History The annex housing the gas chamber of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp (Bas-Rhin), where 86 Jews were gassed for medical experimentation, reopens to the public on Saturday, after 18 months of restoration and a new memorial journey
Archives. Natzwiller-Struthof on 24 06 2012. Struthof concentration camp — G. VARELA /20 MINUTES
It’s the only Nazi concentration camp set up there. on French soil. The annex housing the bedroom; gas from the Natzweiler-Struthof camp (Bas-Rhin), where 86 Jews were gassed for medical experimentation, reopens to the public on Saturday, after eighteen months of restoration, with a new memorial route.
“It’s an operation of heritage restoration and not of reconstruction or rehabilitation, where; we intervened in an extremely meticulous way,”said Pierre Dufour, chief architect of historical monuments, who supervised the building on Thursday. the project on the only Nazi concentration camp installed in annexed Alsace.
To constitute a collection of skeletons
Located a hundred meters below the camp where some 52,000 deportees from all over Europe were interned between May 1941 and November 1944. gas was at Originally a food depot and ballroom at the nearby inn. In August 1943, 86 Jews, selected to Auschwitz, were gassed there, in order to constitute a collection of skeletons, in anticipation of the total annihilation of all the Jews which the Holocaust was to lead to. These experiments were notably carried out by the director of the Institute of Anatomy of the Reichsuniversität (Reich University) in Strasbourg, August Hirt.
Inside the building, restored for 1.6 million euros, the visitor passes through three rooms before accessing the the small bedroom; gas of 9 square meters, at the white earthenware and the padded door. The tour is structured around sober explanatory glass panels, and objects from the period, such as a funnel connected to the glass. to the bedroom; gas, a notebook of Hirt or a moving alliance of a victim. Eight Gypsies will also die at the series of experiments carried out in the chamber Struthof gas.
“Medical War Crimes”
Last May, the University of Strasbourg had made an inventory of these Nazi years in a report of 500 pages, where the light was finally shed on the participation of his faculty; of Medicine to “Medical War Crimes” “The reopening of this place will help to bring the missing link to the city” all this work done for several years” Guillaume d’Andlau, director of the European Center for Deported Resistance fighters – Struthof (CERD), the memorial of the former concentration camp which welcomes 200,000 visitors each year.
The former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp was one of the deadliest in the Nazi concentration camp universe, with 22,000 dead, mainly from exhaustion, hunger and inhuman treatment.