Relatively unknown, the camp set up in annexed Alsace was one of the deadliest in the Nazi concentration camp universe. Research is underway to better understand how it works.
Its pink granite was coveted by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, and its remains are now unearthed: the Struthof quarry (Bas-Rhin), a place of forced labor for thousands of deportees, is being excavated unprecedented, 80 years after the opening of the only Nazi concentration camp located on French territory. Relatively unknown, he was one of the deadliest.
“This part of Struthof had been somewhat neglected, while the quarry preceded the construction of the camp”, raises Juliette Brangé, head of the excavation site, while browsing the vast artificial terrace on the mountainside. There remain only nine buildings or what remains of their foundations, out of the twenty built under the rule of the Nazis. To imagine the place as it was at the time, surrounded by watchtowers, “we have less than ten archival photographs, it’s not much”, regrets the young archaeologist.
From May 1941, on this promontory located 800 meters above sea level, thousands of prisoners followed one another to extract the stone, originally intended for the great constructions of the Reich. The former also had to build the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, located 500 meters further north, and the roads leading to it themselves.
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Human guinea pigs
During the war, 17,000 deportees, twenty years old on average, from all over Europe passed through the Struthof built in annexed Alsace, 52,000 counting the nebula of satellite camps on either side of the Rhine. They were mainly resistance fighters and political prisoners, but also Jewish or gypsy deportees, homosexuals and Jehovah’s Witnesses: 22,000 died there.
Most died of exhaustion, inhuman treatment or starvation, others were victims of sinister pseudo-medical experiments. Indeed, several hundred deportees served there as human guinea pigs for experiments on poison gas and typhus. The German professor of anatomy August Hirt also had 86 Jews who had come specially from Auschwitz executed in the small gas chamber of the camp, to constitute a “anatomical collection” news “Judeo-Bolshevik race”. Their bodies, placed in formalin vats until the end of the war, were recently identified.
The camp also served as a place of execution for 107 resistance fighters. This mortality rate of 40% places it “among the most murderous of the Nazi system, excluding the extermination camp of course, on a par with Bergen Belsenand Sachsenhausen, much more than Buchenwaldand Dachau», according to historian Robert Steegmann, author of a reference work on the KL-Natzweiler.
The excavations should make it possible to better understand the nature of the forced labor which had “not studied at all”, according to Juliette Brange.
“Industrial Space”
In 1943, at the turn of the conflict, “the quarry is transformed into an industrial space”, she explains. German Junkers aircraft engines are dismantled there in halls, the spare parts being reintroduced into the industry to support the Nazi war machine. Files, metal tools as well as a forge to dismantle engine parts… The first objects discovered by the excavations testify to this, confirming that it was not only a question of extracting granite. “We can talk about qualified work”, observes the archaeologist.
“There, it is really the first element which is interesting”, smiles suddenly, moved, Clément Schermann, trowel in one hand, while showing with the other an aluminum triangle of barely five centimeters, discovered a few moments earlier at the foot of a building that a layer of humus had partially engulfed. “In the center, you have the little guy who symbolizes the Junkers firm, arms outstretched”, representing a propeller, continues the undergraduate archeology student at the University of Strasbourg to describe his find, a plaque probably attached to an aircraft engine.
The quarry was managed by DEST, the German Earthworks and Quarry Company, a company owned by the SS, with the camp charging them for this free labor. The DEST registers reveal that more than 1,000 people took turns every day at the quarry. “The deportees worked 60 hours a week, from 6:30 a.m. in winter, and were fed only 1,500 calories a day when it takes three times as many for a hard worker”, completes Guillaume d’Andlau, director of the European Center for Deported Resistance-Struthof (CERD), the memorial of the former concentration camp which welcomes 200,000 visitors each year.
“Place of Terror”
No less than 31 nationalities have passed through the Struthof, but according to Michaël Landolt, archaeologist for the regional direction of cultural affairs (DRAC) Grand Est, which finances the site“most of the forced laborers were Poles or Soviets. There were few French people, to prevent them from communicating with certain civilians from the Bruche valley who came to work at the quarry, probably for heavy work. he explains again, near a slab which has just revealed vintage electrical connections, with bare wires.
At his side, a dozen volunteer students are taking part in the excavations which are to be repeated every August until 2024. Descendants of deportees have also taken part in the important preliminary clearing work, such as Alain Salomon, administrator of the Natzweiler-Struthof association, history and memory, whose father Robert passed through Struthof. A few months before his disappearance in 2015, the former resistant had described in a vibrant speech “a hotbed of terror, crying, pain, grueling work in all weathers. In the face of unbearable Holocaust denial, it is important to bring this reality to the surface,” comments today his son about this place where nature had taken over.
Le Struthof will be the first concentration camp discovered by the Allies in their advance towards the West, in November 1944. But when the Americans arrive in front of the double row of barbed wire and the monumental gate, the 17 barracks and watchtowers are empty. The Nazis evacuated some 5,500 prisoners from the camp to Dachau. And the kommandos (work camps) on the right bank of the Rhine remain in operation. Until their release in April 1945.
“We couldn’t afford to put [ce lieu] value”, concedes André Woock, 62, mayor of the small rural town of Natzwiller located below, who recovered the property from the quarry after the war. “And then for the elders here, this story was still complicated”, adds the chosen one.
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