Eugène Marlot, resistor, published the underground newsletter  L'Espoir from Dijon, and later wrote the unofficial guide for Natzweiler-Struthof, L'Enfer d'Alsace (Alsace Inferno) which has been translated by Diana Mara Henry and is available by contacting dmh@dianamarahenry.com or Paypal.

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L'Enfer d'Alsace
Introduction

The translation of these memoirs was first undertaken as a source of caption material for an exhibit of my photographs of the Natzweiler-Struthof slave-labor and extermination camp. I made my first visit to this camp in the Vosges mountains of Eastern France in 1985, during a visit to my paternal grandfather’s hometown near Strasbourg, not far away from Natzweiler.

The Nazis created this camp for political prisoners, first from Germany and then from all over Europe. Many were in the NN (“Nacht und Nebel”) category. Forty-five thousand prisoners spent time there between 1941 and 1944; at least 12,000 died. The camp contained all the elements of horror of the larger and better-known extermination camps. There were the gas chamber, the crematorium, the prison, the infirmary, the gibbet, the dissecting table - all on a gruesomely intimate scale compared to the gruesomely vast scale of Auschwitz.

Jews did not survive Natzweiler unless they hid their Jewish identity or were in transit to other slave labor commandos; they were imported specifically to be gassed by Dr. Hirt, who obtained his orders to study their "racial differences" at the School of Anatomy at the University of Strasbourg. The Nuremburg documents collected by Serge Klarsfeld in The Struthof Album document the information Marlot provides here on the extermination of Jews and Gypsies in the gas chamber and by experimental procedures.

The Nazis shipped the 8,000 live inmates back to Germany in the first days of September, 1944, as the Allies advanced into the region. Those who survived to the war’s end were liberated from Dachau, April 29, 1945. The camp’s commandant, Joseph Kramer, was executed by the British for his crimes as “the beast of Belsen,” the camp he had been transferred to in the last months of the war. After variously commuted sentences, all the other perpetrators went home to live out their lives with their families in Germany.

L'Enfer d'Alsace is sold at Natzweiler-Struthof, which is a French national historic site, as a kind of a guidebook. Eugène Marlot gave me permission to publish my English translation, and I am extremely grateful to him and his family for giving me such encouragement. I have powerful memories of my visit with him and his wife, and his last visit to the camp, at the head of a group of young people, their teachers and parents. A champion of history, he led these groups for over 40 years. After his death in 1998, he requested that his ashes be scattered there, to join those of thousands of his companions who “left by the chimney” of the crematorium, as Kramer told them they would. This translation is dedicated to their memory...