Natzwiller - Le Struthof concentration camp (by kerouac2)

[Deleted]

Le Struthof, located in a beautiful site in the Vosges mountains of eastern France, has the misfortune of being the only Nazi death camp that was located on French soil. It is only 25 kilometres from my grandmother's birthplace, so it has been impossible for the family to ignore over the years. I went there for the first time when I was 7 years old, and the horror was still fresh in everybody's mind in those days. The war had ended less than 20 years earlier. When I think of how recent the 1990's seem us now, I am astonished that my French family had already totally turned the page of that period and were happy to look towards the bright future that seemed to be in store for all, including the Germans on the other side of the border. Back in those days, there were still plenty of ruins in many of the villages and towns, and often my grandparents or my mother even remembered "the night the town was bombed" and could describe the scene. It was already like something out of a movie to me, but the visit to Le Struthof definitely made it all real.

The modern brochure that one receives during a visit now says "the visit is not considered appropriate for children" but there were no such precautions when I was a child. I've been there perhaps 3 or 4 times in my life, so it's not as though I need to "see" the place again. I need to "feel" it.

The first thing you see is the "lantern of the dead" -- a field where that ashes from the ovens were dumped.



The camp is right next to this.

Only four barracks were kept from the camp. The other buildings were razed, although their foundations were kept. The first building houses the small museum. I am sorry to say that since I moved to France, the museum has been attacked by arsonists twice, causing considerable damage each time.

Here is a period photograph of the camp in the winter. Naturally, there was no heat for the prisoners.



The prisoners came from all over Europe. This helped to disorient them and discourage escape.









The Nazi coding system for prisoners was very sophisticated.





Tens of thousands of people were exterminated here.









The camp was "lucky" in a way. After the battle of Alsace, it was the very first concentration camp to be evacuated by the Allies.



Normally, one would be happy to be transferred out of Auschwitz...

[Deleted]

[Deleted]

One of the remaining buildings is the cellblock for "bad" prisoners.















Here is one of the solitary cells.





No need to see this cell.

Impossible to avoid the ovens. It was even worse when I was little, because they had left ceramic disks in the ovens. When the Nazis were burning corpses, they would place a ceramic disk in the mouth of each cadaver. At the end of the day, they would collect the disks out of the ashes in the ovens to count how many people they had incinerated.

This is the funeral urn room. Families of German prisoners (only) could purchase the ashes of their loved one after incineration. The charge was between 60 and 100 Reichmarks, and of course there was no guarantee that the remains were actually those of the family member.

On the table is an urn containing the ashes of burned hair. Most of the hair was removed from the cadavers before incineration to be made into felt hats.

Here is a tour group arriving. At least half of the visitors are from Germany.



Behind the camp is the cemetery and the memorial.
















When I was little, the memorial had just been built.

[Deleted]

There is now a relatively new "deported resistant" centre on the site. It is a bit more hopeful in tone and had a very interesting display of clandestine radio broadcast equipment, which often meant a death sentence if you were caught with it.

This is a parachute equipment cannister.











Two kilometres from the camp is the gas chamber.

I have never been inside.

That's all.

[mossie]

A terrible reminder

[bjd]

The new museum somehow feels less "touching" than the old buildings.

My kids all participated in the "Concours de la Résistance" when they were in high school. It was an obligatory part of the history programme in 3° (age 14-15) and 1° (age 16-17). My daughter won twice (two different years) and went on a trip to Struthof, then to Berlin and Buchenwald (I think). There were a couple of former Resistants with the group of high school kids. The group of visitors in your picture looks like the same kind of thing, although I don't imagine there are many Resistants left now.

[htmb]

Thank you for this sensitive report, Kerouac. Your personal memories added to its poignancy. It is important that we never forget the horrors that occurred in places like this.

[tod2]

Htmb took the words right out of my mouth......thank you for a wonderful report Kerouac.

[Deleted]

Aug 28, 2013 6:10:05 GMT kerouac2 said:

The modern brochure that one receives during a visit now says "the visit is not considered appropriate for children" but there were no such precautions when I was a child. I've been there perhaps 3 or 4 times in my life, so it's not as though I need to "see" the place again. I need to "feel" it.

Thank you, kerouac. I now realise that this was one of the first concentration camps to which my parents took me (9 y.o.) and my brother (7 y.o.). I recognised it from the nooses, the ovens and, finally, the memorial. For years I've been trying to figure out which one it was, thinking it was not in France, but Germany. Those days, there was no English signage or visitors' centre, I believe, which made it that much more bleak and terrifying for a child. Those visits had an impact on my life that are immeasurable, they are part of my chemical makeup now; something in that child changed forever when she witnessed that level of depravity and cruelty at such a young age. You have no idea how much your "revisit" means to me.

[Deleted]

Inside the first "museum" building, there are no signs in English -- it is only in French and German.

I don't think any child ever forgets that white marble monument with the skinny man. One of my great uncles was detained not in a concentration camp but in a POW camp for most of the war. He apparently was almost on the chubby side when he was made prisoner, but he came out of the camp looking as thin as the silhouette on the monument and he stayed that way for the next 50 years.

[Deleted]

I never fully understood the words concentration camp when I was that age. It confused me terribly, and the only thought that came to me was that these people were made to concentrate on whatever horrible thing got them there in the first place, like it was some sort of a deathly meditation centre. And why should a child have any concept of its purpose?

[lagatta]

Originally, it didn't refer to a place to systematically murder people (or in the case of the largest camps, to kill them after extracting slave labour), but always referred to internment without trial. It seems that the term itself was first used during the Boer War, but this is subject to debate.

[bjd]

I just found this:
concentration camp, a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians. The term was first used to describe prison camps used by the Spanish military during the Cuban insurrection (1868–78), those created by America in the Philippines (1898–1901), and, most widely, to refer to British camps built during the South African War (Boer War) to confine Afrikaners in the Transvaal and Cape Colony (1899—1902). The term soon took on much darker meanings. In the USSR, the Gulag elaborated on the concept beginning as early as 1920. After 1928, millions of opponents of Soviet collectivization as well as common criminals were imprisoned under extremely harsh conditions and many died.

Two more paragraphs about German use.

[Deleted]

Since many concentration camps were just prisons, that's why the term "death camp" was created to distinguish those used for extermination and not just confinement.

[patricklondon]

They could also form part of a (if this isn't too banal a phrase for the concept) "mixed economy", with areas for forced labour (with, at best, indifference as to what happened to the labourers, at worst a deliberate attempt to work them to death), and associated satellite camps, some of which also used "regular" POWs as labour (it was recognised under the Geneva Conventions that POWs other than officers could be used in non-military labour - many German POWs were kept on in Britain after the war to work on farms and the like, and quite a few eventually settled and made a life in the UK).

My father was down a coalmine in Poland, which was formally attached to a satellite camp of Auschwitz, and the satellite in question was known as a wretched place in its own right. He and the other "Western" POWs would be marched back to their own camp's facilities each night, and the Russian and Polish POWs went...... elsewhere.

[Deleted]

This box carved by one of the prisoners was on display in the museum.

I happen to own a much simpler box that was made by a German POW after the war. I do not have the slightest idea how the box came into my family -- whether such items were sold in shops, or perhaps it was even given as a gift by one of the prisoners.

I left a few items inside so you can see that it is quite small.

[Deleted]

The cobwebs of my mind began to clear after writing "gift." I'm pretty sure that the box was a gift from a prisoner to my grandfather. He was mayor of his home village from 1945 to 1971, and right after the war, the villages in Lorraine each received a few POWs who helped to start cleaning the neglected kitchen gardens and to clear away some of the rubble when necessary.

I'm sure that my grandfather got along very well with the POWs because he had been a POW himself in Germany during the Great War and had some very good memories of working on a farm there, and also of the farmer's daughter.

[mossie]

When I worked on a farm in 1948 we had an German ex POW who was an excellent worker and a very fit strong man. We had to carry 2¼ cwt (252 lbs) sacks of seed corn, I could just about struggle along with one after using a hoist to get it on my shoulders, Henry could lift one clean off the ground and swing it across his back . He to to work where he was directed for 5 years and would then be eligible to become a naturalised British citizen. He had no home or family to go back to, which was common among many Germans and East Europeans, particularly those where the borders of countries had moved after the war. The pilot I flew with in the RAF was Polish, but his home had moved into Ukraine, although his father was still there as the local postmaster, the position he held before the war. They could not admit to a son in the RAF, so he had very little contact with them, he had left Poland in 1939 at the age of 18.

[lugg]

A terrible but so essential reminder.

I was wondering who the "apatride" classification would apply to prior to the end of the war ( kind of links to Mossie's comments) Was it mostly the Free French do you know ?

[Deleted]

I was reading elsewhere that most "stateless" people from that period were Armenians.

[bjd]

My parents and grandmother (and many other Poles) became stateless after WW2 because they didn't return to Poland. This was also the case for the many Poles who had joined the Polish army in the Middle East, or Mossie's pilot in Britain.

When we emigrated to Canada, they had travel documents issued by the Brits valid for that journey, but only had an "official" citizenship once they became Canadian citizens 5 years later. My sister and I were born in England so had British citizenship (oddly, I think, since I don't know if it still works that way).

[mossie]

There were large numbers of "stateless" people. Some countries had disappeared, others had border changes. Poland bodily moved to the west, a part of eastern Germany became Poland and a part of eastern Poland became Russia. So people who had considered themselves German were overnight converted into Poles and some Poles became Russians. Of course these borders had been flexible for centuries. Long ago Lithuania was once part of Poland, and mighty Prussia became part of Poland.

[bjd]

mighty Prussia became part of Poland.

Except for the bit that became Russian -- Kaliningrad.

There are books and jokes about people whose nationality changed several times even though they remained in the same village or town.

[Deleted]

Obviously, after WW2, there were huge numbers of stateless persons due to all of the border changes. Many men from Alsace-Moselle who enrolled voluntarily in the German army were made stateless after the war, because they were stripped of their citizenship. But before WW2, there were not all that many stateless people.

One of my colleagues was born stateless, along with his brothers. He was of Russian origin but born in Morocco. I have no idea if the family could have chosen to become Moroccan, but after being rejected by the United States, they ended up in France and were naturalised there.

[nycgirl]

What a disturbing place. I had never heard of Le Struthof before. I have been to Holocaust museums before but seeing the actual tools of torture and murder and being on the site of such brutality must be painfully haunting. I personally wouldn't bring any kids under the age of 12.

The family heirloom you pictured is lovely, Kerouac, and not just for sentimental reasons.

[Joan234]

I will try to visit on my upcoming trip next summer but I don't know if I can take it.

[WC Travelers 75]

Thank you for this post and pictures and your remembrances. We were at the site in July 2015 at closing time and the gates to the camp were closed. We were able to your the museum and the memorial and take pictures from outside the gate. We were visiting Obernai, the hometown of my wife's grandfather.