[3] After the 1940 defeat by Germany and 10 July 1940 vote of full powers to Marshal Philippe Pétain, the Republic was abolished and Vichy France was proclaimed.

The Vichy government cooperated with Nazi Germany, hunting down foreign and French Jews and turning them over to the Gestapo for transport to the Third Reich's extermination camps.

It was used first as police barracks, then converted into the primary detention center in the Paris region for holding Jews and other people labeled as "undesirable" before deportation.

Drancy fell under the command of the Gestapo Office of Jewish Affairs in France and German SS Captain Theodor Dannecker.

SS officer Alois Brunner became camp commandant as part of the major stepping up at all facilities needed for mass extermination.

The inmates from Borgo, Jewish refugees from a number of European countries, had been arrested after the Italian surrender in September 1943, having mostly come to Italy from France in search for safety from Nazi prosecution.

[5] Many French Jewish intellectuals and artists were held in Drancy, including Max Jacob (who died there),[7] Tristan Bernard, and the choreographer René Blum.

[5] Dutch painter Max van Dam, captured in France en route to Switzerland, was briefly incarcerated in Drancy where he was able to paint and create print work.

[13] In 1977, the Memorial to the Deportation at Drancy was created by sculptor Shelomo Selinger to commemorate the French Jews imprisoned in the camp.

This perspective, held by Charles de Gaulle among others, underlined in particular the circumstances of the July 1940 vote of the full powers to Marshal Pétain, who installed the "French State" and repudiated the Republic.

[14] On 20 January 2005, arsonists set fire to some railroad freight cars in the former camp; a tract signed "Bin Laden" with an inverted swastika was found.

They include messages written on the walls, many graffiti, aluminium drinking mugs and other personal belongings left by the prisoners, some of which are inscribed with the names of the owners.

The archive also includes the cards and letters written by the prisoners to their relatives before deportation, and they are a moving contribution to the memory of the camp, and the crime of their detention.

The ground floor shows a changing exhibit of prisoners' faces and names, as a memorial to their imprisonment and murder by the Nazis, assisted by the gendarmerie of Occupied France.

Nicolas Grenier, Cité de la Muette (poem), in honor of Max Jacob, who died in the Drancy camp, 2011.