Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of .

About 52,000 prisoners were estimated to be held there during its time of operation. The prisoners were mainly from the resistance movements in German-occupied territories. It was a labor camp, a transit camp and, as the war went on, a place of execution. Some died of exhaustion and starvation – there were an estimated 22,000 deaths at the camp and its network of subcamps. Many prisoners were moved to other camps; in particular, in 1944 the former head of Auschwitz concentration camp was brought in to evacuate the prisoners of Natzweiler-Struthof to Dachau as the Allied armies approached. Only a small staff of Nazi SS personnel remained when the camp was liberated by the French First Army under the command of the U.S. Sixth Army Group on 23 November 1944.

The anatomist August Hirt made a Jewish skull collection, whose purpose was to portray Jews as racially inferior, at the camp. A documentary movie was made about the 86 named men and women who were killed there for that project. Some of the people responsible for atrocities in this camp were brought to trial after the war ended.

The camp is preserved as a museum in memory of those held or killed there. The European Centre of Deported Resistance Members is located at this museum, focusing on those held. A monument to the departed stands at the site. The present museum was restored in 1980 after damage by neo-Nazis in 1976. Among notable prisoners, the writer Boris Pahor was interned in Natzweiler-Struthof and wrote his novel Necropolis based on his experience.

Background In 1940, Germany invaded and occupied France, including Alsace. That region, adjacent to the German border, was chosen for full Germanization and was annexed to Gau Baden-Alsace. On 2 July 1940, two weeks after the fall of the nearby city of Strasbourg, an internment camp was set up near Schirmeck which existed throughout the war but was never part of the concentration camp system. The Natzweiler-Struthof main camp on 1 May 1941 was established nearby at Natzweiler in the Bruche valley, due to its proximity to a quarry.Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos volume one, Natzweiler-Struthof main camp, p. 1004

Operations

The construction of Natzweiler-Struthof was overseen by Hans Hüttig in the spring of 1941, in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of . The camp operated between 21 May 1941 and the beginning of September 1944, when the SS evacuated the surviving prisoners on a "death march" to Dachau, with only a small SS unit keeping the camp's operations.

On 23 November 1944, this camp with its small staff was discovered and liberated by the French First Army as part of the U.S. Sixth Army Group, on the same day that the city of Strasbourg was liberated by the Allies. Through 1945, Natzweiler-Struthof had a complex of about 70 subcamps or annex camps. (For the system of subcamps see List of subcamps of Natzweiler-Struthof.)

Initial focus and later actions

The total number of prisoners reached 52,000 over the three years, of 32 nationalities. Inmates originated from various countries, including Poland, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, France, Nazi Germany, Slovene-speaking parts of Yugoslavia and Norway. The camp was specially set up for Nacht und Nebel prisoners, in most cases, people of the resistance movements. It was a labor camp and a transit camp, as many prisoners were sent to other Nazi concentration camps before the final evacuation. As the war continued, it became a death camp as well. Some people died of exhaustion from the work they had to do while starving. Deaths have been estimated at 22,000 at the main camp and the subcamps.

Interned prisoners provided forced labor for the Wehrmacht war industry, through contracts with private industry. The work was done mainly at the numerous annex camps, some of them located in mines or tunnels to protect them from Allied air raids. Work, hunger, darkness and lack of health care caused many epidemics; mortality rates could reach 80%. Some worked in quarries, but many worked in the arms industry at various subcamps. Daimler-Benz moved its aircraft engine factory from Berlin to a gypsum mine near the Neckarelz annex camp. The disused autobahn Engelberg Tunnel in Leonberg, near Stuttgart, was used by the Messerschmitt Aircraft Company which eventually employed 3,000 prisoners in forced labor. Another annex camp at Schörzingen was established in February 1944 to extract crude oil from oil shale. The total number of prisoners at all of the Natzweiler subcamps was an estimated 19,000 of whom between 7,000 and 8,000 were in the main camp at Natzweiler.

The camp held a crematorium and a jury rigged gas chamber outside the main camp, which was not used for mass extermination but for selective extermination, as part of the human experimentation programs, in particular on the problems of fighting a war, like typhus among the troops.

Doctors Otto Bickenbach and Helmut Rühl were accused of crimes committed at this camp. Hans Eisele was also stationed in this camp for a time. August Hirt committed suicide in June 1945; his suicide was unknown for many years, and he was tried in absentia in 1953 at Metz for his war crimes, including the Jewish skull collection, begun at Auschwitz, continued at Natzweiler-Struthof, and at the Reichsuniversität Straßburg.

Some prisoners were executed directly, by hanging, by gunshot or by gas. The female prisoner-population in the camp was small, and only seven SS women served in Natzweiler-Struthof camp (compared to more than 600 SS men) and 15 in the Natzweiler complex of subcamps. The main duty of the female supervisors in Natzweiler was to guard the few women who came to the camp for medical experiments or to be executed. The camp also trained several female guards who went to the Geisenheim and Geislingen subcamps in western Germany.

Leo Alexander, the medical advisor at the Nuremberg trials, stated that some children were murdered at Natzweiler-Struthof for the sole purpose of testing poisons for inconspicuous executions of Nazi officials and prisoners. Such executions of took place at Bullenhuser Damm.

The camp became a war zone in late summer 1944, and was evacuated in early September 1944. Prior to the evacuation of the camp, 141 prisoners were shot dead on 31 August – 1 September 1944. The 70th anniversary of this execution of those who resisted Nazi occupation was commemorated at the museum in 2014.

Notable prisoners

Four female British SOE agents were executed together on 6 July 1944: Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh, Andrée Borrel and Sonya Olschanezky. Brian Stonehouse of the British SOE and Albert Guérisse, a Belgian escape line leader, witnessed the arrival of the four women and the events leading up to their execution and cremation; both men testified to the executions of the four women in post-war trials. The two men were sent to Dachau, where they were liberated. Roger Boulanger writes of the four British SOE women executed under the supervision of Dr. Plaza and Dr. Rhode, in his section on Capital Punishment (Les exécutions capitales), as to the intent of the RSHA of Berlin, Reichssicherheitshauptamt, to have them disappear with no trace, as their names were not recorded as being at this camp. Stonehouse later sketched the four women which aided in their identification.

Charles Delestraint, leader of the Armée Secrète, was detained at Natzweiler-Struthof, then was executed by the Gestapo in Dachau days before that camp was liberated and the war ended. Henri Gayot, a member of the French Resistance who was interned at Struthof between April and September 1944, documented his ordeal in drawings which are now in the Struthof Concentration Camp Museum.

Bishop Gabriel Piguet, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, was interned at Natzweiler before being transferred to the Priest Barracks of Dachau Concentration Camp. He is honored as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust Memorial, for hiding Jewish children in Catholic boarding schools.

Two British Royal Air Force airmen (Flying Officer Dennis H. Cochran, and Flight Lieutenant Anthony "Tony" R. H. Hayter) who were involved in "The Great Escape" and murdered by the Gestapo after re-capture, were cremated at Natzweiler-Struthof.

British bomber Sergeant Frederic ("Freddie") Habgood was hanged at this camp, after his Lancaster bomber crashed in Alsace on 27 July 1944 and he was betrayed to the Nazis by a local woman. Two died as a result of the crash, three survived as prisoners of war in a camp in Poland, one returned to England with the help of the resistance, and Mr Habgood was hanged on 31 July 1944. His death was acknowledged as a war crime in 1947 and his family was informed, but the most personal evidence of his presence there, a silver bracelet with his name on it, emerged from the soil in July 2018, as an area with flowers was being watered by a volunteer.

In his memoirs titled Moi, Pierre Seel, déporté homosexuel, Pierre Seel, who served a sentence at the neighboring camp of Schirmeck, tells that he took part in the construction of the Struthof concentration camp, in the context of his forced labor tasks.

Notable Norwegian prisoners at Natzweiler include newspaper editor and Labour Party politician Trygve Bratteli who later went on to become Prime Minister of Norway, and former footballer Asbjørn Halvorsen who had previously played in Germany for Hamburger SV. Both were imprisoned at Natzweiler for distribution of illegal newspapers in German-occupied Norway. In total, 504 Norwegians were imprisoned at Natzweiler. Only 266 of them returned home alive.Kronikk: Den glemte generalen

The Slovene novelist Boris Pahor was imprisoned at the camp in 1944. Pahor was later transported to Dachau camp and other camps until finally liberated in Bergen-Belsen. After the war he wrote the novel Necropolis about his experiences in the camp. The novel was later translated into numerous other European languages.

List of personnel The camp had five commandants and numerous doctors in its history.

Commanders (Commandants) SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Huttig SS-Sturmbannführer Egon Zill SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Schwarz

SS Doctors SS-Hauptsturmführer Kurt aus dem Bruch SS-Hauptsturmführer Karl Babor SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinz Baumköther SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Blancke SS-Obersturmführer Franz von Bodmann SS-Obersturmführer Hans Eisele SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Graefe SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Krieger SS-Obersturmführer Georg Meyer SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Plaza SS-Hauptsturmführer Elimar Precht SS-Untersturmführer Andreas Rett SS-Untersturmführer Werner Rohde SS-Hauptsturmführer Gerhard Schiedlausky SS-Obersturmführer Siegfried Schwela

Private firms using inmate labor The following private firms used Natzweiler-Struthof camp's inmates for labor in their factories:

Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG) Adlerwerke AG (formerly Adlerwerke vorm. Heinrich Kleyer) Bayerische Motorenwerke AG (BMW) Berger

Daimler-Benz AG Friedrich Krupp Ironworks Gruen & Bulfinger Henkel & Cie Heinkel Flugzeugwerke, aircraft factory, Zuffenhausen Kessler Factory Koch & Mayer Messerschmitt AG Röchling Group

Jewish skull collection