After Strasbourg we went to the NL Natzweiler Concentration Camp. This visit was a rough one as you all can imagine. Natzweiler was mostly a work camp where prisoners would mine granite, the camp was also where most of the resistance fighters were sent and eventually killed. (They wore clothes with the letters "NN" on the back - Nacht und Nebel - Night and Fog prisoners. Hitler called the resistance prisoners this because he wanted them to disappear similarly to the way a man in Wagner's opera Das Rheingold had.) Natzweiler also contained a gas chamber, a crematorium, and rooms for medical experiments.
The front gate of the camp.
Where the prisoner's barracks used to be.
The Monument to the Departed.
VERDUN!
There is not much to say about our day in Verdun which cannot be better explained through photographs, so here goes:
The amazing thing is that you can still see where the trenches were and where bombs had landed. Land like this covers the area around the fort for miles. The memorial (google it!) was the most memorable part because underneath there are thousands of bones. You can actually look in some windows and see a room filled with bones that belong to unidentified French and German soldiers who died during the 9-month-long battle.
MORE SOON
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