The Germans established the Drancy camp in France in August 1941. Drancy later became the major transit camp for the deportations of Jews from France. Fewer than 2,000 of the almost 65,000 Jews deported from the Drancy camp survived the Holocaust.
Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Germans arrested those who resisted their domination and those they judged to be racially inferior or politically unacceptable. People arrested for resisting German rule were mostly sent to forced-labor or concentration camps. The Germans deported Jews from all over occupied Europe to extermination camps in Poland, where they were systematically killed, and also to concentration camps, where they were used for forced labor. Transit camps such as Westerbork, Gurs, Mechelen, and Drancy in western Europe and concentration camps like Bolzano and Fossoli di Carpi in Italy were used as collection centers for Jews, who were then deported by rail to the extermination camps. According to SS reports, there were more than 700,000 prisoners registered in the concentration camps in January 1945.
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![The first transport of Jews arriving at the Drancy transit camp by bus [LCID: 55637]](https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/thumb/05f48837-d08c-46c0-9a91-bcdc478e7818.jpg)