Concept
Drancy internment camp (Camp d'internement de Drancy) was an assembly and detention camp for confining Jews who were later deported to the extermination camps during the German occupation of France during World War II. Originally conceived and built as a modernist urban community under the name La Cité de la Muette, it was located in Drancy, a northeastern suburb of Paris, France. Between 22 June 1942 and 31 July 1944, during its use as an internment camp, 67,400 French, Polish, and German Jews were deported from the camp in 64 rail operations, which included 6,000 children. Only 1,542 prisoners remained alive at the camp when the German authorities in Drancy fled as Allied forces advanced and the Swedish Consul-General Raoul Nordling took control of the camp on 17 August 1944, before handing it over to the French Red Cross to care for the survivors. Drancy was under the control of the French police until 1943 when administration was taken over by the SS, which placed officer Alois Brunner in charge of the camp. In 2001, Brunner's case was brought before a French court by Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, which sentenced Brunner in absentia to a life sentence for crimes against humanity. After the 1940 defeat by Germany and 10 July 1940 vote of full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the Republic was abolished and Vichy France was proclaimed. The Vichy government cooperated with Nazi Germany, hunting down foreign and French Jews and turning them over to the Gestapo for transport to the Third Reich's extermination camps. The Drancy internment camp became identified by the northeastern suburb of Paris in which it was located. It was originally conceived by the noted architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin as a striking, modernist urban community. The design was especially noteworthy for its integration of high-rise residential apartment towers, among the first of their kind in France. Poetically named La Cité de la Muette ("The Silent City") at its creation for its perceived peaceful ideals, the name became twisted with bitterly ironic meaning.
