleville and Nancy, as well as some older campsites that were revived as transit camps, such as Châlons-sur-Marne and Vesoul).

Allied soldiers captured on the Normandy front also passed through these camps on their way to Germany. The transfers and disruptions due to the fighting affected the supply chain for the prisoners, who experienced much hardship during this period. Trains with prisoners became targets of air attacks, which killed many prisoners. In western, southwestern, and central France, the Germans were unable to evacuate most prisoners before the arrival of Allied troops. In some cases, the French resistance liberated the prisoners. The destruction of bridges by the resistance also held up the prisoner transfers, leading to liberation.

A few of the Frontstalags became part of the network of centers for French colonial ex-prisoners awaiting repatriation. The conditions in these centers were bad because the new French authorities could neither repatriate them quickly nor care for them adequately. Whereas most prisoners had worked and earned money under the Frontstalag administration, they were now idle and unemployed. The French authorities often could not procure them their military pay and their premiums. Some prisoners compared their frustrating situation with the “time under the Germans,” which they now tended to idealize. The discontent among ex-prisoners triggered many riots in France, Britain (where some ex-prisoners were sent before returning to Africa), and Africa itself.

A complicating issue was that a number of ex-prisoners had “married” French women and sometimes had children with them; these prisoners wanted to stay in France and settle there, and French women occasionally started riots when these soldiers were forcefully repatriated. The French administration did not recognize most of these marriages, and some officials feared miscegenation and social problems if the exprisoners were allowed to settle in France. On the other hand, the colonial governors did not want these couples in the colonies because they feared that marriages of colonial “subjects” and white French women would undermine colonial prestige. In light of these considerations, the commander of France’s “indigenous” troops even went so far as to suggest resettling the mixed couples in Madagascar, but his proposal was deemed illegal. The bloodiest clash involving ex-prisoners occurred in Thiaroye outside of Dakar on December 1, 1944, when the French army command and police opened fire on a crowd of 1,280 ex-prisoners who demanded immediate pay, killing at least 35 of them.¹⁷

The experience of Frontstalag prisoners in France, after a dismal start in 1940–1941, was not altogether terrible. Although there were periods of hunger and hardship in the Frontstalags, the guards in general treated the prisoners in a humane way, and the camp commanders often made great efforts to enhance the infrastructure and supply of the camps. Some of the prisoners’ suffering was due to internal rivalries and corruption. The prisoners’ prolonged stay in Germanoccupied France created significant problems for a French administration intent on reintegrating the prisoners into a colonial routine, based on discrimination, after 1944.