Somber and Sad

While our friends, Jeff and Jo, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau yesterday (Tuesday), today we set our sights on Le Struthof, the only Nazi concentration camp established in French territory.  It is located way up in the Vosges mountains not far from a village called Natzwiller (a somewhat ironic name!). It took about an hour to drive there from Rhinau and all of us, including Emmy, were committed to seeing it.  One thing for sure, we knew this would not be an easy experience.

The scenery as we drove up the long and winding mountain was beautiful - not unlike mountain roads in British Columbia.  In fact, we found out later that the site for the camp had previously been a ski resort.  We climbed and climbed and then, turning a corner, we were there.  One of the first things that struck me were the number of tour buses in the parking lot - lots of them.  It quickly became apparent as we approached the ticket centre that most of these buses carried school children and it wasn't lost on us that the classes were speaking equally French and German.  This is not first time have I been impressed that the Germans keep this horrible part of their history at the forefront of the school curriculum.  They appear to be determined to learn from that part of their past - an approach some other countries might want to try.

Le Struthof is not a large camp but it contains a microcosm of the horrors of other camps.  There were tortures, beatings, hangings, medical experiments, hard labour and even a gas chamber where the Nazis tried to determine the most "efficient" way to exterminate people. 

Wikipedia gives a good synopsis of this place:

Natzweiler-Struthof was a German-run concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains  close to the Alsatian village of Natzwiller (German Natzweiler) in France, and the town of Schirmeck, about 50 km (31 mi) south west from the city ofStrasbourg. Natzweiler-Struthof was the only concentration camp established by the Nazis on present-day French territory, though there were French-run temporary camps such as the one at Dreancy.  At the time from 1941 to 1944, the Alsace area in which it was established was administered by Germany as it was an integral part of the German Reich.  The camp operated from 21 May 1941 to early September, 1944, with prisoners.  A small staff of Nazi SS remained, found when the camp was liberated by the French First Army under the command of the US Sixth Army Group on 23 November, 1944.  About 52,000 prisoners were estimated to be held there in its time of operation.  The prisoners were mainly taken from the resistance movements in German-occupied territories.  It was a labor camp, transit camp and as the war went on, a place of execution.  Some died from the exertions of the labor and the poor food.  There were an estimated 22,000 deaths at the camp, including the network of sub-camps.  Many prisoners were moved to other camps; in particular, the former head of Auschwitz concentration camp was brought in 1944 to evacuate the prisoners of Natzweiler-Struthof to Dachau as the Allied Armies neared in 1944.  August Hirt conducted some of his efforts in making a Jewish skeleton collection in this camp.  A documentary movie has been made about the 86 named men and women who were killed there for that project.  Some of the people responsible for atrocities in this camp came to trial after the war ended.  The camp is preserved as a museum in memory of those held or killed there.  The European Centre of Deported Resistance Members is located at this museum, focusing on those held at this camp.  The Monument to the Departed stands at the site.  The present museum was restored in 1980, after damage by neo-Nazis in 1976. Among other notable prisoners, the writer, Boris Pahor, was interned in Natzweiler-Struthof and wrote his novel Necropolis based on this experience.

With that description, I will let the attached photos speak for themselves, including some that were information plaques in the museum.  You don't need much imagination to understand the horrors that took place here.

 

The juxtaposition of the gallows overlooking such beautiful scenery was not lost on us. 

We spent a couple of hours there but did not visit the gas chambers.  However, we saw enough to understand that this was, like the other camps, a place where so much evil was perpetrated on so many innocent people.

We left there early afternoon and the road back down the other side of the mountain got us to the valley very quickly.  From there, it was a short drive to Offenburg where Emmy was catching a train to Frankfurt to visit friends there and near Mannheim for the weekend.  She'll re-join her grandparents Monday.  I will reconnect with her (and them) in London in a couple of weeks.