Among the horrors that the people of Sedan endured under the three successive occupations of the Ardennes by the enemy, the internment camp that the Germans operated from January 1917 to November 1918 in the fortified castle of Sedan is one of the worst memories of their tragic story.
This camp run by torturers was a death camp, a sinister prefiguration of the Nazi extermination camps of the last war. This hell, ignored by public opinion outside the nearby region, was called "le Bagne" by the people of Sedan when Belgians and French people died there every day as a result of inhuman treatment. It was the crucial need for manpower that pushed the enemy into the criminal spiral of growing barbarism. In the occupied zones of Belgium and France, civilians between the ages of 14 and 60 were requisitioned in work battalions (Zivil Arbeiter Bataillon), but those who showed themselves to be the slightest bit recalcitrant there were directed to the labor camp. internment in the fortified castle of Sedan or in the very harsh Kommandos of Bazeilles or Mont Saint Martin. When they went out to go to the construction sites, the prisoners were recognizable by their red armband worn on their left arm, their big clogs or their bare feet, but above all by their thinness and their haggard eyes.
Denzin, the camp commander, Michelsohn, the doctor, and Holz, the head of the guards, terror of the prisoners, were the main responsible for the revolting mortality rate that this camp reached. Deprivations, abuses, appalling malnutrition, appalling hygiene, general dysentery, slave-like conditions at work, 5 to 600 prisoners crammed into 400 possible places, everything was an accelerated march towards death. The number of victims remains uncertain, but in less than two years it exceeded a thousand deaths and probably significantly more. In 1919, the prison commander and doctor were sought to be tried as war criminals, but in vain...!
Today, after 75 years of suicidal wars, let us make ours the last words of the commemorative plaque which is in the fortified castle of Sedan: “Let us erase hatred, but let us preserve the memory”.
This camp run by torturers was a death camp, a sinister prefiguration of the Nazi extermination camps of the last war. This hell, ignored by public opinion outside the nearby region, was called "le Bagne" by the people of Sedan when Belgians and French people died there every day as a result of inhuman treatment. It was the crucial need for manpower that pushed the enemy into the criminal spiral of growing barbarism. In the occupied zones of Belgium and France, civilians between the ages of 14 and 60 were requisitioned in work battalions (Zivil Arbeiter Bataillon), but those who showed themselves to be the slightest bit recalcitrant there were directed to the labor camp. internment in the fortified castle of Sedan or in the very harsh Kommandos of Bazeilles or Mont Saint Martin. When they went out to go to the construction sites, the prisoners were recognizable by their red armband worn on their left arm, their big clogs or their bare feet, but above all by their thinness and their haggard eyes.
Denzin, the camp commander, Michelsohn, the doctor, and Holz, the head of the guards, terror of the prisoners, were the main responsible for the revolting mortality rate that this camp reached. Deprivations, abuses, appalling malnutrition, appalling hygiene, general dysentery, slave-like conditions at work, 5 to 600 prisoners crammed into 400 possible places, everything was an accelerated march towards death. The number of victims remains uncertain, but in less than two years it exceeded a thousand deaths and probably significantly more. In 1919, the prison commander and doctor were sought to be tried as war criminals, but in vain...!
Today, after 75 years of suicidal wars, let us make ours the last words of the commemorative plaque which is in the fortified castle of Sedan: “Let us erase hatred, but let us preserve the memory”.
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