WHAT IS NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF/KLNa?
Chronology of the KLNa
Maps showing location of N-S
Photographs of the camp - outlineof illustrated lecture
Background of Presenter and endorsements of this project.
Testimonials by noted scholars
SURVIVORS REMEMBER and REMEMBERED
CALL ME ANDRE: Joseph Scheinmann, aka André Peulevey:
Call Me André : A Jewish spy for the British in the French Resistance
Jean Schmit: A political prisoner writes letters home
Eugène Marlot: Sac d'Os and L'Enfer d'Alsace
Henri Rosencher: Le Sel, La Cendre, La Flamme: A Jewish fighter's story
Monsieur le Chanoine Hess, Catholic cleric, a prisoner
His memoirs translated
General Delestraint,Free French Commander,
imprisoned at Natzweiler
Boris Pahor: the KLNa's most honored literary figure
Floris Bakels Nacht und Nebel:
a Dutch proemintem's memoir
Christian Ottosen and other Norwegians at Natzweiler
Arne Brun Lie: Night and Fog:
A Norwegian survivor's book, podcast and film
Bombardier Alfred George JONES and others remembered: see links for
Johnny Hopper, Nacht und Nebel, and Seeing through the Fog
Wikipedia's info on other survivors:
Xavier, Duke of Parma
Tadeusz Borowski, author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Alf Martinius Grindrud
Haakon Sørbye
Brian Stonehouse
More information and links:
Order to remove Jews from the concentration camps
The Gas Chamber-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
Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman's Holocaust Project
Natzweiler's 70 Kommandos - slave labor dependencies
New book published about Kommando Bisingen
A new museum and links to European resources
Diana Mara Henry presents the memoirs of Natzweiler-Struthof
at the Association for Jewish Studies
conference in Los Angeles, 12/22/2009:
AJS 41st Annual Conference
December 20-22, 2009
Hyatt Regency Century Plaza
Los Angeles, California
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.
To be uploaded, available on request:
Videos and Films
Essay: "Life Was Not Beautiful"
Nuremburg Documents
Memorial page of names
“Liberation” of the camp
Dachau connection
Escape from NS