I’m starting out my vacation review with the Struthof. Grim, I know but it’s the only place where I’ve gone through all the pictures already.
After the Armistice of 22 June 1940, Alsace and Moselle were annexed de facto by the 3rd Reich, German civil servants were appointed to run the administrations, the German currency and common law were imposed, the factories and mines “Germanised” and the use of French was banned. Starting in1942, Alsacian and Mosellan men were conscripted into the army, the Wehrmacht.
Himmler, head of the Gestapo and the police, and Oswald Pohl, head of the principal administrative and economic section of the SS (WVHA), wanted to build camps close to quarries in order to exploit the deportees, as in Mauthausen and Flossenbürg, as part of the Deutsche Erd und Steinwerke (DEST), the SS mining firm set up by Himmler in 1938.
The small village of Struthof, on Mont-Louise, was a tourist resort much appreciated since the early 20th century, in particular by holidaymakers from Strasbourg who came for its hotel and ski slopes. But it was picked for its seam of pink granite discovered by the SS geologist Colonel Blumberg in September 1940. The first deportees arrived here in two convoys from Sachsenhausen camp on 21 and 23 May 1941. They built the first huts of KL Natzweiler. Declared a forbidden area, the camp was completed in October 1943.
On 21 April 1941, near the village of Struthof, the Nazis opened a concentration camp, KL-Natzweiler.
The central camp, the only concentration camp in France, was located in the then annexed Alsace département. Its annexes, scattered over the 2 sides of the Rhine, made up a network of nearly 70 camps, more or less large. Of the nearly 52,000 detainees of KL-Natzeiler, about 35,000 did not go through the central camp.
A labour camp supporting the Nazi war industry, it was also used for medical experiments by Nazi professors from the Reich University of Strasbourg.
On 23 November 1944, the Allies discovered the site evacuated by the Nazis since September. Some deportees from the camp annexes had their sufferings prolonged in the spring of 1945 on the “Death Marches”.
From 1941 to 1945, the KL-Natzweiler was one of the most murderous camps of the Nazi system. Nearly 22,000 deportees died there.
This is the gate from the inside. This isn’t the original gate. The original one was much lower.
The whole perimeter had barbed wires around it and watch towers. The fence was also electrified.
This is the Ravine of Death. Officers would push prisoners into it and the guards in the watchtower would shoot them since they were “trying to escape”.
I was in front of the guard tower 2 pictures up. The guard tower pictured right above can be seen on the bottom right.
There was a total of 17 blocks. 15 were made in wood (6 dormatories, 5 for the infirmary, 1 for people with typhoid fever, 1 with offices, 1 for the kitchen and 1 for quarantine). 2 of the blocks were cemented (crematorium and the prison block).
There were barracks going down the hill, 6 on each side. Only the 2 buildings at the bottom and 2 at the top remain.
Bottom right is the prison block. Bottom left is the crematory block.
This is where roll call would happen.
The barracks that can be seen in the picture below is where the Museum is right now. It was a dormatory before.
Do you see the white block near the middle of the picture? They are memorial stones and there is one placed where a barrack used to be with the names of the other camps.
Sometimes they would hang people. There used to be 2 gallows during the war.
The reason they choose this location was because they found some pink granite in the area. This wheelbarrow represents the quarry and the work that the prisoners had to do. They also built the stairs going up and down the hill and the road to the gas chamber.
That’s the Museum in the background.
Here’s a door from the prison block from inside the cell. They would cram 20 people or more in rooms like this one. They would only get food every 3 days. They would be sent to the prison block for any reason such as people late to roll call.
I don’t know what to call this other than an oubliette except it’s not really one. They would put people here for 3 to 42 days. People awaiting hanging were placed here as well. The back panel goes to one of the cells. These were so small that you couldn’t stand up in them, you had to crouch.
This is the crematorium block. The first people to die in the camp are incinerated in Strasbourg. In 1941, a first crematory oven is built elsewhere on the camp grounds. At the end of April 1943, this block is built and the oven is installed in October.
This is the crematory oven. On the right, you can see melted shoes.
On the floor below was the morgue and also where they executed people. The bodies were hoisted by a gurney. The heat generated by the cremations was used to heat the shower water.
This is the urn room. At the beginning, families of German deportees could recover their ashes if they paid the right price. The urn in the middle of the table contained hairs that were shaved from the deportees and would be sent to felt factories.
This Cross of Lorraine is a memorial to all French resistance members killed in concentration camps.
This plaque is near top guardhouse (you can see it in the pictures above) and it’s a memorial for all the foreign deportees that died here.
Here is a monument above to camp for all those that died. There is a cemetery there but we didn’t have time to visit.
This is the ash pit. At first, the SS would scatter the ashes of the prisoners in their vegetable garden but with increasing numbers of bodies, they started scattering them near the crematorium. The plaques on the wall are from different countries honoring their own who died here. the inscription on the floor is “Honneur et Patrie, Ossa Humiliata”.
We didn’t have a chance to visit the rest of the camp but we plan to go back sometime in the future.
