Sir Roger Gale
Member of Parliament for North Thanet (Margate, Herne Bay & The Villages)
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Gale's View - 04/07/2018
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July 4th 2018
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The names Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Dachau are well known to those of a certain age. Natzweiler-Struthof may not strike a chord but its history is every bit as grim. Struthof is the only concentration camp built upon French . Located in the Nazi-occupied region of Alsace it opened in May 1941 and was liberated in September 1944. During its time in operation some fifty-two thousand people from thirty-two nationalities, including those from Poland, The Soviet Union, The Netherlands, France, Germany, Slovenia, Norway and the United Kingdom passed through the gates of the camp and of those it is estimated that 22,000 inmates died of starvation, disease or though execution by hanging , by firing squad or in the gas chamber. Many of those who lost their lives, who were forced to work for the Wehrmacht war industry in labour sub-camps , were captured `Nacht und Nebel` prisoners , people of the resistance movements throughout mainland Europe. They included four British women members of the Special Operations Executive, Diana Rowden, Vera Leigh, Andree Borrel and Sonya Olschanky who were murdered together on 4th July 1944 and two Royal Airforce airmen, Dennis Cochran and Tony Hayter, who were involved in the “Great Escape”, killed by the Gestapo after re-capture and cremated at Natzweiler-Struthof.
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A fortnight ago, in my capacity as Leader of the UK delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (The PACE, not to be confused with the European Parliament) and accompanied by the Leader of the Labour delegation, my colleague Angela Smith, the British Permanent Representative (Ambassador) in Strasbourg and Suzy, my wife, I laid at the Struthof, against the stark background of the gallows, a memorial wreath. The wreath-laying ceremony was followed by a simple service attended by diplomatic representatives of many countries and, most movingly, by a few of the now very aged survivors of incarceration in the camp. It is an experience that I shall not forget, ever.
The vile nature of the concentration camps and the grim tasks that they performed is, of course, well known and well documented. The Struthof is just one of those where `medical experiments` were carried out upon the Nazi`s fellow-humans I left this awful place with a renewed respect for those who risked and gave their lives in the clandestine as well as the overt fight for freedom and with a greater realisation and understanding of something else that we tend to overlook.
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Great Britain is one of the few countries of Europe that were not occupied during and after the war by German or Allied or Soviet troops. There were no concentration camps built upon our soil and while we suffered, as a nation, huge losses of life on foreign fields and through air-raids at home we were never defiled in quite the same way as the lands of our immediate friends and neighbours. The “European Project” is promoted and defended most fiercely by those who, having had first-hand experience of occupation, are determined that no such process should ever be allowed to happen again. It is a sentiment and strength of feeling that, as we seek to extricate ourselves from the bureaucracy, the waste, the meddlesome interference in the affairs of sovereign nations and, yes, of downright corruption that the European Union has become, we need to have regard.
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Winston Churchill and the Leaders of nine other Countries founded the Council of Europe as a bastion against the possibility of another war in Europe or another holocaust. As we leave the EU we shall, if we are truly to honour the memory of those who died in The Struthof and other concentration camps, need to strengthen our ties with the now forty-six countries of the CoE . There are still too many breaches of too many human rights, too many political prisoners, too many judges and journalists and schoolteachers held in captivity in too many countries of the wider Europe and there is much work yet to be done if Churchill`s dream is ever to be realised.
