Almost exactly 80 years ago, when American troops liberated the only Nazi concentration camp in France, they found it completely abandoned.
Thousands of people were gassed or murdered at the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in the eastern Alsace region on the German border during World War II.
But when the Americans arrived on November 25, 1944, “they found a completely intact, completely empty camp”, historian Cedric Neveu told AFP.
He added, “There was not a single SS guard or a single prisoner. The camp was in perfect condition… The Germans probably thought they would turn back.”
Of the 50,000 or so people held in Struthof and its satellite camps, “17,000 died or went missing, particularly in the death marches of spring 1945,” Neveu said.
According to 100-year-old Henri Mawson, one of the last surviving French prisoners, the camp commander told arriving prisoners in 1943, “You enter here through the big gate. You will go out through the chimney of the crematorium.”
‘Night and Fog’
The Struthof was opened in 1941 near the village of Natzwiller, 800 meters (2,6000 ft) up in the Vosges mountains.
New waves of prisoners began to arrive in 1943 after the “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”) operation, Nazi groups of political opponents whom they wanted to disappear without a trace.
Mawson, a member of the French Resistance, was arrested in June 1943 and sentenced to death.
In November of that year, he was brought by train to the camp near Rothau.
The prisoners were forced into trucks and cars, he said, “with blows from rifle butts and bites from dogs.”
“There wasn’t enough room, so some people had to stand for the last eight kilometers (five miles). One man died on the way,” Mosson recalled.
Before undergoing disinfection, prisoners were stripped of their clothes, had their heads shaved, and were bathed in water heated by a crematorium furnace.
Mawson got a job disinfecting prisoners’ clothing, which allowed him to survive despite conditions of bitter cold, heat and starvation.
“By the end we had nothing but boiled nettles to eat”, he said, adding that by the time he returned home he weighed only 38 kg (84 lb).
Struthof housed men of about 30 nationalities, mostly Poles, Russians and French.
Among those detained were Jews and Roma as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and regular criminals.
‘inhuman’
Michael Landolt, who runs the European Center for Exiled Resistance Members, based near Struthof, said political prisoners captured in the “night and fog” crackdown were “right at the bottom of the ladder”.
“They were subjected to the hardest labor and had the highest mortality rates,” he said.
Soviet and Polish prisoners, Landolt said, “were considered ‘Untermenschen’ (“sub-humans”) by the Nazis and were treated very badly”.
Beyond the harsh conditions, Struthof was also the site of executions and medical experiments.
In August 1943, 86 Jewish prisoners were executed in a gas chamber so that their remains could be added to a collection of Jewish skeletons.
Even when Allied forces entered France in 1944 and reached the camp, the suffering of the prisoners did not end.
They were forcibly moved to other camps on the other side of the Rhine River.
Historian Neveu described, “Struthof continued to exist, like a cancer that has metastasized.”
Its final end came when those satellite camps were evacuated in the spring of 1945.
After the war, the Struthof was used to hold people who collaborated with the Nazis until 1949, then became a prison.
It was only later that it became a memorial site which is now visited by over 200,000 people every year.
President Emmanuel Macron is among the leaders expected to pay tribute to the camp’s victims at a memorial ceremony at the camp site on Saturday.
Most of the prisoners’ huts have long been destroyed, but they are still marked on the ground.
Visitors can still see the crematorium buildings, the prison and the gas chamber below, as well as walk through the cemetery where over a thousand prisoners are buried.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
