Survivor tells of Nazis’ medical experiments
THE MAN Who Saw Too Much is a story of extremes: the story of Natzweiler concentration camp, better known as Struthof, which was the first to be discovered by the Allies, 75 years ago this week.
And the man is the remarkable Boris Pahor, at 106 the oldest living survivor of Nazi camps, who made it through Natzweiler, in Alsace-Lorraine, Dachau, and ultimately Belsen, where he was liberated.
In Alan Yentob’s distressing film, familiarity marches side by side with appalled horror as Pahor’s own story is played out through extracts from his autobiographical novel, Necropolis
Pahor, who made it through Belsen
Several of the Struthof prisoners — 52,000 in all, of whom nearly half died — were talented artists. Some of their surviving drawings, which show Nazi guards and kapos beating and murdering indiscriminately, form part of the film.
It is rare to hear testimony of this level from a political prisoner of the Nazis, and one of the bonuses of Yentob’s film is to provide documented historical evidence of what went on in the camps from a non-Jewish victim.
But while most of the Struthof prisoners were, like Pahor, political arrests, there was a specific group of 86 Jews, the identification of whom provides an astonishing coda to Yentob’s film.
The Nazis conducted medical experiments at Struthof and the group of Jews were sent there from Auschwitz at the express directive of Himmler, to be murdered in order to provide skeletons for what one historian interviewed called a “zoological museum of an extinct species”.
The Jews, men and women, were executed by the camp’s commandant, Josef Kramer, who testified as to how he had killed them when put on trial for war crimes.
The bodies were sent to the Institute of Anatomy at Strasbourg University, under the supervision of the Nazi professor August Hirt, who had actively encouraged Kramer to build gas chambers at Struthof.
After the war the bodies were discovered in tanks in Strasbourg, their identifying tattoos erased. But historical detective work by Dr Hans-Joachim Lang, who appears in the film, enabled eventual identification of the 86 men and women, whose names are now inscribed on a memorial at Strasbourg’s Jewish cemetery.
It took until 2003, working on a hidden list of their tattooed numbers, for Dr Lang to put names to the 86 murdered Jews.
Boris Pahor’s story, The Man Who Saw Too Much, will be shown on BBC1 on Wednesday November 27.
Jews were sent to Struthof to provide skeletons for a ‘museum’