The NN and other political prisoners of the Nazis were destined to slave labor and extinction.įloris Bakels' diaries form the basis of Nacht un Nebel, (Night and Fog) Published in 1993 by Lutterworth Press, it is possibly the earliest to be written: it is based on his concentration camp diaries which were hidden in the rafters of Natzweiler before the camp's "evacuation" on September 2, 1944, to Dachau. This should set aside the challenge so often put to a Jewish person interested in this period of history: "Why can't you put the Holocaust behind you?" Every one of the authors so far known to have written about Natzweiler, and included in this survey, was sent there as punishment for acts of resistance and sabotage of the German war effort. The most recently published memoirs are by a Norwegian, a Dutchman and a Slovene: non-Jews. These accounts demonstrate that the persistence of memory of these atrocities is not an act claimed only by the Jews: only two of the known memoirs were written by Jews. Future generations, no matter how widely they create, fantasize, interpret, analyze, will always have these primary sources, this bedrock of memory to mine. The phenomenon of opposition to the Nazis under many forms and guises is represented in about two dozen memoirs of Jews and non-Jews who actively participated in the destruction of the Third Reich, for the enduring honor of mankind.
By 1943, Himmler decided to group all those arrested under this decree at Natzweiler. The memoirs of Natzweiler-Struthof provide primary material for a serious exploration of the history of repression and resistance in the second World War.Īll the writers known to have written about Natzweiler belonged to a category which deserves to be studied far more extensively than it has been in the U.S.: they were resistors condemned under the NN - "Nacht und Nebel" decree.From 1942 on, the KLNa was mostly dedicated to the incarceration and death of resistors. Natzweiler/ KLNa to the Nazis, one of the least discussed of the concentration camps, with its population of almost entirely non-Jewish inmates, and Jewish resistors not identified as Jewish, makes an important case study of revolt.
Floris Bakels- a Dutch Proeminentem at Natzweiler-Struthof
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