This was mentioned passingly in an infographic by romasintigenocide.eu, but several other sources mentioned it as well. It was really shocking and confusing! Was there still pockets of Nazi resistance after Victory in Europe Day holding out in these areas? Did the Allies willingly keep the Roma camps open or did they not know they existed or weren’t priorities?
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
While you’re waiting for a more comprehensive answer about Les Alliers, I can say with some certainty that this wasn’t related to Nazi resistance, which was never conceived of as being centered on the camps. I’m many cases, these were actually evacuated on death marches if the prisoners were able to move, or simply abandoned if they were not. As primary scenes of Nazi crimes, no one was interested in remaining associated with them, and they were typically abandoned by their staffs in advance of the enemy.
However, the camps themselves were also prime institutional infrastructure on a pretty devastated continent after the war. And there were also a lot of ‘displaced persons’ who needed to be repatriated or resettled. Hundreds of millions were moved or had moved around Europe, usually without a permanent destination in mind, if any at all. This led the Allies or local governments to keep some camps open or reopen others. France would probably be the responsible country in this case, as it was pretty tenacious about defending its postwar sovereignty. At the same time, (I think) some of the DP camps were run by the International Red Cross and the UN, so there’re a few of options.
More sinister were camps like Dachau, which the postwar Bavarian government maintained to intern criminalized ‘asocial’ groups, including homosexuals. And that really brings us to how camps like those the Nazis used were/are part of the modern political landscape, from US policy toward Japanese-Americans through the Soviet GULAG to post-colonial villagization in Malaysia and Tanzania. Which is probably a separate question.
I’m not at my PC to provide specific sources ATM, but will ASAP. Hopefully someone knows more specifically about Les Alliers, as the Roma and Sinti experience during the war is a blind spot for me. I thought I could at least provide a bit of context in the meantime.
The reason why the camp was not closed immediately after the war was that the Alliers camp, like the other camps in France holding Roma and nomad families - about thirty of them were in operation during WW2 - was not a German camp, but a French one, maintained by French authorities. While they were "concentration camps", there were more similar in practice to the internment camps created by US authorities for their Japanese citizens.
Roma people in France did suffer during the war, but those who were living in territories under Vichy administration were not deported, with two exceptions. Two groups of men in a camp in Poitiers were sent to Germany as workers in January and June 1943 and were murdered in Sachenhausen and Buchenwald. French Roma people died in Auschwitz but they had not been camp internees: they were arrested in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais departments which were under direct German military command in the autumn of 1943 and deported on 15 January 1944 by convoy Z from Mechelen in Belgium.
So the Roma under French administration mostly survived the war, and about 6500 of them - men, women, and children - were interned in thirty camps across France. Most of what follows is derived from articles written by historian Marie-Christine Hubert.
While the rejection of Roma people has a long history in France, dating back to the Middle-Ages, it was rekindled by the arrival of Roma populations from Eastern Europe in the second half of the 19th century. The fact that many arrived through the German border also contributed to anti-Roma sentiment after the Franco-Prussian war, as they were accused of being German agents (many Roma had settled in Eastern France).
Special legislation was created in the early 1900s to manage these populations and restrict their movements, culminating in the creation in July 1912 of the Régime des Nomades, which forced them to have a special ID (later supplemented with anthropometric information such as the chest size or the length of right ear) and regulated their circulation. It is important to note here that these regulations targetted nomadic people and that the racial basis was explicitely rejected by the lawmakers. Indeed, nomads could be of Roma descent (which were known by different demonyms) or non-Roma. They could also be French or foreigners. In fact, nobody agreed about a constitutionally acceptable definition for the Roma, and the law thus described them by their travelling behaviour, categorizing people into itinerant salesmen, itinerant showmen (forains) and nomads. On the eve of WW2, 40,000 people were identified as such.
A mere 13 days after the declaration of war in September 1939, nomads were forbidden to travel in the department of Indre-et-Loire, and such restrictions were soon implemented in other departments. Similar measures had already been taken during WW1, and some nomads had been interned at that time. The reason was the same in WW2 and WW1: not only nomads inherited the centuries-old distrust for vagrants, but, because they were always travelling, it was assumed that they could be spies. On 6 April 1940, French authorities introduced a nationwide ban on the movement of nomads for the duration of the war, and placed them under house arrest and under close police surveillance. The decree said:
The incessant displacements of the nomads allow them to observe troop movements, the stationing of units, the location of defensive installations, important information which they are likely to communicate to enemy agents.
At that point, the idea of putting them in "some sort of concentration camp" was rejected because it was too costly and because putting many "dangerous" people in the same place was seen as problematic. Note that this did not concern people of Roma descent who were not nomadic: sedentarized Roma were not expelled or sent to camps.
On 4 October 1940, German occupation authorities demanded that all the nomads (a term that for them also included the forains) be put in internment camps under the surveillance of the French police. "Undesirable" individuals, including Roma people, were expelled from the areas that were directly under German control. A number of camps were established across France: typically, a German Field Commander ordered the mayor of a town to count the nomads, locate a potential camp, and carry out the internment. The Alliers camp, near Angoulême, received nomads from Charente and Charente-Maritime on 22 November 1940. The Germans rarely took part in the internment process (they often bungled it by arresting the wrong people who were later released). The French were supposed to pay for it, resulting in dreadful internment conditions.
Unlike other concentration camps, people were grouped by families, and some lived there in their own caravans. There were often more women than men, and about 30-40% of the internees were children. The general living conditions in the camps were bad. Camps were makeshift, and many lacked proper facilities like heating and running water, as well as protection against cold, wind and rain. In some cases, the internees had been forced to abandon their caravans to live in barracks and had lost their belongings. People suffered from hunger and cold, lacked clothing, and sometimes died from diseases and malnutrition. It was sometimes possible for families to leave the camp and live under house arrest nearby. Others escaped, notably during transfers.
The Alliers camp was no different, and, ironically enough, it was the German authorities of the Feldkommandantur 749 who criticized the French about the bad living conditions in the camp in November 1940 (the letter has been found the archives by Jacky Tronel). It seems that conditions improved in 1941. In October 1942, when the nomads of the Alliers camp received cogs and clothing from the Secours National, they had to pay for these with their own cash and ration stamps.
French authorities seem to have used the camps to educate the Roma and "teach" them sedentary life: notably, they set up schools in some camps for the instruction of children. There was one in the Alliers camp: guards were in charge of bringing kids to the camp's school, and those who escaped school were denied treats. There were limited attempts at separating (not forcefully) children from their parents to put them in institutions to give them a "proper" education (a few children escaped). Adults were put to work, for everyday tasks related to camp life, or as farm workers, craftsmen (a traditional Roma occupation), or even factory workers. The camps also gave the Vichyite authorities the opportunity to provide religious instruction to Roma people.
The number of internees peaked at 3500 in February 1942, and decreased reguarly after that, as internees were released and the camps shut down. In December 1944, only five camps remained. The legality of the internment was questioned by the new French authorities, but the process took time. In September 1945, the Minister of the Interior decreed that the nomads still in the three remaining camps had to be released, but it was not until the decree of 10 May 1946, which officially marked the end of the war, that the last nomads were released from the Alliers camp, on 1st June 1946.
Why did it take so long? For Marie-Christine Hubert, the internment of Roma in France during WW2, even though it had been ordered by German authorities, was still fundamentally related to the "Roma question" in France and to the French willingness to "integrate" its Roma population by eradicating nomadism. In July 1946, the Minister of the Interior reaffirmed the necessity of the application of the 1912 law "vis a vis of nomads who do not acquire stability and who do not demonstrate a willingness to integrate into the sedentary population".
Paradoxically, this may have saved the French-based Roma from deportation: the German never showed much interest in (or understanding of) the French "nomads" who were a very heterogenous population, difficult to sort out into Roma and non-Roma, and that the French refused to consider as a separate racial category (unlike the Jews). But, as notes Hubert, this is only one theory, and one does not know why the Germans did not try to exterminate the French Romas as they did in other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe.
Sources