Twenty-five years of interviews, photography, research and translation of documents on this camp are being added to this site with the goal of informing, publishing and connecting with survivors and other researchers. Please share your knowledge and experience and let us know if you would allow us to add your input to the site. Copies of CALL ME ANDRE or THE HELL OF ALSACE are available for purchase in hard copy for $50 each. A few major donors are needed to fund the production of this website and the translation of important documents and texts from the original French. Diana Mara Henry is available for speaking engagements about the camp and the resistance. These presentations can be tailored to the audience's background knowledge and age-approriate presentations. All materials not under other copyright are Copyright 1984-2010 Diana Mara Henry. Please contact dmh@dianamarahenry.com See also the exhibit: Vanishing Jews of Alsace Views on this research : Testimonials
Photo Copyright © Diana Mara Henry WHAT IS NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF/KLNa?Chronology of the KLNa Photographs of the camp - outlineof illustrated lecture Background of Presenter and endorsements of this project. Presenter's Résumé / other website: www.FrontSeattoWar.com Testimonials by noted scholars
More information and links:Order to remove Jews from the concentration camps -CAUTION GRAPHIC - Nazi doctors at Natzweiler, and the burial of the bodies of the 86 Jews from Auschwitz who were gassed The story of two Belgium Jewish women who were gassed SS Decree of October 10, 1942 to "cleanse all concentration camps of Jews" Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman's Holocaust Project Natzweiler's 70 Kommandos - slave labor dependencies Forced Labor 1939-1945 Memory and History website New book published about Kommando Bisingen Concours National de la Résistance et de la Déportation: See the amazing brochure to download, a compendium of 50 documents of denunciation, collaboration and repression of the French Resistance under the Nazis. |
No one can write an exhaustive book on a concentration camp, but one can certainly try to indicate all its aspects, resources for further study, and questions posed by its operational structure in the context of the other Konzentrationslagers, Nazi ideology, and Europe at war. This site creates a scholarly and publications center (Natzweiler Press) for the tragic and little-known concentration camp of Natzweiler-Struthof, (to the SS: KLNa) the only Nazi Konzentrationslager located in France, operating between 1941 and 1944 for the slave labor and brutal destruction of an (almost) exclusively non-Jewish population and the gassing and “medical” experimentation on Jews and Gypsies. Besides these aspects which it shares with many other camps, KLNa has certain more remarkable aspects. It became, for example, the primary center for the punishment of the category of political prisoners known as "NN." Their "Nacht und Nebel" status was determined by specific decree and judicial procedures practically unknown in the US today, where "Night and Fog" is thought to represent the quality of existence in the camps rather than the specific sentence under the NN Erlass (OKW Commander Keitel's decree) accorded some of those deemed most dangerous resistors and saboteurs of the Third Reich. The camp was accorded “Category III” status, and like Matthausen, which detroyed Spanish Communists in its quarry under conditions of staggering overwork and cruelty, Natzweiler was used to destroy Russians under similar conditions at its quarry site, while two dozen other European nationalities suffered famine, untreated disease, physical and mental abuse, and medical experimentation in the central camp and its 70 exterior slave labor sites (Kommandos). This is why all the nations of Europe, including the Sinti, are represented at the yearly commemoration ceremonies at the camp, a French national historic monument: survivor memoirs of the camp exist in their native languages of Slovene, Dutch, Norwegian, French and English.
By force of the years which now separate us from the tragic events, the survivor literature of the camp is nearly complete, barring certain memoirs which may yet come to light and be published posthumously. I have collected dozens of them and will present excerpts of them all, both to illustrate the coherence of their descriptions of the same brutal acts and the unique qualities of individual memory, and to pay tribute to the heroes who lived in our time. You are welcome to contact and to add your documentation.- Diana Henry To be uploaded, available on request: Nuremburg Documents Memorial page of names “Liberation” of the camp Videos and Films Essay: "Life Was Not Beautiful": the memoirs of Natzweiler-Struthof presented at the Association for Jewish Studies 41st Annual conference, Los Angeles, 12/22/2009
Diana Mara Henry presents the memoirs of André Scheinmann at THE 40TH ANNUAL SCHOLARS’ CONFERENCE ON THE HOLOCAUST AND THE CHURCHES The new museum at Natzweiler and links to European resources CERD's "Documents Pedagogiques" More worksheets for students from the Musée de la Résistance et de la Déportation in Besançon....
|