France · 19th century
Fort de Romainville, (in English, Fort Romainville) was built in France in the 1830s and was used as a Nazi concentration camp 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. 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.
Text adapted from “Fort de Romainville” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Fort de Romainville ranks #2,883 of 9,035 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #221 of the 787 mapped in France. Founded c. 1835, it is older than 9% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 705 atlas entries founded in the 19th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,540 times in the last 60 days, more than 63% of the atlas. 47 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Paris, 6 km away. See how France compares in the castle statistics.
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