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

The Wehrmacht established Frontstalag 180 on July 20, 1940, and disbanded the camp on March 26, 1941. Frontstalag 180 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 00 082 between April 28 and September 14, 1940. The number was struck between July 15, 1942, and January 24, 1943.

Frontstalag 180 was a short-lived camp for French prisoners of war in Tours and Amboise in the Loire valley (map 1). Little information is known about the camp, except for a few informal reports by aid agency members. A woman working for the French Red Cross, for example, visited Amboise on July 26, 1940, and found four camp sites in and around the town. The German commander was very strict and requested a thorough examination of the aid packages, explaining to her that, previously, packages for the prisoners had contained arms, alcohol, and civilian clothing (to facilitate escapes). She estimated that the camps held approximately 14,000 prisoners. The conditions were very bad. The prisoners lacked food, clothing, shoes, and bed linens. The camps were infested with lice. The campgrounds were in poor condition; the high humidity in the area turned much of the ground into mud.

In December 1940, after the departure of most metropolitan French prisoners for Germany, another aid worker reported about a camp in Amboise that held 2,093 prisoners: 1,427 North Africans, 550 Indochinese, 85 prisoners defined as “blacks” (West Africans), 21 Antilleans, and 10 Madagascans. The prisoners were suffering from the cold and urgently requested a transfer to the warmer south of France.¹ In early 1941, Frontstalag 181 headquartered in Saumur, 70 kilometers (44 miles) west of Tours, took over what remained of the campsites belonging to Frontstalag 180.