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

The Germans created Frontstalag 181 on July 20, 1940, and disbanded the camp on June 12, 1942. Frontstalag 181 received field post number (Feldpostnummer) 00 894 between April 28 and September 14, 1940. The number was struck between July 15, 1942, and January 24, 1943.

Frontstalag 181 held French prisoners of war (POWs). It was located in the city of Saumur (map 1), which had been the site of heroic resistance by French officer cadets to superior numbers of German troops during the last days of the French campaign, and the surviving defenders were among the first prisoners interned in Frontstalag 181. As a sign of respect for their heroic fight, the first German commander, whose name was Eschig, released them after a few days. For several months thereafter, the camp then became a center for prisoners from France and from the empire.

The main camp of Frontstalag 181 occupied various locations, including the cavalry school in Saumur. Attached to it were two hospitals, the Hôpital Mixte and the Hôpital Desjardins. A note from an aid worker from the late summer of 1940 stated that the camp housed 3,700 metropolitan French and 1,500 colonial prisoners. Conditions were tolerable, thanks to the generous efforts of the local Red Cross, boy scout troops, and other organizations.¹ The sub-prefect of the department stated on January 2, 1941, that the prisoners were treated well, although the winter cold was hard to take for many soldiers from tropical regions. The German authorities allowed the families of the French prisoners and the war godmothers (marraines de guerre; women who corresponded particularly with colonial soldiers in order to replace to some extent their distant family) to visit them in the camp. In early January 1941, however, 3,700 metropolitan French prisoners were loaded onto cattle cars and sent to Germany in three convoys, and the camp population, henceforth, consisted mostly of colonial prisoners as well as a few French Jews.²

At the time of the Scapini Mission’s first formal inspections, on April 2, 1941, Frontstalag 181 had 3,992 colonial prisoners and 238 Frenchmen and was under the command of Oberst Freiherr von Gall. The 600 prisoners remaining in the main camp were working on improving the grounds. Religious services were well organized. The camp had several marabouts and priests. There were 30 colonial officers in the camp who enjoyed some privileges, such as having personal servants and private rooms with washing facilities, although they were not housed separately from the rank-and-file troops, as the Geneva Convention required. For their entertainment, the prisoners organized variety shows. They requested pictures of Marshal Pétain, soccer balls, Arabic books, and teaching materials for French language courses. The inspector heard that tensions existed among the prisoners because the Moroccans, as in most other camps, received more generous aid packages than the others. The inspector found out, however, that supplies sent from Vichy were still in storage and had not been [End Page 172] distributed to the needier prisoners. Most of the prisoners in the Frontstalag were deployed in small agriculture and road construction commandos outside the main camp. The inspector heard that there were larger commandos with 200 prisoners each in Tours and Amboise, likely the remnants of Frontstalag 180.³

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Frontstalag 181 at Saumur. Former cavalry barracks, May, 1941.

COURTESY OF ICRC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), visiting the camp on May 30, 1941, confirmed these impressions and found that conditions in the main camp were fairly good. The ICRC inspectors estimated the rate of tuberculosis to be 3–4 percent, which was comparatively low. The main camp housed 235 West Africans, 54 Antilleans, 27 Madagascans, and 30 Jews (it is unclear whether these were residents of France or North Africa).⁴

The Scapini Mission organized a more detailed inspection in July 1941, for the first time including a number of commandos. Most of the prisoners in these commandos worked for farmers, often at the request of the local mayor, and they enjoyed fairly good conditions. In the village of Thilouze, east of Saumur, the 14 Tunisians of the local commando ate lunch in a public restaurant and received four liters of wine every day, all at the expense of the local mayor. In nearby Azay-le-Rideau, another generous mayor paid for restaurant lunches for 37 Tunisians (although there is no mention of wine). In another small commando, the prisoners were housed in the local rectory and cared for by a woman paid by the town who cooked for them every day. In Angers, a commando of 230 West Africans existed, but the inspector made no comment on their work. In some places, the inspector criticized mayors or individual farmers who did not adequately care for the prisoners. Sometimes the rations provided by French employers were significantly smaller than the ones previously distributed by the Germans, a fact that alarmed the French authorities because they feared that such experiences would help German propaganda and loosen the ties of the colonial prisoners to France.⁵

In Saumur itself, the camp had far more prisoners in July than in the spring: 2,526 prisoners, among them 1,825 people from the French Antilles, North Africa, and Indochina as well as 615 West Africans and 86 metropolitan French. Conditions in Saumur were very good, even though the inspectors noted strong tensions among the prisoners from different territories (or “races,” as they said). Everywhere in the Frontstalag, the colonial prisoners resented the recently announced dismissal of metropolitan French prisoners in the Frontstalags. People from the empire who had French citizenship were particularly outraged about not being considered Frenchmen.⁶

German propaganda toward North Africans was very active in Frontstalag 181. Escaped prisoners reported that the Germans used North African collaborators as camp police to prevent escapes and showed films about the successes of the Wehrmacht, which apparently left a vivid impression on many prisoners. German-edited Arabic newspapers were widely distributed, and German agents told North African prisoners that the Germans would pay them more and treat them better than the French. Escaped pro-French prisoners asked the Vichy police and secret service to closely monitor all prisoners dismissed or escaped from Saumur because German propaganda there had been quite successful among the Algerians and Tunisians, though apparently not among the Moroccans.⁷

From the beginning, Frontstalag 181 faced a major problem with escapes. In the first months, it was mostly the metropolitan French prisoners who ran away, especially once they understood that they might be transported to Germany. Later, colonial prisoners also escaped in large numbers. In September 1941, for example, 60 colonial prisoners dug a tunnel beneath the barbed wire in Saumur and escaped.⁸ Altogether, 1,500 prisoners appear to have fled from the camp from July 1940 to January 1942. The proximity of the demarcation line made escapes particularly attractive (the Germans did not insist on a return of POWs having reached the “free zone”). An early resistance network in Saumur, assisted by French Red Cross drivers, hid escaped prisoners and guided them across the demarcation line.⁹ German guards killed several prisoners during escape attempts, and Freiherr von Gall protested repeatedly to the mayors of Saumur and other towns, demanding that they suppress solidarity networks and prevent civilians from talking to the prisoners. In March 1941, the German Ortskommandantur of Saumur even forced the towns Saumur and Saint-Hilaire-Saint-Florent to pay a large sum (500,000 francs for the former, 100,000 francs for the latter) as a fine for allegedly supporting prisoner escapes, but the Germans returned the money in August after having been unable to prove any official complicity in prisoner escapes.¹⁰

In the second half of 1941, Frontstalag 181 was absorbed by Frontstalag 232 in Savenay. The camp in Saumur and many [End Page 173] work commandos continued operating under Frontstalag 232 for a few months, but the German authorities closed the camp in January 1942, probably because of the large number of escapes. Many prisoners from the former Frontstalag 181 were transferred to Frontstalag 133 in Rennes, and others were sent to Frontstalag 195 in Onesse-et-Laharie.¹¹