Max Nevers, Nach Natzweiler[1], NN deportee, serial number 4585.

Max Nevers was born in the Yonne in 1920 and became a butcher in Dijon. In 1940 he was drafted into the infantry. He joined the Resistance in the Yonne in January 1941 as part of the FTPF. Nevers soon became the head of the network in his department and later in the Côte d’Or and part of the Aube. He and other comrades were arrested while planning to sabotage the Paris-Lyon-Marseille railway. He was sent to Dijon prison for eight months before being transferred to Natzweiler via Romainville Fort, where a fellow detainee and German teacher taught him the basics of that language. He was moved to Natzweiler by the French NN convoy on 15 July 1943. Here he describes some moments in the life of NN deportees in the camp.

” They received the order to send us to Natzweiler…where we thought we would be saved... [Arriving at Rothau] we noticed that all the shutters were closed…We were met at the camp by Kramer [the SS Lagerkommandant] and got off near the crematorium. Shower, body search. Then they gave us trousers, a collarless shirt and a pair of wooden clogs. We had a cross and NN, Nacht und Nebel, painted on our arms, trousers and back in either red or yellow phosphorescent paint. Then a schreiber [secretary] wrote down, “Max Nevers, serial number 4585”. Now I was just a number… In the block I met comrades from the Resistance. Some were sent to the Kartoffelnkeller, the potato cellar, and to the quarry. When they came back we said to ourselves ‘it’s not possible…’ Half the comrades carried the other half because they couldn’t stand up anymore. That night I went to see a comrade, Roger Linet, and asked him how long he’d been there. ‘Four days.’ ‘And you’re already in such shape!?’ ‘Yes, they make us carry heavy stones on our backs with the sun beating down on us. That s.o.b. SS Ehrmanntraut urinates on the guys who fall down on the ground…’ I belonged to a kommando of around 60 comrades in front of a high butte inside the camp. We had wheelbarrows, used pickaxes, loaded stones and dumped them into a ravine. We had to build a terrace. I remember what Willy Behnke [one of the first German deportees at Natzweiler-Struthof] told me: ‘Try to save your strength but don’t stop moving…and work with your eyes, watch where the SS are. When the SS arrive, start looking busy with your pickaxe.’ On the first day around 30 guys were on the ground looking dead… One day I told a young comrade pushing a wheelbarrow to be careful, to let go in order to avoid falling…he was pushed into the ravine. I managed to grab him but they pulled me back. He was shot in the side. He told me, ‘They must have shot me, it burns.’ It was nearly an hour before we stopped working. That night they brought him to the block with a friend and showed him to the doctors [fellow deportees], Dr. Chrétien and Dr. Boutbien. We didn’t have the right to go to the Revier (infirmary). Chrétien heated a piece of iron and removed the bullet… After four or five months in this kommando we saw a young SS arrive with a decoration he won fighting on the Eastern front. He looked at us and told SS Fuchs that the conditions we were working in were unacceptable…Fuchs shouted at him, he was thrown out of the camp, and we never saw him again.”

Chemins de la mémoire
September 2003

[1]“Destination: Natzweiler” Excerpt from oral testimony by Max Nevers,
French NN deportee at Natzweiler, president of the Struthof Association, recorded on 26 June 2003

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