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THE STRUTHOF
ALBUM STUDY OF THE
GASSING AT NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF
by Jean-Claude Pressac
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authorities still did not know whether
the “work” had been done. On the 21, it was thought to have been
completed, and on the 23, Leclerc’s Second Division suddenly overran
Strasbourg. Since Hirt had lied, since his superior, SS Colonel Sievers,
General Secretary of the Ahnenerbe, had also lied, and since everyone insisted
that they had carried out orders which in fact were not executed in the
debacle, as a result 16 or 17 bodies were indeed found intact in the cellars of
the Institute of Anatomy, with an Auschwitz identification number still visible
on the left forearm in some cases (3). In other cases, the number was removed
in order to prevent identification of the victim’s origins, as can be seen
on the photographs of forearms.
They were all photographed by the legal
identification branch. In an ordinary school of medicine, such bodies would
just be part of the “décor”. In Strasbourg, the corpses left
over from Professor Hirt’s racial studies had been the subject of too much
bureaucracy and had been seen by too many witnesses not belonging to the SS.
They were not “normal”. They pointed and they still point a finger at
a totalitarian regime that laid its foundations on a bed of racial inequality.
One might well wonder why Hirt’s collection was never completed in
practice. Was it a “whim” on his part, quickly forgotten after having
cost 87 Jewish women and men their lives for nothing, or did he simply not
dare, given the worsening military situation, to finish realizing his project?
Hirt could have told us, but he preferred to disappear (4).
These 87
purposeless murders are a perfect example of what can come from the contempt of
a group of men for other “different” ones, and of the danger of a
society in which too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few. The
expression “Die Macht ohne Moral”, or “Power without
Morality” is a fitting close to this short study.
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J-C P.
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THE STRUTHOF
ALBUM STUDY OF THE
GASSING AT NATZWEILER-STRUTHOF
By Jean-Claude Pressac
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Back |
Page 13 |
Forward |
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