Natzwiller, France:
When American soldiers liberated France’s only Nazi concentration camp almost exactly eighty years ago, they found it completely deserted.
During the Second World War, thousands of people were worked to death or murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in eastern Alsace, on the German border.
But when the Americans arrived on November 25, 1944, “they found a totally intact, totally empty camp,” historian Cedric Neveu told AFP.
“There was not a single SS guard or a single prisoner. The camp was in perfect condition… the Germans probably thought they would return,” he added.
Of the approximately 50,000 people held in Struthof and its satellite camps, “17,000 died or went missing, especially during the death marches of the spring of 1945,” Neveu said.
“You entered here through the big gate. You leave through the chimney” of the crematorium, the camp commander told the prisoners who arrived in 1943, according to 100-year-old Henri Mosson – one of the last remaining French prisoners.
‘Night and Fog’
Struthof was opened in 1941 near the village of Natzwiller, 800 meters high in the Vosges.
From 1943 onwards, new waves of prisoners arrived after “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”) operations, Nazi roundups of political opponents who wanted them to disappear without a trace.
Mosson, a member of the French Resistance, had been arrested in June 1943 and sentenced to death.
In November of that year he was taken by train to Rothau, near the camp.
Prisoners were forced into trucks and cars “with gun butt blows and dog bites,” he said.
“There wasn’t enough room, so some had to stand for the last eight kilometers (five miles). One man died” along the way, Mosson recalled.
Prisoners were stripped naked, had their heads shaved and showered with water heated by the crematorium oven before being disinfected.
Mosson obtained work disinfecting the prisoners’ clothing, giving him a chance of survival despite the biting winter cold, summer heat, and starving conditions.
“By the end we had nothing but boiled nettles” to eat, he said, adding that by the time he returned home he weighed just 80 pounds.
Men of about 30 nationalities were held in Struthof, mainly Poles, Russians and French.
Among those arrested were Jews and Roma, but also Jehovah’s Witnesses and regular convicts.
‘Subhumans’
Political prisoners rounded up in the ‘Night and Fog’ actions were “at the very bottom of the ladder”, says Michael Landolt, who heads the European Center for Deported Resistance Members, near Struthof.
“They had the hardest labor and had a higher mortality rate,” he added.
Soviet and Polish prisoners were “regarded by the Nazis as ‘Untermenschen’ (“inhumans”) and also very severely mistreated,” Landolt said.
In addition to the harsh conditions, Struthof was also the scene of executions and medical experiments.
In August 1943, 86 Jewish prisoners were killed in a gas chamber so that their remains could be added to a collection of Jewish skeletons.
Even when Allied troops crossed France and reached the camp in 1944, there was no end to the prisoners’ suffering.
They were forcibly evacuated to other camps on the other side of the Rhine.
Struthof ‘continued to exist, like a cancer that has spread’, historian Neveu describes.
The final end came when these subcamps were evacuated in the spring of 1945.
After the war, Struthof was used to detain people who had collaborated with the Nazis until 1949, when it became a prison.
Only later did it become a memorial site that is now visited by more than 200,000 people every year.
President Emmanuel Macron is among leaders expected to pay tribute to the camp’s victims at a commemoration at the site on Saturday.
Most of the prisoners’ huts have long been dismantled, but they are still marked on the ground.
Visitors can still see the crematorium buildings, prison and gas chamber below, as well as walk the avenues of the cemetery where more than 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.)