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

The Wehrmacht founded Frontstalag 152 on July 20, 1940, and disbanded the camp on March 21, 1941. Frontstalag 152 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 26 714 between April 28 and September 24, 1940. The number was struck between July 31, 1942, and February 9, 1943.

Frontstalag 152 held French prisoners of war (POWs). It was located in a zone where large numbers of POWs were taken during the last days of the French campaign in June 1940. There were two main sites, the first in Pithiviers and the second in Beaune-la-Rolande (map 2), which later became notorious as internment camps for Jews and political prisoners. Little is known about the time during which these camps held POWs, however.

In July 1940, Oberstleutnant Johannes Gutschmidt, who commanded a number of camps in this region, visited both camps and found that they each had approximately 13,000 prisoners and were vastly overcrowded. Gutschmidt made efforts to transfer some prisoners to less crowded camps. The guard units in Pithiviers were the 450th and 451st Reserve Battalions (Landesschützenbataillone). Gutschmidt noted that a prisoner was shot while trying to escape on August 23, 1940.¹

A woman working for a French aid organization visited Pithiviers on July 26, 1940, and found 18,000 prisoners distributed over three different campsites. All the prisoners seemed to be hungry, although many prisoners were working on farms in the countryside and were better nourished than the prisoners [End Page 163] confined to the big camps (probably mostly colonial soldiers, who were not yet allowed to work outside the main camps at this time). In Beaune-la-Rolande, she found 14,000 prisoners, many with dysentery. As she wrote, “Here, they [the prisoners] lack everything. Some prisoners tell me with a sad voice that they have a little too much for dying but not enough for living.” In addition to food, the camp urgently needed medicine.²

Other information collected by the French authorities confirms that the prisoners in Beaune-la-Rolande, mostly Algerians and Moroccans, were near starvation in the late summer of 1940.³ The colonial prisoners in Frontstalag 152 were likely transferred to neighboring Frontstalags 151 and 153; most of the metropolitan French prisoners were transferred to camps in Germany.