We continued on the Michelin Green Guide driving route,
joining, just before Le Bonhomme, the Routes des Cretes going north. This was a
section of the Route that we hadn’t covered before and it was the best part of
it. We were lucky that the weather was much better and the views were
excellent. And it was the views that made the drive so good – long views and
lots of them.
After a supermarket stop at St. Marie aux Mines, we made our way across country
to Le Hohwald over more, pretty mountain scenery. Here we joined another
Michelin driving route and headed for Rothau where we intended to spend the
night. Close to Rothau we came to Struthof where the Nazis had the only
concentration camp on French territory - Natzweiler.
Visiting the museum and memorial was a sobering experience. Rather than a death
camp for the Jews, Natzweiler was mostly reserved for members of the resistance
although there were also prisoners from other groups that the Nazis hated – Jews,
Soviet POWs, homosexuals, criminals, Gypsies and Jehovah’s Witnesses. This was
a primarily a work camp where the object was to work the inmates to death. The
camp was also the recipients of prisoners classified as ‘Night and Fog’,
meaning that they should be made to disappear without any record being kept of
their existence. Such status was given to British agents such as Andree Borrel,
Vera Leigh, Sonia Olschanezky and Diana Rowden, four incredibly brave women who
worked undercover in France for the Special Operations Executive. They were
killed by lethal injection whilst others were shot, including 106 members of
the French resistance killed on 1st September 1944. All those
murdered were incinerated in the camp crematorium. We finished our visit at the
memorial next to the cemetery with its simple black wooden crosses.
We couldn’t decide whether to stay in the campsite at Rothau or in the aire
that was just outside its entrance. The decision was made for us when we tried
to book into the campsite. The owned told us that the pitches were so wet that
we would sink into them but the aire pitches were fine, so we stayed there.
Photos: Three views on the Routes des Cretes; The
Natzweiler-Struthof camp; One of the camp watchtowers and the double barbed
wire fence.
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