The 12th of March, 1938. German troops cross the border with Austria and invade the country without
firing a single shot. They are not met with armed resistance, but with cheers and flowers.
While thousands of Austrians turn out to greet Adolf Hitler as he travels first to Linz and
then on to Vienna, terrified Jews, leftists and other opponents of the Nazi Regime race towards
the country’s borders, hoping to reach them before they are closed but most are trapped in
a rapidly Nazifying Austria which is no longer an independent country but becomes a province of Nazi
Germany referred to by a new name: the Ostmark. One of the most powerful Austrian Nazi officials
in the Führer’s new province becomes August Eigruber.
August Eigruber was born on the 16th of April 1907 in Steyr then part of Austria-Hungary.
After attending elementary and secondary school,
Eigruber underwent training in geodesy and fine mechanics at the Austrian Federal Teaching
Institution for Iron and Steelworking and then worked in his profession.
In November 1922, at the age of 15, Eigruber joined the National Socialist Worker Youth
of Austria and 3 years later he became its leader. In April 1928,
he joined the German Nazi Party, whose Steyr-Land district leadership he took up in October 1930.
After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, he fully intended to
bring about an Austro-German union. However, Germany was not immediately militarily and
diplomatically ready to carry out Hitler’s foreign policy goals. First, Hitler and other Nazi leaders
focused on establishing a Nazi dictatorship. However, behind the scenes the Nazi leadership
began planning territorial expansion and a European war almost as soon as they took power.
Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign which
was encouraged and funded by Germany. The Nazi goal was to undermine the regime of the Austrian
Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent. They staged disruptive protests
and brawled with political opponents and the police. Austrian Nazis set off explosives and
tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish-owned businesses. In June 1933, in response to a fatal
Nazi bombing, the Dollfuss regime banned the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates. Although
the Nazi movement became illegal in Austria, the Austrian Nazis such as August Eigruber continued
to operate illegally within the country. For his activities in the Nazi Party, Eigruber was
sentenced to several months in prison. From May 1935 he was a regional director of the
now illegal Nazi party in Upper Austria and from 1936 he took over the entire regional leadership.
In the spring of 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich.
The Anschluss, as it became known, took place over three days between the 11th and 13th of
March 1938. The Anschluss was supported by many Austrians, among them Austrian Nazis such as
August Eigruber, who saw it as a political, social, and cultural reunification with their
brother country, Germany. Thousands turned out to greet Adolf Hitler, the native son
who was returning to his homeland. For Austria’s approximately 200,000 Jews, the Anschluss marked a
terrible turning point. Beginning on the night of the 11th of March and in the weeks that followed,
there was pogrom-like violence across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat up,
attacked, and humiliated the Jews. They forced Jews to scrub the streets, clean public toilets
and perform humiliating exercises. Many decided to try to leave Austria and lines appeared at
consulates across the city of Vienna. When Hitler returned home to Berlin, he was greeted as a hero.
The Anschluss was the Nazi German regime’s first act of territorial aggression and expansion.
Even though the leaders of the West saw the Anschluss as an invasion,
not one government made a move to stop Hitler who, without interference,
felt free to embark upon the next step in his scheme to conquer all of Europe.
Austria was no longer an independent country and became a province of Nazi
Germany referred to by a new name: the Ostmark. The former States of Austria were reorganized
into seven Reichsgaue or administrative subdivisions, each under the rule of a
government official holding the dual offices of Reichsstatthalter – the governor - and
Gauleiter - the Nazi Party leader. One such official became August Eigruber. On the 14th of
March 1938 he was appointed governor of Reichsgau Upper Danube which was a name for Upper Austria
and 2 months later on the 22nd of May Adolf Hitler appointed him Gauleiter of this region.
Eigruber was a personal friend and confidante of Hitler and was one of
the few who was even allowed to address him by his first name.
On the 10th of April 1938, one month before Eigruber became Gauleiter,
he had been elected as a member of the Reichstag – parliament of Nazi Germany, representing Austria.
In his position as a Gauleiter, August Eigruber helped to establish Mauthausen concentration camp
which was located in his Reichsgau Upper Danube. Eigruber was not in day-to-day contact with the
camp, but he was the Nazi provincial leader under whose jurisdiction Mauthausen fell. He
was involved not only in the building of the camp but also sending prisoners there
and he was frequently there to witness executions in which he also participated.
The camp became operational from the 8th of August 1938, several months after the German
annexation of Austria, when the SS transferred the first prisoners from the Dachau concentration
camp. During this phase, the prisoners, all of them German and Austrian men, had
to build their own camp and work in the quarry. In December 1939 the SS ordered the construction
of a second concentration camp – Gusen - just a few kilometres from Mauthausen.
The Gusen camp went into operation in May 1940. Living and working conditions in Mauthausen,
as in Gusen, were harsh, which led to the death by murder, mistreatment,
starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
After the outbreak of war, people from across Europe were deported to Mauthausen,
which gradually developed into a system of several interconnected camps.
In order to accommodate the prisoners where they worked, the SS established several subcamps.
Commandants of these camps reported directly to German Nazi commandant Franz Ziereis.
Newly-arrived prisoners were transferred to these camps from the main camp. During this phase,
Mauthausen and Gusen were the concentration camps with the harshest imprisonment conditions
and the highest mortality. Those who were ill or deemed ‘useless’ by the SS lived
in constant fear for their lives. In 1941 the SS started to construct a gas chamber
and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people.
Other than four Yugoslav women whom the SS brought to Mauthausen with 46 men to be
shot in April 1942, the first female prisoners in Mauthausen were two dozen women from Ravensbrück,
whom the SS transferred to provide sex for favored male prisoners. The women arrived in June 1942 and
lived in the first brothel established in the Nazi concentration camp system.
During the second half of the war the prisoners, who by the end of September
1944 included 459 women, were increasingly used as forced labourers in the arms industry.
Since the prisoners were now needed for their labour, living conditions improved for a short
time. By the end of 1944, some 6,000 prisoners worked in 18 factory halls in Gusen producing
rifles, machine pistols and aircraft motors. The stress on armaments production brought
some benefits to the prisoners in 1943 and 1944. The SS authorities increased rations,
allowed packages with food and medicine to come in from the outside,
and issued special vouchers for especially productive workers.
However, the camp guards brutally mistreated the prisoners during the whole time of Mauthausen
existence. After the war, Franz Ziereis, the camp commandant, confessed how the inmates
had been killed by gassing, hard labor, or through benzine injections or how at
an outside temperature of minus 12 degrees they made the prisoners bath in water and then stand
in the open stark naked until they died. Some inmates had to haul stones until they collapsed,
then they were shot, and their record was annotated "Trying to escape". Others
were driven into a barbed-wire fence or were literally torn to pieces by the dog named "Lord".
In 1944, with the danger from Allied bombing increasing,
the Gusen camp authorities deployed thousands of prisoners to build the
underground tunnels which housed the armaments production sites.
Towards the end of the war, the Mauthausen concentration camp became
the destination for evacuations from camps near the front line.
Tens of thousands of prisoners arrived on several large transports. Overcrowding, lack of food
and rampant disease led to mass death among the prisoners in the final months before liberation.
As the responsible Gauleiter and head of the nutrition office in Upper Austria, Eigruber was
primarily responsible for the catastrophic food situation of the prisoners. He was instrumental
in cutting bread rations to the camp, which led to mass starvation and the deaths of many people.
During the month of April, Kapos at Gusen camp, acting on the orders of the SS,
beat several hundred prisoners to death. At the end of that month, in one of the last gassing
operations in the Third Reich, the SS murdered 650 ill prisoners with poison gas in a barracks.
In early May 1945, some in the SS and in the Upper Austrian Nazi Party leadership
toyed with the idea of forcing the surviving prisoners into the underground tunnels which
had been dug for the armaments industry and caving them in with explosives. However,
neither the SS nor the Nazi Party zealots carried out these plans.
On the 5th of May 1945 the US Army reached Gusen and Mauthausen. By the time of its liberation,
most of the guards in Mauthausen had fled and around 30 of those who remained were killed by
the prisoners. A similar number were also killed in Gusen. In the confusion during the liberation,
prisoners, enraged by the killings perpetrated by the Kapos and barrack
elders the previous month, killed a number of these prisoners who had served as Kapos,
room elders or other types of auxiliary service to the SS staff.
After the liberation, some prisoners were in such a weakened state that
many still died in the days and weeks that followed the liberation.
An estimated 197,000 prisoners passed through the Mauthausen concentration
camp and its subcamps between August 1938 and May 1945. At least
95,000 died there, and more than 14,000 of them were Jewish.
Toward the end of the war, as US forces approached Linz, the capital of Eigruber’s Reichsgau Upper
Danube, he proclaimed the city a "fortress" to be defended to the bitter end. However, shortly after
the beginning of the offensive on the 5th of May 1945, he fled and proclaimed Linz an open city.
As the Allied and Soviet advances were nearing Berlin in 1945, a desperate Hitler issued the
Nero Decree, ordering the destruction of German infrastructure to prevent the Allied advance.
It was also interpreted to extend to the art hidden in the Altaussee salt mine which was
under the authority of August Eigruber. Even after the rescindment of the decree, he ordered
eight bombs to be placed inside the tunnels, but disguised them by placing them in crates
labeled “Caution - Marble - Do Not Drop.” However the Altaussee miners grew suspicious of these new
crates and moved them out of the mine in the dead of night. Using a system of small
explosive charges, they blasted the entrance of the mine, sealing it shut with all its
treasures inside and waited for the arrival of the Allies. A special Allied unit dubbed
the “ Monuments Men” then recovered at least 6,577 paintings, 2,300 drawings, 954 prints,
and 137 sculptures destined for the planned Führermuseum in Linz. The collection contained
some of the most famous and valuable pieces of art in Europe, including paintings by Vermeer,
Breughel, and Rembrandt, the Rothschild family jewels, Jan van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece and
Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges, stolen from the Church of our Lady in Bruges in September
1944. In total, $3.5 billion worth of looted art was recovered from the Altaussee salt mine alone.
While Eigruber managed to hide out using forged identification papers until the 11th of August
1945 when he was arrested by US Army in Sankt Pankraz, about 90 km away from Mauthausen, the
camp’s commandant Franz Ziereis fared far worse. On the 23rd of May 1945, while trying to escape,
Ziereis was shot three times in the stomach and died on the following day in former Camp Gusen.
Following his death, his corpse, naked except for the bandage on his left arm, was hanged by former
prisoners on the camp fence in Gusen. On his back in red they had painted “ Heil Hitler “ and on his
behind they had painted Swastikas. Ziereis remained there for several
days in such a way that his torso and legs dangled aimlessly over the wire.
And only due to the stench of his decay an army officer eventually ordered the body removed.
With Eigruber justice finally caught up with him and he was tried at the Mauthausen-Gusen
camp trials heard by an American military government court at Dachau. The first trial
of personnel from Mauthausen-Gusen began on the 29th of March 1946.
Among the 61 accused were 60 former members of the camp's administration and August Eigruber.
During the trial some of the co-defendants heavily incriminated Eigruber and testified that together
with Ernst Kaltenbrunner, since 1938 Eigruber had "decisively determined the filling of positions in
Mauthausen" and that since February 1945 the camp commandant had been under his direct supervision.
In addition, he was accused of number of crimes. When in the fall of 1944 the resistance group New
Free Austria was uncovered by the Gestapo and betrayed under torture, more than 50 men and
women were arrested in Freistadt in October the same year. The People's Court in Linz sentenced
ten of the accused to death for high treason, eight of whom were shot on 1st of May 1945.
The executions were illegal by the standards of Nazi law, because no decision had yet been made
on the appeals for clemency. The shootings took place at the instigation of Gauleiter Eigruber,
who had pushed the judicial officials massively to issue the necessary orders
Another his crime was murder of Soviet Prisoners of War. In February 1945 around 500 Soviet
prisoners of war escaped from the Mauthausen concentration camp. In reference to those
Russians who had been recaptured, Eigruber said” All these pigs have to be killed”.
Two witnesses confirmed that Eigruber was present when two Americans,
one Englishman and nine others were shot in the neck on the night of the 5th of April
1945. One of the two witnesses testified that immediately before the execution of
one of the men, Eigruber had announced the death sentence in Himmler's name.
At the end of April 1945 he ordered the execution of 42 resistance fighters from the "Welser Group"
who were gassed in Mauthausen on the 28th of April 1945, one week before the camp’s liberation.
Andreas Trum – a former block leader at Mauthausen and one of the defendants at the trial - testified
that Eigruber personally directed the shooting of nine Czechs in the spring of 1943.
Another defendant Johannes Grimm, a former manager of the quarry in the
Mauthausen concentration camp testified how on one day in April 1945 at 4 AM August Eigruber
together with Mauthausen commandant Franz Zieries, both while in a drunken state,
shot a dozen people, including two Englishmen, five Poles, one Belgian and one Russian.
August Eigruber denied all the allegations and even claimed that he had never inspected
Mauthausen as he had no authority to do so. However, his lies did not help him escape justice.
On the 13th of May 1946 the Dachau International Military Tribunal sentenced August Eigruber to
death by hanging for his responsibility for the crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp. He was 40
years old when he was executed on the 28th of May 1947 in the yard of Landsberg Prison. Eigruber’s
last words were "Lord, take care of Germany. Lord, take care of my family. Lord, take care of my
children. I regard it as an honor to be hanged by the most brutal of victors. Long live Germany!".
There were no tears shed for August Eigruber.
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