Paving stones in memory of Gypsies interned by the French state during the Second World War will be laid on Sunday in a town in Bas-Rhin. In Marseille, a monument in tribute to the victims of the Gypsy genocide must also be inaugurated. In recent years, initiatives have multiplied to bring this dark page in French history out of oblivion.

Published on: 02/14/2026 - 3:58 p.m.

"Before the last world war, I lived in Strasbourg with my whole family. We had to flee at the start of hostilities, because we were gypsies, a race deemed inferior and doomed to extermination. We hid in the town of Villiers, in Indre, until the day the mayor of this town announced to us that we had to be transferred to a camp. It was at the beginning of 1941. We were loaded into trucks under the threat of the weapons and were transported to Argelès, before being interned in the Rivesaltes camp."

In his file held by the Defense Historical Service, Charles Adolf recounts the circumstances of his internment and that of his family during the occupation, when he was only 11 years old. “We were not mistreated, but we suffered from the cold, the hunger and above all the lack of care and the constant fear of extermination. My father died on April 23, 1941,” he describes.

This story dates from the 1980s, during procedures to obtain political internee status. In response, Charles Adolf was refused this award under the pretext of having stayed in "accommodation camps" and not "internment" and was never recognized as a war victim.

A first for the gypsies

Eighty years after the end of the conflict, a symbolic reparation will finally take place for this Alsatian gypsy who died in 2000. A paving stone of memory will be laid, Sunday February 15, in Schweighouse-sur-Moder, in Bas-Rhin, in his memory and that of his father. “The mayor of this town contacted me to have memory paving stones laid. We realized that there had been Jewish victims in this town, but also the two members of the Adolf family who were from there and who were gypsies,” explains Christophe Woehrle, who initiated this inauguration.

For around ten years, this historian has been working in Alsace, but also throughout France, to install Stolpersteine ​​(stumbling blocks, or on which one trips, in French) to pay tribute to the victims of Nazism. More than 500 have been inaugurated in France since 2013.

The Stolpersteine ​​were originally the project of the German artist Gunter Demnig. In 1992, he illegally laid the first memorial paving stone in front of Cologne's city hall. This included the deportation order signed by Heinrich Himmler, the supreme leader of the SS, concerning the Gypsies, dated December 1942. In France, it was necessary to wait more than 30 years for the first paving stone to pay tribute to a member of this community. “It’s a first for the gypsies with the Adolf father and son,” underlines Christophe Woehrle.

“They remained under the radar, because Jewish memory took over from the 1960s. The Shoah Memorial did its job very well, whereas for the Gypsies, there were no institutions to unite this memory,” believes the historian who is also the president of Stolpersteine ​​France.

Read alsoMemory of the Shoah: in Alsace, paving stones to “stumble with the head and with the heart”

An internment policy

The internment of Gypsies in France nevertheless affected more than 6,500 men, women and children in France between 1940 and 1946, more than 90% of whom were of French nationality. Even before the start of the occupation, this population, already monitored in its movements thanks to an anthropometric identity book set up in 1912, was placed under house arrest from April 1940. "After October 4, 1940, the prefects of the occupied zone applied the German order by arresting the nomads already under house arrest to put them in more or less structured camps", describes the historian Marie-Christine Hubert, author of a history thesis on Gypsies during the Second World War.

“In the non-occupied zone, the Vichy government internalized Argelès, then Barcarès and Rivesaltes, the Gypsies that the Germans expelled from the annexed regions (Alsace-Lorraine), as it also did with the Jews expelled in the same circumstances,” she continues.

These families, like the Adolfs, suffer on a daily basis. “Barracks made of wooden planks or fiber cement, without heating or with a very poor ventilation system, trailers for certain families, deplorable hygienic conditions, widespread malnutrition,” explains Marie-Christine Hubert. Charles Adolf's father could not stand these precarious living conditions and died in the Rivesaltes camp.

Unlike the Jewish internees, the vast majority of Gypsies were not deported to the extermination centers, as the historian explains: "Heinrich Himmler's deportation order did not concern occupied and unoccupied France, because it was not part of the greater Reich. This is why France is the only country in the West not to have experienced a mass deportation of Gypsies. The French authorities did not nor sought to include them in the existing deportation convoys. The order was not given."

More than 500 deportees

In the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, an area then attached to Belgium, 351 arrested Gypsies were however deported by convoy Z towards Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 15, 1944. In her work which has just been published, entitled "The Deportation of Gypsies from France and Belgium" (Editions Tirésias), Monique Heddebaut highlights this transport. In total, it listed 364 Gypsies sent to extermination centers from this area under direct command from Berlin.

The historian also studied those who were deported from the northern and southern zones. “For example, at the Poitiers camp, we extracted nomads who were sent to the Compiègne-Royallieu camp and who were deported in January 1943 to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp,” she explains. "There are other people who were arrested or rounded up, then deported, but without really knowing under what conditions and on what criteria. That's the whole problem, but that represents around 150 nomads in the rest of France."

Monique Heddebaut insists on the differences between these types of deportation: "From the north and south zone, they were sent to concentration camps and work commandos. The purpose and the survival rate are not the same as for those taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, who are part of a genocidal process. That's the difficulty of working on this subject."

Like Monique Heddebaut and her pioneering study, more and more researchers are taking up this part of French history. Member of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Ilsen About was able to observe that these “voices have, for a long time, not been heard”. “There were comments from the victims right after the Second World War, but without effect,” says this specialist in Gypsy worlds. “It is important to know that the legislation on nomads, particularly discriminatory, was applied until 1969 in France. This did not encourage memorial gestures.” It was not until 2016 that President François Hollande recognized in a speech "the suffering of the nomads who were interned" and France's responsibility.

Also read “The Republic recognizes the suffering of nomads” interned during the Second World War

Late interest

The researcher also notes that knowledge of these facts was also formed late: "The first work on the internment of nomads was published at the beginning of the 1980s by the local historian Jacques Sigot. We remained, until the end of the 1990s, in a fairly fragmented state of memory, because there was insufficient historical interest." Ilsen About notes, however, that recently, many actions have been carried out, even if there is "unfortunately a little dispersion" with "autonomous groups leading their own struggles".

This is the case in Marseille, where a first stele in memory of the Gypsy genocide is to be inaugurated in the coming months in the Saint-Pierre cemetery. It must pay tribute to the members of this community murdered by the Nazis during the war in Europe. According to historians, the toll fluctuates between 200,000 and 500,000 victims out of just under a million Gypsies living on the continent.

"It will be a stone two meters high and one wide, where it will be inscribed 'Samudaripen', which means 'Gypsy genocide' in the Romani language. There will also be the distinctive brown triangle of the Gypsies in the camps", describes Sasha Zanko, president of the Tchatchipen association ("the truth" in Romani), which is working on this project alongside the Marseille historian Michel Ficetola.

“This will be the only monument intended to commemorate the Gypsy genocide in France,” he insists. But why did you wait so long? "Gypsies are shy and timid, and afraid to ask for this or that. But it was time. Many people don't even know that there was a genocide," he believes. “It is not only a work of memory, it is also a political message to affirm that the Gypsy people, despite everything they have suffered, are still standing.”

Also read: The Roma Holocaust, a forgotten genocide

A future memorial

Nearly 900 km away, in Montreuil-Bellay, in Maine-et-Loire, another initiative is also planned. A memorial is due to open in the fall of 2027 on the site of a former nomad internment camp. From November 1941 to January 1945, nearly 2,000 people were interned there. “This will consist of a permanent exhibition center and an interpretation trail which will be set up for an independent visit by the public,” describes Virginie Daudin, director of the regional Resistance and Freedom center, responsible for promoting the site.

According to her, a long educational work remains above all to be done: "This story has recently made its way into school textbooks, but there is still a lack of teacher training on this specific period. There are thus entire sections of society which are completely unaware of it, both among those not concerned and among descendants."

The director, however, notes “a memorial surge in 2026”. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the internment camps. The Gypsies were in fact not released in 1944, like the other administrative internees. It was only after the publication of the cessation of hostilities decree of May 10, 1946 that the last nomads, as they were called at the time, were released, well after the collaborators.

"The French authorities before the war, under Vichy, after the Liberation, had the same objective: the settling of nomads. All the measures taken, even today, have the same objective: to limit travel by making parking difficult", underlines the historian Marie-Christine Hubert.

The circulation book established in 1969 for people "traveling in France without domicile or fixed residence", requiring them to report to a police station every three months to indicate where they are, was only abolished in 2017. In administrative language, they have become "the community of travelers", to whom municipalities must designate parking areas. The reception of this community, estimated today by the Ministry of the Interior at nearly 500,000 people, is always a sensitive subject. “The vast majority of descendants of internees live in reception areas and experience discrimination on a daily basis, which does not facilitate their recognition efforts,” summarizes Ilsen About.

Also read: Tony Gatlif: “I have within me the life force of the gypsy people”

Integrate this part of our history into the national memory

For the researcher, there remains a lot to do: "We need strong actions, with the creation of a national memorial, a real place of contemplation and a study mission, like the 'Mattéoli mission' for the dispossession of the Jewish community, which assesses all the damage, as well as funding to create a research center."

Last year, MPs tabled a motion for a resolution to this effect, so that August 2 becomes the day of commemoration of the genocide of the Gypsies (in reference to the night of August 2 to 3, 1944 during which 3,000 of them, women, men and children were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau) and that France officially recognizes "its share of responsibility in this genocide and more broadly in the various forms of persecution suffered by the thousands of French families targeted by these criminal policies.

“It is first and foremost a question of justice. It is about the lives of these victims, some of whom were born in the camps, who are still alive, and their descendants,” insists Ilsen About. “The history of Travelers is only known by the musician Django Reinhardt, the Bouglione circus or the director Tony Gatlif, but there is no collective awareness of the belonging of this population to the history of France,” he adds.

Marie-Christine Hubert shares the same feeling. For her, it is necessary to finally integrate the history of the 6,500 internees and more than 500 deportees into the national memory "to fight against anti-Gypsyism and to remind generations who have not experienced war what the consequences of discrimination can be."

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