Laghouat prison camp

Laghouat in the Algerian Sahara by
Gustave Achille Guillaumet, 1879

Laghouat prison camp was a detention centre at Laghouat in Saharan Algeria, maintained during the Second World War by Vichy France and later by the French Committee of National Liberation.

The camp was one of nine established by the French in the Sahara, primarily for dissidents, but from 1940 to 1942 it was used as an internment camp for British Empire servicemen,[1] under the name Camp des internés britanniques Laghouat ("British Internees Camp Laghouat").[2] After these men were freed by Allied forces in November 1942, the camp was again used for North African internees, of whom many were communists and Jews.

  1. ^ Simon Ball, The Bitter Sea: the struggle for mastery in the Mediterranean 1939—1945, p. 186
  2. ^ 'News from the Sahara' in Prisoners of War News, vol. 3 (1942), p. 111