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

The Wehrmacht established Frontstalag 221 on July 17, 1940, and ordered its dissolution on March 8, 1944 (although it was not completely disbanded until July 7). The unit received three field post numbers (Feldpostnummer): 02 604, issued between April 28 and September 14, 1940 (struck between July 15, 1942, and January 24, 1943); 17 427 A, issued between January 10 and September 26, 1943 (struck on January 30, 1945); and 20 275 A, also issued between January 10 and September 26, 1943 (struck on January 30, 1945).

Frontstalag 221 included a series of camps in the area of Bordeaux in southwestern France. It was centered on land belonging to the town of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles and some neighboring communities, where a series of camps had been constructed over the years (map 1). The camp also controlled work commandos mostly devoted to forestry in the area around Bordeaux. It was often overpopulated, because the Scapini Mission and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) pressed the Germans to house colonial prisoners in the south of France, although the German occupation zone included only a small strip of land along France’s southern Atlantic coast; the proximity of the demarcation line stifled economic exchange, exacerbating the supply situation in the three southwestern Frontstalags (195, 221, and 222).

Frontstalag 221 took over Frontstalag 230 and some prisoners from Frontstalag 135 in November 1941. It oversaw work commandos in many towns and villages, mostly in the Gironde Département, including Lugos, Saint-Symphorien, Lacanau, Langas, Saucats, Hourtin, Lanton, Moutchic, Lège, Andernos, Brach, and Carcans. In December 1942, Frontstalag 221 had 7,470 prisoners and was the largest of the eight camp complexes in France. The vast majority (75%) of the prisoners were North Africans; the second largest group were the “Senegalese” (i.e., West Africans; approximately 20%).¹ In the second half of 1943, the two sections of Frontstalag 221 in the region of Bordeaux and in Rennes together held almost 11,000 prisoners, making this Frontstalag by far the largest in France, with nearly a third of all remaining French colonial prisoners.²

In Saint-Médard, Frontstalag 221 included the Camp des As along the Jalles River. Other subcamps were the nearby Camp des Annamites, called after Indochinese civilian workers who had worked nearby, and various other sites around Saint-Médard and neighboring towns, such as the Camp de Souge to the west and the Camp de Germignan in Le-Taillan-Médoc, to the northeast.

Little documentation exists for the first months of Frontstalag 221’s existence. Like most other camps during this early period, it appears to have been overpopulated and undersupplied. The French army physician Dr. Hollecker, who had witnessed some massacres of black French prisoners in June 1940 and worked in the camp hospital from January to November 1941, noted that the initial occupancy of the camp complex was 8,000 but that it was reduced to 4,000 in March 1941.³

The physical structure of the camps belonging to Frontstalag 221 underwent significant improvements. In the period of December 1940 to October 1941, sewer systems were installed or upgraded; some buildings that had lacked power received electricity; toilets and washing facilities were built; inside walls received new paint, and the outer walls of barracks were covered with a coat of camouflage paint, probably to better protect the prisoners from air attacks and also to deprive British planes targeting the nearby airport of orientation markers.⁴ As the northernmost camp in the Southwest—which offered the warmest climate zone of German-occupied France—the camp complex of Saint-Médard became a reception area for prisoners transferred from Germany and elsewhere.

In the early months of 1941, German propaganda was particularly active in this Frontstalag, encouraging independence movements (particularly among the Tunisians). In the summer of 1941, the notorious Leutnant Krebs, an Arabicspeaking German propaganda specialist, visited Saint-Médard and spoke with prisoners. Some North African nationalists, including students from Paris and Bordeaux, performed various services for the North African prisoners of Saint-Médard, such as medical care and letter writing for the illiterate, and edited a pro-German Arab newspaper, Lisan-al-Asir (Voice of the Prisoner).

The first round of inspections, conducted by Ambassador Georges Scapini himself, occurred in April 1941. The Camp de Germignan, under the command of Oberstleutnant Hollmeier, had 1,066 French colonial prisoners, mostly North Africans, and 11 foreigners (Poles serving in French uniform and some Belgians). The prisoners worked in agriculture and forestry. They pointed out that their man of confidence, who had been chosen by the Germans, was incompetent. In the Camp des As, which held 1,385 prisoners of war (POWs) and was commanded by Oberleutnant Wolfensteller, the inspectors bemoaned the lack of straw mattresses and blankets, but the German officials claimed that the prisoners had burned the straw and sold the blankets. There were several cases of tuberculosis, particularly among the Madagascans and West Africans. The morale of the prisoners was poor, partly because of tensions between the West African and Indochinese prisoners, and because the man of confidence, Adjutant Mohamed Bel Aid, appeared to be unqualified for his task. To help mitigate tensions, the inspectors asked the German commander to assign separate barracks to prisoners from different ethnic groups.⁵

The Scapini Mission returned to the main camp in Saint-Médard (Camp des As) in July 1941. The commander of the Frontstalag at this time was Major de Ahna, and the camp had a new man of confidence (Adjutant-Chef Ben Aida). The camp complex in Saint-Médard housed 2,782 prisoners (1,448 Algerians, 532 Moroccans, 451 Indochinese, 302 “Senegalese,” 32 Tunisians, 13 Madagascans, and a few other prisoners, including some Hindus, probably from the small French [End Page 192] territory in India); an additional 3,075 prisoners were in work commandos or branch camps. The inspector observed that the prisoners were upset about the lack of postal contact with their families, but he concluded that conditions in the camp had significantly improved since April. The Camp de Germignan was poorly supplied, however, and the prisoners urgently needed soap and new clothing. Germignan had 659 prisoners (521 Algerians, 72 Moroccans, 52 Tunisians, 13 recaptured Frenchmen, and one Hindu).⁶

Most prisoners in the commandos were working in forestry, which meant hard work often in isolated and therefore poorly supplied locations. Many forestry commandos had insufficient access to clean water, and the prisoners lacked clothing, soap, and everything necessary for leisure activities (balls, books, musical instruments). Another persistent problem was the lack of washing facilities. In Lugos, prisoners were allowed to use the showers of the German guards twice a week. Because the forestry commandos in this region were relatively large (150–300 prisoners), there usually was a mar-about among the prisoners and a room available for Muslim prayers, but prisoners in many commandos asked for copies of the Quran.⁷

Relations to civilians were strained in some places. In Saint-Laurent-du-Médoc, for example, a farmer repeatedly noticed that his chickens were disappearing at night. He alerted the police, and police officers searched a nearby castle where Algerian prisoners lived. The prisoners denied any wrongdoing, but the police found many chicken bones in the kitchen garbage (which the farmer promptly identified as the bones of his chickens!), and the Germans withdrew the commando in the face of public hostility after the police inquiry became known.⁸ In some places, local doctors claimed that the presence of the prisoners had led to an increase of diseases among civilians, including malaria.⁹ However, civilians also complained about the German army personnel, who could rarely resist the temptation to explore the wine cellars of the houses they had requisitioned.¹⁰

In November 1941, the combined effects of the influx of new prisoners from other Frontstalags and the interruption of supply deliveries from the French Red Cross created severe shortages in Frontstalag 221. Because of a denunciation by a female driver, the German secret service had discovered that the truck drivers of the French Red Cross section of Périgueux, which supplied all the camps in the Southwest, had smuggled letters and persons across the demarcation line. Therefore, they forbade the Red Cross trucks to enter the occupied zone of France.

The Camp des As was in the hands of North African mafia-style organizations that terrorized the black prisoners, robbed aid packages, and extracted bribes in anticipation of the liberation of the 10,000 North Africans in December 1941. Bel Aid and a Tunisian NCO named Ousseini were at the center of these rival networks. They had accomplices among the German personnel, although Senghor believed that the commander of the camp and the Frontstalag commander did not know about the extent of the corruption. Some German guards kept encouraging the prisoners to complain, but this involved serious risks because Bel Aid had made sure that his companions were all drafted into the camp police. They arbitrarily beat and arrested other prisoners, especially black Africans.

By this time, the Scapini Mission had received numerous letters from prisoners and aid workers about corruption in Saint-Médard. The German authorities started an inquiry against Bel Aid, Ousseini, and others, leading to the arrest of several guards and prisoners, but the outcome of the case is unclear because of the interruption of inspections in May 1942 that came about as a consequence of the Giraud crisis. Bel Aid figures on a list of German collaborators prepared by the French secret service, which identified him as “very hard toward the other prisoners.”

The hospital situated in the Camp de Germignan was a special institution within the Frontstalag 221 complex. With Dr. Hollecker’s participation, this hospital established new X-ray testing procedures for tuberculosis that so impressed Scapini during his visit in April 1941 that the procedures were later adopted in other camps, too. Hollecker pointed out that the Germans were very generous in dismissing prisoners even though many diseases were feigned; he knew of prisoners rubbing sand, tobacco leaves, or quinine salt into their eyes or skin so that it looked as if they were developing a trachoma or a rash indicating a dangerous infectious disease. Hollecker also described the establishment of a special section in the hospital staffed by 12 German physicians who specialized in tropical diseases. Prisoners from other Frontstalags were often sent to this hospital for treatment. The French physicians worked together with the Germans.¹¹

Soon after Hollecker’s dismissal from captivity, however, the Germans separated one building of the hospital from the Frontstalag, closed it to the French physicians, and used it as a secret training and research facility. This hospital attracted Nazi researchers interested in demonstrating racial differences through physical and pathological characteristics, such as Dr. Wolfgang Abel, a physician from Vienna who had participated in the sterilization of children of French colonial soldiers and German women in the Rhineland (the so-called Rhineland bastards) during the mid-1930s. Abel was particularly interested in leprosy patients in Saint-Médard. His broader interest was in identifying distinctive racial characteristics, and he therefore took numerous photographs of healthy and sick colonial POWs and established a collection of their footprints without their consent.

While Abel’s research was degrading but not life threatening, another Austrian physician and “racial scientist,” Dr. Karl Horneck, conducted experiments that involved serious risks for his subjects. Horneck wanted to test race-specific reactions to disease and to explore the possibility of human-tohuman immunization. He took blood from prisoners and injected a serum into them that contained antibodies from persons of a different race. His injections could cause life-threatening reactions such as an allergic shock, a hemolysis [End Page 193] (rupture of red blood cells), or a thrombosis (blood clot) and embolism. The Scapini Mission, which had inspected the entire hospital in 1941 and was still allowed to visit some of the hospital buildings in 1942, was denied access to the tropical medicine section on the grounds that it no longer belonged to the Frontstalag.¹²

In 1943, some commandos in the Southwest of France received French cadres. According to the French defense ministry, the selection of cadres was particularly arbitrary in the region of Bordeaux. German soldiers randomly rounded up some young Frenchmen, gave them hunting rifles, and told them to guard colonial prisoners. The French cadres remained in this area until several weeks after the Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944.¹³

As elsewhere, severe tensions existed among prisoners in Frontstalag 221. There is unusually strong evidence for tensions between the Muslim prisoners and the Jews (mostly from Algeria) in Saint-Médard in 1943–1944. A German secret service report based on intercepted prisoner letters claimed that many French colonial prisoners in Frontstalag 221 resented the Jews among them, accusing them of black marketeering and lack of solidarity. Many prisoners apparently believed that their food and accommodations were so bad because of the presence of Jews in the Frontstalag. It is possible but not certain that the Germans at one time made efforts to concentrate North African Jews and French Jews (who were excluded from the liberation order of “white” prisoners on July 3, 1941) in Frontstalag 221.¹⁴

For unknown reasons, Frontstalag 221 also oversaw several work commandos in regions far away from Saint-Médard. In the late summer of 1943, a branch of Frontstalag 221 had installed itself in Rennes (Brittany) and taken over a number of commandos in northwestern and central France. The German lists of POWs for September 1, 1943, mention two camps designated as Frontstalag 221, one in Saint-Médard with 6,933 prisoners (including a few Soviet prisoners) and one in Rennes with 3,809 prisoners (including 43 British subjects); the existence of two separate camps with the same designation may explain the duplicate field post numbers. Information on the more distant commandos is fragmentary. A commando belonging to Frontstalag 221 also existed in Neufchatel-en-Saosnois (Sarthe), where 150 “Senegalese” and 100 North Africans were working for the Wehrmacht.¹⁵ Several commandos on the British Channel Islands Alderney and Jersey (54 and 35 North Africans, respectively) also belonged to Frontstalag 221 for some time.

There is no information on the liberation of Frontstalag 221, except that, as in other Frontstalags, the prisoners sometimes were put in charge of their former guards and that the camp complex of Saint-Médard was used for German POWs.