The camp held about 1,500 prisoners. Prisoners worked in the nearby granite quarries, in construction projects, and in the maintenance of the camp.
Beginning in the summer of 1943, the Germans detained many "Night" and "Fog" prisoners in Natzweiler-Struthof. The "Night and Fog" (Nacht und Nebel) operation represented a German attempt to subdue growing anit-German resistance in western Europe. Suspected resistance fighters were arrested without their families being notified. The prisoner simply disappeared into the "Night and Fog". Many prisoners in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp were members of the French Resistance.
In August of 1943, a gas chamber was constructed in Natzweiler-Struthof in one of the buildings that had formed part of the hotel compound. The bodies of more than 80 Jewish prisoners gassed at Natzweiler-Struthof were sent to the Strasbourg University Institue of Anatomy. There, anatomist Dr. August Hirt amassed a large collection of Jewish skeletons in order to establish Jewish "racial inferiority" by means of anthropological study. The gas chamber was also used in pseudoscientific medical experiments involving poison gas. The victoms of these experiments were primarily Gypsies who had been transferred from Auschwitz. Prisoners were also subjected to experiments involving treatment for typhus and yellow fever.
In 1944, concentration camp prisoners became increasingly important in German armament production. The Germans used prisoners throughout the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system as forced laborers to produce arms and to construct underground manufacturing facilities.
There were about 50 subcamps in the Natzweiler-Struthof camp system, located in Alsace and Lorraine as well as in the adjacent German provinces of Baden and Wuerttemberg. By the fall of 1944, there were about 7,000 prisoners in the main camp and more than 20,000 prisoners in the subcamps.
With the approach of Allied forces in September of 1944, the main camp at Natzweiler-Struthof was evacuated and the prisoners distributed among the subcamps. In March of 1945, the Germans disbanded the subcamps and sent most of the prisoners on death marches - forced marches over long distances with brutal treatment and no food or water - toward the Dachau concentration camp in southern Germany. From May 1941 to March 1945, more than 17,000 people died in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp system.
