Bidspirit auction | Struthof Concentration Camp, France –

Struthof Concentration Camp, France – Collection of Real Photo Postcards Depicting Scenes from the Camp - 13 Real photo postcards documenting scenes from the Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp (Struthof) in France, located approximately 50 km from Strasbourg (the only Nazi concentration camp established on French soil). Published by the local publisher Lucien Kohler, who operated from the commune of Rothau in the Bas-Rhin department - a town adjacent to the camp site and home to the railway station through which prisoners were transported to the camp. France, 1940s. Natzweiler-Struthof Concentration Camp, established by the Nazis in the Vosges Mountains of occupied Alsace, France, was the only Nazi concentration and extermination camp built on French soil. It operated as a high-security forced labor camp, where prisoners were worked to death in the nearby granite quarries under a relentless regime of brutality that included beatings, hangings, extreme starvation, and confinement in freezing underground punishment cells. The camp also contained a small improvised gas chamber used for murder and horrific medical experiments, alongside an operating crematorium. The camp is particularly infamous for one of the most calculated and gruesome crimes committed there: the murder of Jewish prisoners for the creation of the Nazi anatomist August Hirt's ”Jewish Skeleton Collection” at the University of Strasbourg. In August 1943, eighty-six Jewish men and women were specially selected at Auschwitz, transported to Struthof, and murdered in the camp's improvised gas chamber. Their bodies were then transferred to Strasbourg for the purpose of creating an anthropological collection intended to preserve the remains of what the Nazis regarded as an ”extinct race.” In addition, Jewish prisoners and other inmates at the camp were subjected to brutal medical experiments involving chemical weapons, including mustard gas, and infectious diseases such as typhus, in which they were deliberately infected to test drugs and vaccines. The exclusive sales rights (Exclusivité de vente) for these postcards were granted to the French organization C.O.S.O.R. (Comité des Œuvres Sociales des Organisations de Résistance), the Committee for the Social Welfare Organizations of the French Resistance. Proceeds from the sale of the album were dedicated to the benefit of former prisoners, political deportees, and victims of the French Resistance. All postcards are captioned on the reverse. 13 postcards. Unused. Very good condition.