About 10,000 Jews have been deported from the German Rhineland to unoccupied France as temporary residents and are being quartered in a center now being completed in the Basses Pyrenees, a New York Times dispatch from Vichy said today.
About 6,500 have already been established there and of these 2,000 are between 60 and 104 years of age, the dispatch said. Two of the refugees are centenarians. The aim of the French Government is said to be to give these Jews a place to stay until they can find refuge somewhere, the report added.
Concentration camps, as such, with a single exception no longer exist in the free zone, according to Vichy Government authorities, the report said. All these camps, which were opened in wartime, have been closed and are being replaced by shelter centers under civil instead of military control for the benefit of foreign refugees on French soil. The one concentration camp for political internees is at Vernet-les-Bains. It harbors about 3,000 persons kept under surveillance allegedly for political reasons.
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