[3] After the Fall of France, the German authorities converted a confinement center (camp de séjour surveillé), built at the site of a former WW1 laundry, in the district of Beau-Désert, near Merignac, into a prison.

The Mérignac camp comprised one barrack and a barbed-wire fence, it was managed by director René Rousseau and guarded by the French gendarmerie.

[1] In December 1940, the regional prefect François Pierre-Alype, acting in accordance with orders from the Bordeaux Feldkommandantur (German Command), organised the internment of around 300 Roma (Gypsies, Tziganes or nomads in reports) including children.

Fifty hostages were shot in retaliation for the killing of German military adviser (Kriegsverwaltungsrat) Hans Gottfried Reimers, by the French Resistance, in Bordeaux three days earlier.

[1] Convoys taking Jewish internees to Drancy for transport to the German death camps:[1] Between February and June 1943, an additional 107 Jews held in Mérignac were deported[1]