FFS
Member
As usual, in front of my laptop when I'm here
Posts: 2,797
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Post by FFS on Jan 23, 2022 20:46:14 GMT 1
I hadn't heard of it until tonight's news.
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Post by lapourtaider on Jan 24, 2022 8:48:44 GMT 1
I wasn't aware there was a concentration camp on french soil. Near me at Rivesaltes there was a camp where Jews were held until deported. There is a memorial there now.
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Post by beejay on Jan 24, 2022 15:04:42 GMT 1
I hadn't heard of it until tonight's news.
I visited it many, many years ago on a dull November day. Then, it was not on the tourist trail, very basic and very eery. I was interested after reading of the four female agents who were executed there.
I visited again a couple of years ago and found a Visitor Centre overrun with parties of school children who appeared to have little interest and very noisy. The outlying sub-camps in the area related to the camp and the railway station at Rothau were of more interest and had virtually no visitors.
Wiki has a large entry about the camp.
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FFS
Member
As usual, in front of my laptop when I'm here
Posts: 2,797
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Post by FFS on Jan 24, 2022 17:22:44 GMT 1
Wiki has a large entry about the camp. Which is way I linked to it.  |
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Post by beejay on Jan 25, 2022 17:54:14 GMT 1
Wiki has a large entry about the camp. Which is way I linked to it. 
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Post by wanderer on Jan 26, 2022 1:44:28 GMT 1
In addition to those murdered in Natzweiler-Struthof, throughout France approximately 3,000 Jewish people died in internment sites, which number around 125.
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Post by annabellespapa on Jan 26, 2022 8:11:52 GMT 1
Liking war films, I found one on Film 4 and recorded some months ago, it is called Overlord and is about 4 years old, the story starts with American soldiers being parachuted behind enemy lines to take out a German transmitter that is fixed to a church spire in a small French town, all starts of ok but then t started getting sinister and it turns out the church basement was used by a German Doctor experimenting on locals, I think I only watched 30 minutes and had to turn it off, I still get flashes off it, I wondered if there was any truth in it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlord_(2018_film) |
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Post by wanderer on Jan 26, 2022 17:06:08 GMT 1
annabellespapa, after reading the plot, I'm surprised you managed 30 minutes! 
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Deleted
Deleted Member
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Post by Deleted on Jan 27, 2022 15:58:10 GMT 1
I hadn't heard of it until tonight's news.
I visited it many, many years ago on a dull November day. Then, it was not on the tourist trail, very basic and very eery. I was interested after reading of the four female agents who were executed there.
We also visited, probably one summer, a while ago. I remember it very well. You could just wander over all the camp. There were fairly basic typed signs posted in most of the rooms.
As you say, eery: abandoned, a place where it seemed no birds sang.
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Post by landmannnn on Jan 27, 2022 21:52:43 GMT 1
If you can, light a candle and put it in the front window in memory tonight.
If not for the event, for my cousin Rita who died last year shouting at the Auschwitz concentration camp guards to bring her mother and father back.
And my father, onset dementia, almost daily nowadays reliving some of those events we can't imagine.
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Post by Dominic Best on Jan 27, 2022 22:35:53 GMT 1
I visited Natzweiler about 30 years ago. It was a chilling experience. I visited Colditz about the same time, it was still a hospital. There they said they’d had a lot of British visitors but very few French which was surprising given that there had been more French than British POWs. They suggested then that it was probably that the French didn’t need to leave France to be reminded of the horrors of the war.
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Post by Dominic Best on Jan 27, 2022 22:38:43 GMT 1
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Post by wanderer on Jan 27, 2022 23:13:38 GMT 1
If you can, light a candle and put it in the front window in memory tonight. If not for the event, for my cousin Rita who died last year shouting at the Auschwitz concentration camp guards to bring her mother and father back. And my father, onset dementia, almost daily nowadays reliving some of those events we can't imagine.   No words landmannnn |
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Post by plog on Feb 6, 2022 20:51:31 GMT 1
There were certainly camps in France other than Natzweiler-Struthof in WW2 that could be described as concentration camps… Those in our our part of the world were legacies of Spanish Civil War (Rivesaltes has already been mentioned) that got repurposed, initially into “internment” camps and then became holding centers for individuals prior to deportation.. Le Vernet Camp in the Ariege was one such example. Internment Camps in France |
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