Natzweiler-Struthof: The Only Nazi Concentration Camp on French Soil

Required Activities

• Walk down the terraces of the camp from top to bottom and find the four buildings that were left when the rest were demolished in March 1954: barrack no. 1 and the kitchen barrack at the top, and at the bottom the crematorium block and the cell block

• Go through the Centre européen du résistant déporté below the camp first, then into the museum in barrack no. 1 — the building is a faithful reconstruction, because the original barrack and everything in it were destroyed by arson in May 1976 and the exhibition had to be rebuilt from scratch

• Stand at the National Memorial to the Deportation, built between 1957 and 1959 by the architect Bertrand Monnet with the sculptor Lucien Fenaux, then walk the national cemetery below it — and find the row it came from: on 3 April 1962 an unknown deportee was lifted from this ground and taken to Paris, to lie as the unknown deportee of the memorial on the Île de la Cité

• Walk the 800 metres down to the pink granite quarry, the reason the camp was put here. Up to 1,400 deportees worked this rock, breaking it out with hand tools from six in the morning until seven at night, the same hours through the winter under floodlights. Find the faces still showing the tool marks, and the mouths of the three tunnels begun in 1944 and never finished

• Walk out of the camp to the gas chamber, which the SS fitted into an outbuilding of the Struthof inn and finished on 12 April 1943 — the inn where the commandant's staff had their quarters. In August 1943, 86 Jewish men and women brought from Auschwitz were killed in this room, in four groups, to supply an anatomical collection in Strasbourg