In 1943, 86 Jews were murdered in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace, for the purposes of “medical” experiments. In a long-term investigation, Hans-Joachim Lang gave them a name and an identity.
Hans-Joachim Lang is a German journalist and historian, honorary professor at the University of Tübingen. He is the author of several works on Nazi “medicine”. Above all, he has elucidated one of the strangest crimes of the Third Reich – but one that is not unknown to historians: the murder, in August 1943, of 29 women and 57 men, all Jews, in the gas chamber of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp. It is the story of this episode of the Shoah that this book offers, with an original style and an accessible reading, Names behind numbers.
The names of the victims
These 86 victims had been selected at Auschwitz and transported to Alsace at the request of Professor August Hirt, an anatomist at the German University of Strasbourg. The crime was widely publicized after the Liberation, when the bodies, partly cut up and preserved in formaldehyde, were found by the Free French Forces in the basement of the Institute of Anatomy of the Civil Hospices of Strasbourg. The case was discussed at length at the trial of the Nazi doctors in Nuremberg.
The human remains were buried in 1945 in a mass grave in the municipal cemetery of Strasbourg-Neudorf, then exhumed and reburied in 1951 in the Jewish cemetery of Strasbourg-Cronenbourg, where they still remain, under a stele. There were trials, testimonies; the case was cited by many historians of Nazism. Serge Klarsfeld rediscovered the affair in 1985, even publishing an album of photos taken during the liberation of Strasbourg, showing – atrocious images – these partly cut-up bodies.
But the names of these victims remained largely unknown. “This gap has not left me in peace,” writes Hans-Joachim Lang, describing this quest that began in 1995. In 1997, the Strasbourg psychiatrist and activist – and the book’s preface writer – Georges Yoram Federmann created the Menahem-Taffel circle, named after the only victim who had been identified at the time. Its aim was to raise awareness of these crimes that were falling into oblivion. It organized ceremonies in front of the building of the Institute of Anatomy, despite opposition from the Strasbourg academic and medical establishment, opposition that faded over time, as a new generation came to the helm.
Only in 2011 was a quay in Strasbourg renamed Menahem-Taffel. In 2004, Hans-Joachim Lang was able to give in his book, published in German under the title The names of the numbers (The Names of the Numbers), the complete list of victims. Since then, the need to translate into French, and publish in Alsace, this book so important for the history of the region had been constantly reaffirmed. But no project had come to fruition, surely a sign of the difficulty for Alsace (even today) to consider its complicated past during the Second World War, the brutal Nazification, as well as the multiple and complex reactions of the Alsatians who remained there.
A memorial controversy
There is no doubt that these 86 badly buried and so late named corpses were working on the body of Alsatian society. The University of Strasbourg and the Faculty of Medicine were only very slow to accept the importance of this memory and the need to physically mark the places of this crime.
They took refuge behind the fact that the institution where Hirt had officiated was the German university recreated from scratch in 1940, the Reichsuniversitätwhile the University of Strasbourg had been moved to Clermont-Ferrand in 1939, with its professors and students, many of whom distinguished themselves in the Resistance and were deported. This is true, and the current university is not the direct heir to the Reichsuniversität. However, beyond a unity of places, the German university had trained many Alsatian students, who continued their studies and became professionals in French Alsace after 1945.
The gas chamber had been listed as a historical monument in the 1950s, but not before being reused for a few years as an annex to the restaurant of the Struthof hotel! It took a national controversy – a very poorly worded controversy, however – for the hotel itself to finally be bought by the State and integrated into the Struthof Memorial. It was provoked by the publication, in 2015, of a book by television doctor Michel Cymes on Nazi doctors, in which he claimed that the remains of August Hirt’s Jewish victims were still in the medical faculty.
Now the Strasbourg researcher and doctor Raphaël Toledano found a small vial containing human tissue bearing a label “Jewish”. The vial was buried in the Jewish cemetery of Cronenbourg, during a curious ceremony led by the chief rabbi René Gutman. A commission of researchers was created within the University of Strasbourg, whose report is announced for 2020.
Bella Alaluf or Walter Wollinski
Hans-Joachim Lang’s book is divided into three very well-articulated parts (which I will not describe here in the order in which they were read). It tells the story of Hirt’s terrible initiative, under the vague aegis of the Ahnenerbe, the research organization in archaeology and anthropology of the SS. It details the selection of victims at Auschwitz, most of whom were chosen from the infirmary where they were already, and subjected to anthropometric measurements.
He recounts their murder: the victims, isolated from the rest of the Struthof prisoners, also noted for the unprecedented presence of women, were driven in small groups in an open truck to the hotel occupied by the guards. SSto the gas chamber. They were probably murdered by hydrocyanic acid (component of Zyklon B) sent from Auschwitz with the 86 prisoners.
Joseph Kramer, the camp commander, who had the gas chamber fitted with a funnel to let in the lethal product, recounted at his trial that he had placed the crystals himself. At dawn, a truck took the first batch of corpses to the Strasbourg Institute of Anatomy. The killings continued for several days, the exact dates not being known. The gas chamber was not used again. The Natzweiler camp and its dozens of subsidiary commandos saw the deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners, who died of exhaustion, illness, malnutrition or mistreatment.
In the second part, Lang recounts the investigation itself, the one that allowed him to identify the victims. It appears simple in its course, but it required a detailed knowledge of both events and preserved documents, while Hirt and his team (and the men of the Ahnenerbe as a whole) tried to erase the traces of their crimes. Hirt fled Strasbourg in November 1944 and hid in the Black Forest, posing as a farmer, before killing himself in June 1945.
The decisive document was the list of the serial numbers tattooed on the bodies – tattoos imposed on all concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and only at that camp. This list of numbers had been drawn up by Henri Henripierre, an Alsatian who had worked as a laboratory assistant for August Hirt and who, in November 1944, had guided the French soldiers to the vats of the Institute of Anatomy. This list did indeed contain the serial number of Menahem Taffel, who had been identified thanks to Auschwitz documents as early as 1970 by Herman Langbein, a survivor and historian.
This list had been included in the Struthof trial court file, but it had disappeared from the archives. Lang managed to find a copy, kept by the Holocaust Memorial in Washington. With the recovered registration numbers, Lang queried various databases, including that of the Auschwitz Museum and that of the International Tracing Service in Arolsen. 71 registration numbers were correct, 15 were incorrect, without Lang being able to determine the origin of the errors. Finally, last but not least, the historian traces in detail some of these fates of Jews condemned to extermination, who came from all over Europe.
Hans-Joachim Lang’s book therefore demonstrates a broad ambition: to unfold, across time and space throughout Europe, the threads that led to the murder of the 86 Jews, but also to act as a work of remembrance. The biographies of the victims found show that they came from all over Europe. On April 26, 2015, François Hollande, President of the Republic, inaugurated a plaque in front of the Struthof gas chamber, bearing the 86 names. From Bella Alaluf, born in 1923 in Thessaloniki, to Walter Wollinski, born in 1925 in Züllichau in Poland.