Well after our one semi-sunny day yesterday, the weather has reverted to even worse than before. It rained hard for most of the day today and we got soaked! I still would rather be too chilly than too hot, but this is starting to get a little ridiculous. :-) Anyway, we left the beautiful city of Strasbourg and headed up into the mountains to see the Nazi concentration camp called Natzweiler-Struthof. It's probably not a camp that you have heard of; we hadn't until we did some research on the area, but it was interesting to learn about another camp and to have new information to take back to our students. (This first picture is an aerial view from online.)
I know it might sound morbid for us to be interested in visiting concentration camps, but we both look at it as a responsibility, a way to honor the lives of those who were murdered. If we can learn about these terrible places and the individual lives that were brutally cut short, then when we share it with our students we are helping to keep the memory of those people alive.
(The pic to the left is of one of the barracks that still exists at this camp. There are a few exhibits in it and it's part of the museum here.)
We have traveled by ourselves to different concentration camps and also with the WSHERC (Washington State Holocaust Education and Resource Center) three different times to visit camps around Europe. The first time with the Center was ten years ago when we went to Poland to see Auschwitz and four other death camps. The second time was to Berlin, where we saw Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen; and the last trip was three years ago to Budapest and Prague where we visited Theresienstadt. The Holocaust Center has taught us so much and we feel a great obligation to share everything we've learned with our students (and pretty much anyone else who is interested). This camp, Natzweiler-Struthof, was a little bit different than many of the others we've seen because it was not specifically focused on Jews, but it was still used for similar purposes: to torture, terrorize, and kill innocents who were singled out by the Nazis.
Here is a bit of info. about the camp. All of the following quoted text comes from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website. "The Germans established the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp near the town of Natzweiler, about 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg, the capital of the province of Alsace (in eastern France). It was one of the smaller concentration camps built by the Germans. Until construction was completed in May 1941, prisoners slept in the nearby former Hotel Struthof, hence the name Natzweiler-Struthof. The camp held about 1,500 prisoners. Prisoners worked in nearby granite quarries, in construction projects, and in the maintenance of the camp."
Here is a reproduction of the bunks that the prisoners slept in (several men to each bunk). The picture on the wall in the background can be seen below.
The drawings throughout this post are done by one of the camp prisoners and have been enlarged for the exhibit. He kept the drawings hidden while he was imprisoned and was able to sneak them out at some point when the war ended. They're really amazing and disturbing. I think it would be fascinating to teach a class completely devoted to Holocaust art and literature (work actually created by the prisoners). We've seen a lot of it in our travels and it never fails to evince a visceral reaction.
"Beginning in the summer of 1943, the Germans detained many "Night and Fog" prisoners in Natzweiler-Struthof. The "Night and Fog" (Nacht und Nebel) operation represented a German attempt to subdue growing anti-German resistance in western Europe. Suspected resistance fighters were arrested and their families were not notified; the prisoners simply disappeared into the "Night and Fog." Many prisoners in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp were members of the French resistance."
"In August 1943, a gas chamber was constructed in Natzweiler-Struthof in one of the buildings that had formed part of the hotel compound. The bodies of more than 80 Jewish prisoners gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof were sent to the Strasbourg University Institute of Anatomy. There, anatomist Dr. August Hirt amassed a large collection of Jewish skeletons in order to establish Jewish "racial inferiority" by means of anthropological study. The gas chamber was also used in pseudoscientific medical experiments involving poison gas. The victims of these experiments were primarily Roma (Gypsies) who had been transferred from Auschwitz. Prisoners were also subjected to experiments involving treatment for typhus and yellow fever."
"In 1944, concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in German armaments production. The Germans used prisoners throughout the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system as forced laborers to produce arms and to construct underground manufacturing facilities. (Allied air raids on industrial complexes necessitated the construction of such facilities.)"
This is the large memorial located above the main gate of the camp. There is a large grassy yard of crosses to the left of it, but it was too rainy and foggy for the dark crosses to show up in the picture. So I cropped them out. (The picture below shows what we saw but on a sunny day so the crosses actually show up.)
This is a display of equipment used to torture and kill the prisoners. The gallows are in the center, and then there are two pieces of equipment they would've used in the forced labor that eventually killed most of them.
This view is looking across the rectangular dirt areas where the former bunkers were located. Each space is marked by a white stone. In the background are two blue buildings that were the crematorium/medical experiment block and the inmates' prison block.
It was a little strange to see crosses in this camp because we're so used to seeing the Stars of David at the camps where Jews were killed. But these were erected for the non-Jews who were killed here..
"There were about 50 subcamps in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system, located in Alsace and Lorraine as well as in the adjacent German provinces of Baden and Wuerttemberg. By the fall of 1944, there were about 7,000 prisoners in the main camp and more than 20,000 in subcamps."
"With the approach of Allied forces in September 1944, the main camp at Natzweiler-Struthof was evacuated and the prisoners distributed among the subcamps. In March 1945, the Germans disbanded the subcamps and sent most of the prisoners on death marches -- forced marches over long distances and under brutal conditions -- toward the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. From May 1941 to March 1945, more than 17,000 people died in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system."
The next several photos are from inside the crematoria building and the jail.
This was the table where autopsies and some medical experiments were done.
These were the urns left over at the end of the war that were meant to be used for the ashes of those cremated. Depending on the prisoner, sometimes the ashes were sent home to the family.
This is the oven used to burn the bodies of the dead prisoners. We've seen these ovens at every camp, and it never gets any easier to process what happened in these rooms.
This is a rack that was used to torture prisoners. Their torsos would've been placed on the rack and they would receive their lashings for whatever supposed offense had been committed.
This is the inmates' prison and these are the doors to the cells. It seems strange to think that prisoners in a labor camp would "need" any more punishment, but we have seen these jails at every concentration camp we've been to.
After touring this camp and its very modern museum dedicated to the French Resistance and the many members who died here, we took our leave and headed to Colmar. It's always strange to leave a concentration camp and emerge into the real world where things are comfortable and normal, but it was a great learning experience for us and we now have new information to teach our students next year.
It took us another hour to get to Colmar, which is a city that looks very much like the last city of Strasbourg. Colmar is sometimes referred to as a little Venice because of its canals and beautiful narrow pedestrian streets. I have to say that I wish we had more time here because we arrived today, a Saturday, and there are a LOT of people EVERYWHERE. Lots of big tourist groups following their leaders, lots of teens out of school hanging out, and lots of locals doing their Saturday errands and shopping.
We have to leave tomorrow, and I'm so sad because I bet Sunday or Monday would be so much quieter and give us a chance to really get to know the city. But that's ok, at least we got to see the beauty a little bit. Here are some of the gorgeous streets we wandered.
All in all, it was a really long and tiring day - most of it in the rain. Hopefully tomorrow will dry up a little bit because we're headed to another American cemetery and the beautiful city of Reims (pronounced Rance). Talk to you tomorrow!
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