Invisible corpses? The deportation necropolis at the Natzweiler-Struthof Memorial

The National Necropolis of Heroes and Martyrs of the Deportation is a part of the Memorial at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp, the only Nazi camp built on annexed French territory. The necropolis, modelled after a French military cemetery, contains 1,118 graves. Using the concepts of invisibility and “legibility”, this article seeks to demonstrate that this necropolis has not found its place in the representation, memory and narrative of deportations from France, and even less so in those of the martyrdom of the prisoners of the Natzweiler camp. This “invisibility” of the necropolis will be explained by the complex history of the search for and exhumation of the bodies of the deportees, by the tensions between the different uses of the necropolis, and finally by the contradiction between the representations of the deportation as an act of violence with no bodies left – burnt in the crematoria – and the presence of bodies in the necropolis all the same.