Camp Vernet

Camp Vernet
Transit camp
Aerial photograph (1945)
Location of Camp Vernet within France
Coordinates	43°11′43″N 1°36′30″E / 43.19528°N 1.60833°E / 43.19528; 1.60833
Location	Le Vernet, Occitania Vichy France
Operated by	French Police German authorities
Original use	Troop camp
First built	1918
Operational	to June 1944
Inmates	Spanish refugees, Jews, former members of the International Brigade
Notable books	The Invisible Writing, Scum of the Earth

Le Vernet Internment Camp, or Camp Vernet, was a concentration camp^[1] in Le Vernet, Ariège, near Pamiers, in the French Pyrenees. It was built in 1918 as a barracks, but after World War I it was used as an internment camp for prisoners of war. From February 1939 to June 1944, it was used:

• first as an internment camp (concentration camp), first for Republican refugees (soldiers, their families, opponents of the Franco regime) fleeing Spain after Franco's victory in the Spanish Civil War: in particular some 12,000 refugees, including soldiers of the Durruti Column^[2] and others of the International Brigades, under the legitimate French government;
• then, as of May–June 1940, under the Vichy government during German occupation in the Second World War. Starting in 1940, apart from the prisoners coming from the Spanish Civil War, the Vichy government used it to house prisoners considered suspect or dangerous to the government, including members of the resistance and opponents of the Hitler, Mussolini and Pétain regimes;^[3]
• then, from 1942 until June 1944, it was used as a holding camp for Jewish families awaiting deportation to other camps. The last transport out of the camp in June 1944 took the prisoners to Dachau concentration camp.