"You will come out through the chimney": inmates of Nazi death camps in France were told

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When American soldiers liberated the only Nazi concentration camp in France almost exactly 80 years ago, they found it utterly deserted.


Thousands of people were worked to death or murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in the eastern Alsace region on the German border during World War II.


But when the Americans arrived on November 25, 1944 "they found a totally intact, totally empty camp", historian Cedric Neveu told AFP.


"There wasn't a single SS guard or a single prisoner. The camp was in perfect condition... the Germans probably thought they would return," he added.


Of the 50,000 or so people that were held in Struthof and its satellite camps, "17,000 died or went missing, especially in the death marches of spring 1945," Neveu said.


"You entered here by the big gate. You will leave through the chimney" of the crematorium, the camp commander told prisoners arriving in 1943, according to 100-year-old Henri Mosson -- one of the last surviving French inmates.

'Night and Fog' 

Struthof was opened in 1941 near the village of Natzwiller, 800 metres (2,6000 feet) up in the Vosges mountains.


New waves of prisoners began arriving from 1943 after "Nacht und Nebel" ("Night and Fog") operations, Nazi roundups of political opponents they wished to disappear without trace.


Mosson, a member of the French Resistance, had been arrested in June 1943 and condemned to death.


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


Prisoners were forced into trucks and cars "with blows from rifle butts and dog bites", he said.


"There wasn't enough space, so some had to stand for the final eight kilometres (five miles). One man died" on the way, Mosson recalled.


Prisoners were stripped, had their heads shaved and showered with water heated by the crematorium furnace before going through disinfection.


Mosson got work disinfecting the prisoners' clothes, giving him a chance of survival despite the biting winter cold, summer heat and starvation conditions.


"By the end we had nothing but boiled nettles" to eat, he said, adding that he weighed just 38 kilos (84 pounds) by the time he returned home.


Men from around 30 nationalities were held in Struthof, mostly Poles, Russians and French.


Among the detainees were Jews and Roma as well as Jehovah's Witnesses and regular convicts.

'Subhumans'

Political prisoners rounded up in the "Night and Fog" actions were "right at the bottom of the ladder", said Michael Landolt, who runs the European Centre for Deported Resistance Members located close to Struthof.


"They were given the hardest labour and had a higher death rate," he added.


Soviet and Polish prisoners were "considered by the Nazis to be 'Untermenschen' ("subhumans") and very badly mistreated" as well, Landolt said.


Beyond the harsh conditions, Struthof was also the scene of executions and medical experiments.


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


Even as Allied forces pushed across France in 1944 and reached the camp, the inmates' suffering was not at an end.


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


Struthof "continued to exist, like a cancer that has metastasized," historian Neveu described.


Its final end came when those 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 memorial site that is now visited by more than 200,000 people each year.


President Emmanuel Macron is among leaders expected to pay tributes to the camp's victims at a commemoration at the site on Saturday.


Most of the prisoners' shacks have long been dismantled, but they are still marked out on the ground.


Visitors can still see the crematorium buildings, the prison and the gas chamber below, as well as walk the avenues of the cemetery where more than one thousand inmates are buried.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by News Agency staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)