The Mérignac internment camp, also known as the Beau-Désert internment camp, was a French internment and transit camp for Roma, Jews, French members of the Resistance, and political prisoners; it was located in the district of Beau-Désert in the commune of Mérignac, near Bordeaux, in German occupied France during World War II.
View of camp's barracks with a fence separating French and foreign detainees
Herbert Martin Hagen was a German SS-Sturmbannführer of Nazi Germany and a convicted war criminal. Hagen served as personal assistant to the SS police chief in Paris Carl Oberg, heading the Gestapo department. Hagen was captured in 1945, but released in 1948. In 1955 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in France, after he was found guilty of being instrumental in the deportation of the Jews from France; nonetheless, he managed to avoid going to prison, and became a prominent West German industrialist. In 1980 after a change in the law to allow retrial of cases handled abroad, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison by a Cologne court, for his key role in the deportation of 73,000 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp. Hagen was released after serving only four years of prison, he died in Rüthen in 1999.
Herbert Hagen, on 1 May 1943 in Paris
Herbert Hagen (In the middle, standing) in Vienna, with Adolf Eichmann on the right and Josef Löwenherz on the left, March 1938