I know about places like Dachau and Auschwitz, but I’ve never heard of camps in France? Are they jut not mentioned much, or did the Nazis just not set up any in France? And if they didn’t, why not?
You’ve not heard about camps because the Germans built only one concentration camp (KL) on French territory: Natzweiler-Struthof in what is today Alsace.
In operation from April 1941 to September 1944, over 52’000 people (for a large part resistance fighters) were imprisoned at the camp and its annexes. Organised primarily as a labour camp supporting the German/Nazi war machine, the KL “was also used for medical experiments by Nazi professors from the Reich University of Strasbourg.” ^1 Over its 3.5 years of operation, around 22’000 people died at Natzweiler.
Although Jews were of course imprisoned here as elsewhere throughout the Nazi-German death machine, the camp (established before the Wannsee Conference) was designated as a detention place in the so-called Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) programme.
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The Nazis didn’t set up many concentration camps outside their most secure territories (Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia). In Poland labor camps and concentration camps were set up, as were both ghettos and extermination camps. In Western Europe (Belgium, France, and the Netherlands) they primarily set up transit camps, like Westerbork, and Drancy, and some sites for forced labor. Non-Jewish civilian populations in France were comparatively well treated (this is when compared to say, Poles or others in the East who were frequently summarily executed, or taken for slave labor, their situations were not good by any means, and there were summary executions of French civilians, and many were taken to forced labor, just not to the extent such things were done in the East). French people who were arrested or taken for slave labor were either kept in French prisons or were transported to camps in Germany. Ravensbruk for example had large numbers of French, and French Jewish prisoners. Many French Jews were kept in Drancy before being transported to Auschwitz and other extermination centers. French people who were suspected of resistance activities, if they weren’t executed, were imprisoned in concentration camps within Germany, or occasionally to the concentration camp portion of Auschwitz (a good testimony of this is Charlotte Delbo’s “None of Us Will Return”). Some were imprisoned in France, but usually people were simply sent to Germany, probably because the camps were close enough and already set up. Repressions of Jews in France played out differently than in the east too. Some people were sent to the transit camp at Drancy, while others were taken directly from their homes to extermination centers.