France: Nazi concentration camp gas chamber in the country reopens as a memorial site

The building it houses the gas chamber of the Nazi concentration camp Nazweiler-Struthofthe only one on French soil, in annexed Alsace, it reopens to the public on Saturday as a place of remembranceafter 18 months of restoration work.

“She is a cultural heritage restoration business and not of rebuilding or remodeling, in which (experts) intervened in an extremely meticulous way,” said Pierre Dufour, chief architect of the historical monuments, who oversaw the project on Thursday (11/24). France.

Just 100 meters from the camp where 52,000 evacuees from all over Europe were interned from May 1941 to April 1945, the building housing the gas chamber was originally a food warehouse and ballroom of the adjacent inn.

The former Nazweiler-Struthof concentration camp it was one of the deadliest Nazi concentration camps, with 22,000 dead, mostly from exhaustion, starvation and inhumane treatment.

On August 1, 1943, 86 Jews selected at Auschwitz were taken to the Alsace gas chamber to form a collection of skeletons, in the context of an operation to exterminate all Jews, which led to the Holocaust. These experiments were mainly carried out by the director of the Anatomy Institute of the Reichsuniversität (Reich University) of Strasbourg, August Hirt.

Inside the building, the renovation of which cost 1.6 million euros, the visitor passes through three rooms before reaching the small gas chamber of 9 square meters, with its white earthenware.

The tour is structured around the explanatory glass cases and period artifacts, such as a tube connected to the gas chamber, a Hirt notebook, a wedding ring of a Jewish victim.

Eight gypsies would also die from the experiments conducted in Struthov’s gas chamber.

Last May, the University of Strasbourg took stock of those Nazi years in a 500-page reportwhere the School of Medicine’s involvement in “war crimes” was finally brought to light.

“The opening of this space will make it possible to complete the missing link of all this work that has been done for years,” said Guillaume d’Andlo, director of the European Center for Displaced Resistance Fighters – Struthov, the former concentration camp’s memorial which receives 200,000 visitors every year.