In just over four years, 52,000 human beings – Jews, Roma and Sinti, LGBTI people, political opponents and others – were imprisoned at Natzweiler-Struthof. 22,000 people lost their lives there. The utter cruelty – the blatant evil – came as a huge shock to many of the prisoners and was very hard for them to comprehend. “I had no idea about this,” the Norwegian, Mr Hans Christian Qvist, told his fellow prisoners later, and he added, “I didn’t realise that human brutality could have such expressions.”
On Saturday 14 September, descendants of deportees from Norway and the Netherlands as well as France, Germany, Italy and Luxembourg were at the site of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp to attend a commemorative ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the evacuation of the camp.
“Memory is our way of paying respect and honouring the victims of these crimes. But I believe that it also underlines the importance of learning and re-learning, and learning yet again, the terrible lessons of the Second World War, and the Holocaust in particular” said Deputy Secretary General Berge.
Ms Marie-Christine Verdier-Jouclas, Director General of France’s Office national des combattants et des victimes de guerre paid her respects “to the heroes who have marked the course of our destiny”. The Permanent Representatives to the Council of Europe of Norway, Ambassador Helge Seland, and the Netherlands, Ambassador Tanja Gonggrijp, emphasised the need to ensure that such atrocities never happen again. The Council of Europe and its governments have a responsibility to act, they insisted.
