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Saarbrücken (dpa / lrs) - The first database on Saarlanders who were interned in the French Gurs camp from 1939 to 1944 went online on Friday.
On the one hand, it records the names of around 500 internees from the Saar who had to fight for daily survival under inhumane conditions, announced the Saarland State Center for Civic Education on Friday in Saarbrücken.
The platform also contains short biographies, historical documents and photographs that provide information about the circumstances of the internment and life in the camp.
The database was activated on the occasion of the day of liberation from National Socialism (May 8th) (www.gurs.saarland). The Gurs expert and former head of the Institute for Palatinate History and Folklore, Roland Paul, researched a large part of the information in the internment index of the Gurs camp in the French city of Pau. The research results were supplemented by evaluations of the state compensation files of the survivors stored in the Saarbrücken state archive, it said.
The Gurs camp on the edge of the Pyrenees was set up in April 1939 as a reception camp for members of the Republican Guards who fled to France after the end of the Spanish civil war.
After the Wehrmacht marched into France in May 1940, it was an internment camp for “enemy foreigners”.
In October 1940 6500 Jews from Baden, the Palatinate and Saarland were deported to Gurs.
A total of 61,000 people were penned in 382 wooden barracks on an area of 24 hectares between 1939 and 1945.
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"The digital internee database is not a completed publication project," said the head of the "Remembrance work and historical-political education" department of the State Center for Civic Education, Sabine Graf.
The database is an invitation to «further research and the development of new communication formats for regional remembrance work».
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210507-99-507248 / 3
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