Natzweiler: The Only Nazi Death Camp in France

 

Natzweiler-Struthof was the only major Nazi concentration camp built on French soil, perched high in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace. Its location was chosen for two reasons: remoteness and a nearby granite quarry the SS wanted to exploit. 

What emerged in May 1941 was a camp that combined relentless forced labor, starvation, sadism, and a series of medical crimes that still stand among the worst of the era.

Unlike the Operation Reinhard death camps, Natzweiler was not designed solely for extermination, but death was everywhere in its daily operations. Prisoners—political detainees, resistance fighters, Jews, Roma, homosexuals, “asocials,” and later evacuees from camps farther east—were driven up the mountain and packed into steeply terraced barracks. The camp clung to the hillside in rows, with the crematorium and punishment cells at the bottom and the commandant’s quarters at the top, symbolizing the hierarchy the SS enforced. Winters were brutal; winds cut through the wooden barracks, and temperatures regularly dropped well below freezing.

Labor was the core of Natzweiler’s system. The quarry sat just below the camp, and prisoners were forced to haul massive granite blocks up and down slopes so steep they later defied reconstruction. The work was designed to break bodies. Fatigue, crushed limbs, and fatal falls were common. As the war went on, the SS expanded the camp into a nerve center for dozens of satellite labor camps—KZ Aussenstelle Walldorf among them—supplying slave labor for weapons plants, synthetic fuel projects, tunnel systems, and airfields. Prisoners were treated as expendable material; when one died, another transport filled the gap.

Natzweiler also became a site for medical atrocities. Under the direction of SS doctors such as August Hirt of the Reich University of Strasbourg, prisoners—especially Jews—were selected, murdered, and dissected for a planned anatomical collection. Others were subjected to experiments involving poison gas, vaccines, and exposure to infectious diseases. The most appalling episode was the murder of 86 Jewish men and women specifically selected and transported to Natzweiler, gassed in a small chamber, and sent to Strasbourg for “research.”

Conditions in the camp deteriorated sharply after 1943. Crowding worsened as transports arrived from across occupied Europe, including evacuated prisoners from Auschwitz, Dachau, and other camps threatened by the advancing Allies. Starvation rations, contaminated water, and rampant disease meant the death rate climbed steadily. Guards and Kapos enforced discipline with arbitrary beatings, hangings, and torture in the bunker cells.

By September 1944, with American forces nearing Alsace, the SS began evacuating Natzweiler. The main camp was abandoned on September 1, but the system of satellite camps continued operating deep into 1945. Prisoners were shipped eastward to Dachau, Allach, Buchenwald, and other collapsing camps, where many died in transport or in the chaotic months before liberation.

When U.S. troops entered Natzweiler shortly after its abandonment, they found a site battered but largely intact: crematorium, execution walls, the gas chamber, and barracks still clinging to the slope. Unlike Sobibór or Treblinka, Natzweiler could not be erased.

Today the camp is a memorial complex with the original crematorium preserved, the terraced layout still visible, and exhibitions inside reconstructed barracks. Its location—high on a mountain ridge with sweeping views—stands in stark contrast to the brutality once practiced there. That contrast underscores the truth at the heart of Natzweiler: beauty of landscape offered no protection against human cruelty, and even the most remote place could be turned into a factory of suffering.

The Bensheim-Auerbach Military Cemetery

 

The Bensheim-Auerbach Military Cemetery sits on the wooded slope of the Kirchberg above Auerbach, a district of Bensheim in Hesse, and preserves the remains of German soldiers killed in the First and Second World Wars. Its origins lie in the chaotic final months of the First World War, when local authorities began interring fallen soldiers from nearby hospitals and field facilities. By the early 1920s, the site had taken on the form of a modest military cemetery, with simple stone markers and a central memorial cross. It became one of many regional burial grounds maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German War Graves Commission.

The catastrophe of the Second World War transformed the cemetery. As the Western Front collapsed in March 1945, casualties surged across Hesse. Soldiers wounded in the fighting around the Bergstrasse, the Rhine crossings, and the Odenwald were brought to aid stations in Bensheim and surrounding towns. Those who died were buried on the Kirchberg, expanding the cemetery dramatically. After 1945, the Volksbund consolidated additional wartime graves from temporary plots in the region, making Bensheim-Auerbach a permanent resting place for thousands.

The cemetery today contains more than 2,400 graves—roughly half from each world war. The design is austere: rows of low stone plaques set into grass, clusters of basalt crosses, and a central memorial area that lists the names of the dead when individual identification is known. The layout reflects post-war German memorial culture—somber, stripped of martial display, focused on individual loss rather than national glory.

In the decades since, the cemetery has served as a site for quiet remembrance rather than public ceremony. School groups, local historians, and families visit to confront the scale of twentieth-century German military death. Its hillside setting above Auerbach emphasizes the contrast between the peaceful landscape and the violent history beneath it, making it one of the more sobering military cemeteries along the Bergstrasse.

In 2017 I visited the German Military Cemetery in Normandy. The same focus on the soldier, not on the government that sent them to war.

Visiting the Curie Museum in Paris

The Pierre and Marie Curie Museum—tucked quietly into the old Radium Institute on the campus of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris—is one of the most understated but important scientific museums in the city. It occupies the preserved laboratory spaces where Marie Curie, her daughter Irène, and son-in-law Frédéric Joliot carried out groundbreaking research in radioactivity from the 1890s through the 1930s. The museum is small, reflective, and resolutely authentic: nothing is dramatized, nothing staged. You stand in rooms where the Nobel Prizes were earned.

At the heart of the museum is Marie Curie’s office and laboratory, preserved almost exactly as they were at the time of her death in 1934. Wooden benches, glassware, electrometers, notebooks, and early radiation-measurement devices remain in their original positions. Unlike her early work in the makeshift shed on the Rue Lhomond, the Radium Institute was built specifically for her—funded by French, international, and American donors—to allow research into the medical and scientific potential of radium. It became one of the great centers of early 20th-century physics and chemistry.

The museum emphasizes both the scientific history and the human story. Panels describe Pierre and Marie’s partnership, Pierre’s accidental death in 1906, and Marie’s tireless continuation of their shared research. Other exhibits trace the later achievements of Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, whose discovery of artificial radioactivity earned them the 1935 Nobel Prize—reinforcing the sense that this building housed not just a laboratory but a dynasty of scientific innovation.

For a visitor returning multiple times, especially after reading Dava Sobel’s biography, the museum gains emotional weight. Sobel’s portrait of Marie Curie—the discipline, the grief, the stubborn moral clarity—comes alive in the physical space. The rooms feel modest for the scale of the discoveries made there, and the lingering sense of danger from early radiation work is unmistakable.

The museum is quiet, intimate, and deeply respectful—a rare place where the history of science still inhabits its original walls.

On Democracy and Death Cults by Douglas Murray – A Review

Douglas Murray’s On Democracy and Death Cults is not a book that aims to comfort. It is a blunt, fact-driven, deeply unsettling examination of the violent forces confronting democratic societies in the 21st century — and of the moral evasions that too often follow in their wake. Above all, it is a powerful chronicle of the October 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, when Hamas militants followed by thousands of "civilian" Gazans launched a brutal assault that left over a thousand civilians dead and hundreds more kidnapped. Murray’s book is, in many ways, both reportage and indictment — and it succeeds on both fronts.

What stands out first is the level of detail and documentation Murray brings to the subject. This is not a work of broad generalizations or slogans. The book’s most compelling sections are those that reconstruct the October 7 atrocities hour by hour, drawing on eyewitness accounts, forensic reports, and the testimonies of survivors. Murray recounts the killings in the kibbutzim, the attacks on concertgoers, the kidnappings of families — including infants and the elderly — and the gleeful celebration of the violence by Hamas and its supporters. His narrative is measured and dispassionate, but that restraint only amplifies the horror. It is hard to read these pages without being shaken.

Murray’s central argument is that liberal democracies are in a state of denial about the nature of the ideological movements arrayed against them. Hamas, he argues, is not a nationalist liberation group seeking compromise or coexistence; it is a death cult, dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews as an end in itself. The book draws parallels to other extremist movements — from ISIS to al-Qaeda — and insists that democracy cannot defend itself if it refuses to name and confront such ideologies for what they are.

He is equally scathing about the Western response to the massacre. Murray reserves some of his sharpest criticism for Western media, universities, and political elites who, within days of the slaughter, shifted the conversation to “context” and “root causes.” He documents the moral gymnastics of those who minimized or justified Hamas’s actions, and he argues that such evasions betray not only Israel but the very values of liberal democracy. The tolerance of intolerant ideologies, he warns, is not virtue but suicide.

The book’s tone is unmistakably polemical — Murray is not interested in a false balance between democratic states and jihadist death cults — but its arguments are grounded in evidence, not rhetoric. He meticulously cites Hamas’s charter, statements by its leaders, and decades of terrorist activity. The result is a text that is both analytical and visceral: it informs, but it also provokes outrage and grief.

There are, however, limits to Murray’s analysis. His sweeping condemnation of Western progressives sometimes verges on caricature, and he has little patience for nuanced debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those seeking a balanced account of the region’s history will not find it here. Murray’s focus is narrower: the nature of Hamas’s ideology and the failure of democratic societies to confront it honestly. Whether one agrees with his broader politics or not, the core argument — that democracy must defend itself against totalitarian movements — is forcefully made and impossible to dismiss.

Perhaps the book’s greatest achievement is that it forces the reader to confront uncomfortable truths. The atrocities of October 7 are not isolated acts of violence but part of a larger worldview that glorifies death and annihilation. The Western instinct to explain away or relativize such evil, Murray suggests, is itself a symptom of a deeper cultural weakness. Democracies cannot afford such illusions if they hope to survive.

On Democracy and Death Cults is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one. It is deeply reported, morally uncompromising, and unflinching in its depiction of both atrocity and denial. Whether one admires or despises Douglas Murray’s politics, this book is a serious work that demands to be taken seriously.

Appendix: Reassessing the Author

Before reading this book, I regarded Douglas Murray as little more than a right-wing propagandist — a provocateur cut from the same cloth as Ben Shapiro and other Trump-aligned commentators. I expected polemic, not substance. And to be fair, Murray’s politics remain sharply partisan, and his rhetorical style will still alienate many readers. Yet On Democracy and Death Cults surprised me. It is well-documented, carefully sourced, and deeply researched. Whatever one thinks of his ideology, this book demonstrates that Murray is more than a political polemicist — he is also a serious journalist and an effective chronicler of one of the most horrific terrorist atrocities of our time.

Paris Bike Co.--The Place to Rent a Bike in Paris

 

I found Paris Bike Co. in 2019 the way most good things are found abroad—an internet search that kept turning up the same message: “Highly recommended.” The reviews were unanimous about one point in particular: Sam Weaver doesn’t just hand you a rental bike. He fits you. Properly. 

Sam Weaver--Owner, Paris Bike Co.

When I showed up, he took the time to check measurements, fine-tune saddle height, and make sure the bike felt like something I’d been riding for years, not something borrowed for a week. 2019 was my first time renting from Paris Bike Co., and that experience set the pattern. Every time I’ve returned to Paris—March 2020, September 2023, November 2025—the process has been the same: Sam dialed in the fit, checked the position, and made sure the bike was set up exactly for what I wanted to do--ride the daily training ride around L'hippodrome Longchamps.  It’s a level of care that’s rare in any rental situation, let alone in a major city.

In 2020, I rented the bike on March 11 planning to keep it until March 16. My flight back to America was March 17. On March 13 (Friday the 13th) the American border closed and the world shut down for Covid.  Most Americans panicked and headed for the airport.  

Sam said he had to shut down the shop, but I could keep the bike till Monday.  It turns out bakeries are essential businesses and stayed open during Covid. So I rode through the empty streets of Paris and ate at bakeries until I left on Tuesday.  By the time I flew back the plane was almost empty. I had a row to myself. 

Sam's clientele includes many triathletes and para-olympic competitors.  I have been in the shop when Sam was working with a local customer on fitting the bike.  He is a Californian. His French is fluent, but it is definitely with a California accent.  It's fun to listen to. 

The shop is located in Malakoff 9km south of Paris.  I go there in the Metro.  You can check out the shop or reserve a bike on parisbikeco.com 

   

Discourses on Livy by Niccolo Machiavelli--The Longer and More Complete Version of The Prince

 

Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy is the book where his real political mind is on full display. The Prince gets all the attention because it is sharp, cruelly observant, and short. But the Discourses—sprawling, rigorous, and grounded in the history of the Roman Republic—shows the full range of what he understood about politics, institutions, and the unpredictable push and pull of human ambition. Reading it after years of re-reading The Prince is like seeing the other half of the puzzle of politics.  I read The Prince every four years from 1980 to 2024. 

Where The Prince analyzes how rulers seize and hold power, the Discourses tackles something more ambitious: how free states are born, how they endure, and why they decay. Machiavelli uses Livy’s early books on Rome as his framework, not because he is nostalgic or idealistic, but because Rome’s long run of success offers hard lessons for every republic. He praises their mixed constitution, their willingness to balance competing interests, and their acceptance that conflict—especially between elites and the common people—is not a flaw but a source of vitality. That alone makes Machiavelli feel modern: he rejects the fantasy of harmony and insists that real politics is friction managed, not friction eliminated.

What stands out most in the Discourses is the same clarity that makes The Prince so readable. Machiavelli writes with a cold eye for how people behave, not how they ought to behave. His central conviction doesn’t change: ambition, fear, honor, resentment, and self-interest drive political life far more than abstract ideals. That blunt realism is exactly why Hannah Arendt drew on him in On Revolution. She recognized what Machiavelli saw clearly: republican liberty survives only when citizens are involved, vigilant, and willing to defend it. Passivity is fatal. Corruption metastasizes when no one resists it. A republic dies when its people stop caring enough to fight for it.

The Discourses also broadens Machiavelli’s view of power beyond single rulers. He analyzes why Rome rotated offices, why it punished powerful men who threatened equality before the law, and why it preserved civic religion and public rituals—not out of piety but because they reinforced unity and discipline. He argues that law is stronger than any prince because institutions outlast personalities. In that sense, the Discourses is a manual not just for leaders but for citizens who want their republic to endure.

For a reader who already read The Prince many times, the Discourses lands with a different kind of force. It confirms that Machiavelli wasn’t simply the teacher of tyrants he’s often caricatured to be. He was a defender of republican self-government who understood its fragility. His realism doesn’t smother hope—he just refuses to build that hope on illusions.

Reading the Discourses after years of reading The Prince I feel I missed a dimension of Machiavelli's thinking. I should have read Discourses decades ago. One book explains how power is taken; the other explains how political freedom is preserved. And in both cases, he tells you exactly how things actually work. No moralizing, no Platonic ideals, no Utopias—just the hard, clear truths of political life.

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My favorite translator of The Prince is Harvey Mansfield. Here is a sample of that translation with Machiavelli's advice on avoiding flatterers.  

KZ--Aussenstelle Walldorf Labor Camp

 

KZ-Außenstelle Walldorf was one of the lesser-known but brutally efficient satellite camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, created during the final phase of the war when the Nazi regime was desperate to fuel its military projects. It operated for less than four months—August to November 1944—but in that short time it chewed through the lives of 1,700 Jewish women, most of them Hungarian, most of them transported from Auschwitz after surviving earlier selections. Their purpose in Walldorf was simple and merciless: build the runways and service roads for the jet-fighter aircraft the Nazis hoped would save them.

The camp was set up in the forest near the village of Walldorf, just south of Frankfurt am Main, and only a few kilometers from the expanding Frankfurt Flughafen. The Luftwaffe and the SS had designated the area for a major construction project: hardened, extended runways capable of handling the Messerschmitt Me 262—the world’s first operational jet fighter. The Me 262 required long, reinforced surfaces for takeoff and landing, and Germany needed them fast. The women brought to Walldorf were the expendable labor force to make that happen.

The prisoners arrived in August 1944 after a chaotic transport from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many had already survived the annihilation of the Hungarian Jewish community earlier that summer. They were marched under guard into a fenced-off patch of forest, where crude barracks, pit latrines, and watchtowers had been thrown together. SS-Männer and female guards (Aufseherinnen) ran the camp with the usual mix of indifference, violence, and daily humiliation. Food was minimal: watery soup, scraps of bread, and occasional ersatz coffee. Disease, starvation, and exhaustion were constants.

Every day the women were marched several kilometers to the airport worksites. There they hauled gravel, broke stone, pushed overloaded wheelbarrows, mixed cement, and laid the foundations for runways and taxiways. The work was bone-shattering—ten, twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. They labored in heat, rain, and cold, under the whip and rifle butt of overseers. Collapse meant a beating. Repeated collapse often meant being removed from the work detail and left to die in the camp infirmary, which had neither medicine nor heat. The SS distinguished between those still “useful” and those who were no longer worth feeding.

Despite everything, the camp did not collapse into total chaos. Prisoners tried to help each other, shared scraps of food, and kept each other alive however they could. A handful survived simply because the camp’s lifespan was so short. By late November 1944, Allied air attacks on Frankfurt intensified, and the Me 262 program was unraveling. The SS shut down Walldorf, forced the surviving women on a death march, and dispersed them to Ravensbrück and other camps.

Roughly 50 of the original 1,700 women lived to see liberation.

The runways they built remained in use after the war; the airport grew around them. For decades almost no one spoke about Walldorf. Only in the 1990s did serious research and survivor testimony bring the camp back into public memory. Today a memorial marks the forest clearing—a reminder that even the world’s first jet fighters were built on the backs of starving, brutalized women dragged from Auschwitz and worked to the edge of extinction.