The duty of memory, that of not forgetting that 86 Jews were murdered in 1943 in the gas chamber of Natzweiler-Struthof, the only Nazi concentration camp in France, then installed in annexed Alsace. “Death must not have the last word,” recalled historian Raphaël Toledano during a tribute to the victims on Sunday in Strasbourg. A tribute which is part of the traditional annual ceremony of remembrance of deportees, established after the Second World War, recalled the Jewish Consistory of Bas-Rhin in a press release.
“It is up to us today to relentlessly say the names of the 86 victims. To tell their story, to pass them on to future generations and thus to restore their voices as well as that of the six million Jews who disappeared” in the Holocaust, he told the few dozen people gathered under the crushing heat in the Cronenbourg Jewish cemetery, including several local elected officials and the prefect of Bas-Rhin. “We will have to do everything to constantly recall the memory of these 86 Jews and repeat that these 29 women and these 57 men”, aged 17 to 64, “were both victims of a misguided and deadly science. […] and victims of the Shoah,” he added.
Initially, 109 Jews (30 women and 79 men) had been selected at Auschwitz in order to constitute a “collection of Jewish skeletons” in Strasbourg, in the words of SS doctor August Hirt, recalled by Raphael. Toledano. “A sort of zoological museum of a race destined to disappear”, commented the historian.
A “work of memory”
On August 2, 1943, 86 arrived at Struthof where, between May 1941 and November 1944, 52,000 people from all over Europe were interned. The 86 Jewish victims were “murdered in a rudimentary gas chamber between August 11 and 18,” then transported to the Strasbourg anatomy institute, according to Raphaël. Toledano. In 1944, faced with the advance of the Allies, August Hirt ordered the destruction of the bodies, a task which was only partially accomplished: the Allies discovered those remaining in December 1944, before other fragments were found in 2015 by the historian .
Also a doctor, Raphaël Toledano discovered in 2015 at the Strasbourg institute of forensic medicine the remains of victims of the Nazi anatomist August Hirt, director of the anatomy institute of the Reichsuniversität of Strasbourg when Alsace was annexed by Hitler’s Germany. “This work of memory” and “research is a work of exhumation, literally and figuratively, of these people,” said Marion Mendelzweig, whose grandmother and one of the aunts perished at the Struthof. “Death in this form of inhuman violence must not have the last word. »