Rieucros Camp

Rieucros
Concentration camp
Location of Rieucros within France
Coordinates	44°31′38″N 3°28′55″E / 44.5271°N 3.4819°E / 44.5271; 3.4819
Location	Mende, Occitania, France
Built by	French Third Republic
Operated by	French Third Republic, Vichy France
Original use	Camp for Spanish refugees
Operational	to 13 February 1942
Inmates	Former International Brigadiers, German opponents of Nazism, Italians, Eastern European Jews, Polish forced labourers; French female communists, anarchists and prostitutes
Number of inmates	thousands
Notable inmates	Ida Mett, Dora Schaul, Alexander Grothendieck, Michel del Castillo, Lenka Reinerová

The Rieucros Camp [ʁjø.kʁo] was an internment camp on a forested hillside near Mende in the French department of Lozère that operated from January 1939 to February 1942.^[1] Prime Minister Édouard Daladier established the camp by decree on January 21, 1939, to isolate members of the International Brigades from French society after the defeat of the Second Spanish Republic and subsequent exile, known as la Retirada, in the Spanish Civil War. Other "suspicious and undesirable foreign men," sometimes accused of common law crimes, were also interned. After France's entry into World War II, authorities transferred the men to the camp of le Vernet and began to intern "suspicious and undesirable foreign women" in October 1939.^[2] Following the Battle of France, Rieucros fell in the southern unoccupied zone and the Vichy regime assumed control of the camp from Third Republican authorities. In February 1942, authorities transferred the entire camp population of women and children to the camp of Brens.