December 1941, round-up in July 1942); at
Clermont-Ferrand (round-up of professors and students of the
University of Strasbourg, who were taken to Clermont-Ferrand on 25
November 1943); at Lyons; at Marseilles (round-up of 40,000 persons
in January 1943); at Grenoble (round-up on 24 December 1943); at
Cluny (round-up on 24 December 1944); at Figeac (round-up in May
1944); at Saint Pol de Léon (round-up in July 1944); at
Locminé (round-up on 3 July 1944); at Eysieux (round-up in May
1944) and at Moussey (round-up in September 1944). These arrests were
followed, by brutal treatment and tortures carried out by the most
diverse methods, such as immersion in icy water, asphyxiation,
torture of the limbs, and the use of instruments of torture, such as
the iron helmet and electric current, and practiced in all the
prisons of France, notably in Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Rennes, Metz,
Clermont-Ferrand, Toulouse, Nice, Grenoble, Annecy, Arras,
Béthune, Lille, Loos, Valenciennes, Nancy, Troyes, and Caen,
and in the torture chambers fitted up at the Gestapo centers.
In the concentration camps, the health regime and
the labor regime were such that the rate of mortality (alleged to be
from natural causes) attained enormous proportions, for instance:
1. Out of a convoy of 230 French women
deported from Compiègne to Auschwitz in January 1943, 180 died
of exhaustion by the end of four months.
2. 143 Frenchmen died of exhaustion between 23 March and 6 May
1943, in Block 8 at Dachau.
3. 1,797 Frenchmen died of exhaustion between 21 November 1943,
and 15 March 1945, in the Block at Dora.
4. 465 Frenchmen died of general debility in November 1944, at
Dora.
5. 22,761 deportees died of exhaustion at Buchenwald between 1
January 1943, and 15 April 1945.
6. 11,560 detainees died of exhaustion at Dachau Camp (most of
them in Block 30 reserved for the sick and the infirm) between 1
January and 15 April 1945.
7. 780 priests died of exhaustion at Mauthausen. 8. Out of 2,200
Frenchmen registered at Flossenburg Camp, 1,600 died from supposedly
natural causes.
Methods used for the work of extermination in concentration camps
were:
Bad treatment, pseudo-scientific experiments (sterilization of
women at Auschwitz and at Ravensbrück, study of the evolution of