Natzwiller, France:

Almost 80 years ago, when American troops liberated the only Nazi concentration camp in France, they found it completely deserted.

During World War II, thousands of people died or were murdered at the Netzweiler-Struthof camp in the eastern Alsace region on the German border.

But when the Americans arrived on November 25, 1944, “they found a completely intact, completely empty camp”, historian Cedric Neuve told AFP.

He added that “there was not a single SS guard or a single prisoner. The camp was in perfect condition … the Germans probably thought they would come back.”

Of the 50,000 or so people held in Strathofen and its satellite camps, “17,000 died or went missing, mainly in the death marches of spring 1945,” Neuve said.

“You enter here through the big door. You will leave through the chimney of the cemetery,” the camp commander told arriving prisoners in 1943, according to 100-year-old Henri Mousson — one of the last surviving French prisoners.

‘Night and Fog’

Struthof was opened in 1941 near the village of Natzwiller, 800 meters (2,6000 ft) up in the Vosges Mountains.

New waves of prisoners began to arrive from 1943 after the “Nacht und Nebel” (“Night and Fog”) operations, the round-up of Nazi political opponents they wanted to disappear without a trace.

A member of the French Resistance, Mousson was captured and sentenced to death in June 1943.

In November of the same year, he was brought by train to Rothau near the camp.

He said the prisoners were “forced to death with rifle butts and dog bites” in trucks and cars.

“There wasn’t enough space, so some had to stand for the last eight kilometers (five miles). One man died on the way”, Mosun recalled.

Prisoners were stripped, their heads shaved and bathed in hot water from a crematorium before undergoing disinfection.

Mosson was given the job of disinfecting the prisoners’ clothing, which allowed him to survive the extreme cold of winter, the heat of summer, and starvation.

“By the end we had nothing to eat but boiled nettles”, he said, adding that when he returned home he weighed only 38 kg (84 pounds).

Struthov housed men of about 30 nationalities, mostly Poles, Russians and French.

Among those arrested were Jews and Roma, as well as Jehovah’s Witnesses and regular criminals.

‘Subhuman’

Political prisoners captured in “night and fog” operations were “right at the bottom of the ladder”, said Michael Landolt, who runs the European Center for Deported Resistance Members, based near Strathof.

“They were subjected to the hardest labor and had a high mortality rate,” he added.

Landolt said that Soviet and Polish prisoners were “regarded by the Nazis as ‘Untermenschen’ (“subhumans”) and treated very badly”.

In addition to the harsh conditions, Strothof was also the scene of executions and medical experiments.

In August 1943, 86 Jewish prisoners were murdered in a gas chamber so that their remains could be added to the collection of Jewish skeletons.

Even as the Allied forces pushed across France and reached the camp in 1944, the suffering of the prisoners did not end.

They were forcibly transferred to other camps on the other side of the Rhine.

Historian Neuve described Strothoff as “living like a cancer that has metastasized.”

It finally came to an end when these satellite camps were evacuated in the spring of 1945.

After the war, Struthof was used to hold people who had collaborated with the Nazis until 1949, then became a prison.

Only later did it become a landmark that is now visited by over 200,000 people each year.

President Emmanuel Macron is among the leaders expected to pay tribute to the camp’s victims at a memorial service at the site on Saturday.

Most of the prisoner’s shackles are long gone, but they still mark the ground.

Visitors can still see the cemetery buildings, the prison and the gas chamber below, as well as walk the paths of the cemetery where more than a thousand prisoners are buried.

(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

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