Fort de Romainville

Fort de Romainville
Fort de Romainville
Transit camp
	Entrance archway
	Location of Fort de Romainville within Paris and inner ring Fort de Romainville (France)
Coordinates	48°53′06″N 2°25′22″E / 48.885126°N 2.422718°E
Location	Les Lilas, Île-de-France; Occupied France
Built by	Second French Republic
Operated by	SS
Commandant	Bickenbach
Original use	Military fort for the protection of Paris
First built	1844–48
Operational	October 1940 – 19 August 1944
Inmates	French Resistance, French communists
Killed	152
Notable inmates	Pierre Georges, Danielle Casanova, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, Hélène Solomon-Langevin, Charlotte Delbo

Fort de Romainville, (in English, Fort Romainville) was built in France in the 1830s^[1] and was used as a Nazi concentration camp in World War II.

Use in World War II

Fort de Romainville was a Nazi prison and transit camp, located in the outskirts of Paris. The Fort was taken in 1940 by the German military and transformed into a prison. From there, resistants and hostages were directed to the Nazi concentration camps. People were interned there before being deported to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald or Dachau concentration camps; the deportees comprised 3,900 women and 3,100 men.

In the Fort itself, 152 persons were executed by firing squad. A few escaped, such as Pierre Georges, alias "Colonel Fabien." From her cell, Danielle Casanova motivated and encouraged her comrades to confront their torturers.^[2] From February 1944, the Fort held primarily female prisoners (resistants and hostages), who were jailed, executed or redirected to the camps. At liberation in August 1944, many abandoned corpses were found in the Fort's yard.