High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Camp Gurs was an internment and refugee camp constructed in 1939 in Gurs, a town in southwestern France near Pau. The camp was originally set up by the French government after the fall of Catalonia at the end of the Spanish Civil War to control those who fled Spain out of fear of retaliation from Francisco Franco`s regime. At the start of World War II, the French government interned Germans and citizens of other Axis Powers, as well as French nationals who were considered to have dangerous political ideas or who were imprisoned for ordinary crimes.