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France Opens Memorial Near Site of Concentration Camp

President Jacques Chirac of France opened a memorial to deportees of the anti-Nazi resistance today near the city of Strasbourg and the site of the sole World War II concentration camp on French soil.

"Never forget the victims of the darkest chapters of mankind's history," Mr. Chirac told a gathering of former inmates and officials at the Struthof-Natzweiller camp, built by the Nazis in 1941 in the mountains of Alsace, a region that was annexed by Germany during the war.

The memorial, in a vast underground storage room dug by camp inmates, gives visitors an overview of the Nazi's 14 concentration camps, including Auschwitz in Poland, Bergen-Belsen in Germany and Mauthausen in Austria.

Read entire article at NYT