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 would become trapped
in a rapidly Nazifying Austria. In the weeks that follow, there is pogrom-like violence
across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat up, attack, and humiliate the Jews. They
force them to scrub the streets, clean public toilets and perform humiliating exercises.
Many decide to try to leave Austria and lines appear at consulates across the city of Vienna.
Several months later the Nazis begin to operate the Mauthausen concentration camp
near Linz. The conditions at the camp are even more severe than at most other Nazi concentration
camps and half of the 190,000 inmates will die at Mauthausen or its subcamps between 1938 and 1945.
After its liberation in May 1945, prisoners who survived years of humiliation and abuse
by their Nazi tormentors, want revenge and the site becomes a witness to a brutal massacre.
Mauthausen concentration 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. The site was chosen because of the
nearby granite quarry, and its proximity to Linz. 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.
The Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Three months into World War II in December 1939, the number had increased to over 2,600 prisoners,
primarily convicted criminals, "asocials," political opponents, and religious conscientious
objectors, such as Jehovah's Witnesses. After the Nazi regime initiated World War II,
the number of prisoners arriving in Mauthausen increased dramatically and broadened in diversity.
After the fall of France in June 1940, Vichy French authorities turned over to the German
SS and police thousands of Spanish refugees, virtually all of whom had
fought against General Francisco Franco's rebel troops during the Spanish Civil War,
and who had fled to France after Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1939. The SS
and police incarcerated the overwhelming majority of the Spanish Republicans,
more than 7,000, in Mauthausen in 1940 and 1941 and individual members of the anti-Franco forces
continued to trickle in to the camp until the last weeks of the war. Also incarcerated at Mauthausen
were members of the International Brigades, most of them Communists of various nationalities,
who had fought the Franco forces in Spain. Among the Spanish prisoners was Francesc Boix,
a photographer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who was imprisoned at the camp
for four years. During his time working in the photography lab of the camp, he was able
to hide and preserve until liberation about 2,000 negatives taken by the SS head of the department,
Paul Ricken, as well as by himself. Those photos depicted the conditions in which the
prisoners lived and were murdered in that camp and they were also proof that the camp was known
and visited by high leaders of the Third Reich, such as Ernst Kaltenbrunner or August Eigruber,
who appeared visiting both the Mauthausen camp proper, and the quarry adjacent to the camp.
During the war, the SS also incarcerated more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war at Mauthausen,
including 3,000 held at the Mauthausen subcamp Gusen. Nationals of virtually
every German-occupied country in World War II came through Mauthausen. These included,
among those prisoners who were registered: - more than 37,000 non-Jewish Poles
- nearly 23,000 Soviet civilians - between 6,200 and 8,650 Yugoslav civilians
- approximately 6,300 Italians after September 1943
- at least 4,000 Czechs - and in 1944, 47 Allied
military personnel - all of them agents of SEO - the British Secret Operations Executive
In the camp, there were also women. 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.
When after the outbreak of war, people from across Europe were deported to Mauthausen,
it 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.
Living and working conditions in Mauthausen, as in Gusen, led to the death by murder,
mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
The work in the quarries – often in unbearable heat or in temperatures as low as
−30 °C– led to exceptionally high mortality rates. The rock quarry in Mauthausen was at the base of
the so called "Stairs of Death". Prisoners were forced to carry roughly-hewn blocks of
stone – often weighing as much as 50 kilograms or 110 pounds up the 186 stairs, one prisoner behind
the other. As a result, many exhausted prisoners collapsed in front of the others in the line,
and then fell on top of the other prisoners, creating a domino effect; the first prisoner
falling onto the next, and so on, all the way down the stairs. In the quarry, prisoners were
forced to carry the boulders from morning until night, while being whipped by the Nazi guards.
Such brutality was not accidental. Former prisoner Edward Mosberg said:
"If you stopped for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed you off the cliff to your death."
The SS guards would often force prisoners – exhausted from hours of hard labour without
sufficient food and water – to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the
ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as "The Parachutists Wall".
At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner
in front of him off the cliff. Other common methods of extermination of prisoners who
were either sick or unfit for further labour or as a means of collective responsibility
or after escape attempts included beating the prisoners to death by the SS guards and Kapos,
starving to death in bunkers, hangings and mass shootings.
At times the guards or Kapos, who were prisoner supervisors,
would either deliberately throw the prisoners on the 380-volt electric barbed wire fence,
or force them outside the boundaries of the camp and then shoot them on the pretense that
they were attempting to escape. Another method of extermination were icy showers – some 3,000
inmates died of hypothermia after being forced to take an icy cold shower and then left outside
in cold weather. A large number of inmates were drowned in barrels of water at Gusen II.
Some inmates were literally torn to pieces by the dog named "Lord".
In addition, German doctors subjected Mauthausen prisoners to pseudoscientific medical experiments,
including testing levels of testosterone, experimenting with delousing chemicals,
medicines for tuberculosis, and nutrition experiments. Camp physician Hermann Richter
surgically removed significant organs—e.g., stomach, liver, or kidneys—from living
prisoners solely in order to determine how long prisoners could survive without the organ in
question. Eduard Krebsbach, the executive camp doctor between autumn 1941 and autumn 1943,
killed an undetermined number of prisoners by injecting phenol directly into their hearts.
The Austrian doctor Aribert Heim, also known as Dr. Death and Butcher of Mauthausen,
not only conducted gruesome experiments such as injecting various solutions into
the hearts of Jewish prisoners to see which killed them fastest,
but he was also known for performing operations without anesthesia.
The food rations in the camp were limited, and during the 1940–1942 period, an average inmate
weighed 40 kilograms or 88 pounds. In 1945 the energy content did not exceed 600 to 1,000
calories a day – less than one third of the energy needed by an average worker in heavy industry.
The reduced rations led to the starvation of thousands of inmates.
As early as 1943, Spanish Republicans incarcerated inside Mauthausen, drawing upon their expertise
as communist fighters and their contacts to Czech, French, and German members of
the International Brigades, established small clandestine networks of resistance inside the
camp. By the winter of 1944–45, these groups had established underground formations armed
with weapons stolen from the camp arsenal. Their most effective activities involved
providing food for starving prisoners, hiding prisoners temporarily, often in the infirmary,
and protecting prisoners against arbitrary torture and mistreatment from Kapos.
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 for 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’s existence.
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.
Prisoners evacuated by train, by truck, by forced march from Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen,
and Gross-Rosen began arriving at Mauthausen in early 1945.
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.
Brutal torture and killing of prisoners also continued until the
final days of the camp’s existence. During the month of April 1945,
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.
Mauthausen's gas chamber remained operative until the very last days of the war. The SS
murdered nearly 3,000 prisoners from the infirmary after a selection on the 20th of April 1945 and
the camp authorities carried out the last mass murder in the gas chamber on the 28th of April
1945. The victims were 33 Upper Austrian Social Democratic and Communist opponents of the regime.
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. The liberated prisoners,
many of them tortured and treated as nothing but animals for all these years,
finally got their revenge. Though by the time of its liberation,
most of the guards in Mauthausen had fled, around 30 of those who remained were brutally
killed by the prisoners. A similar number were also killed in Gusen.
Those SS guards who were not killed, were forced to break stones in the quarry thus
finding themselves under the direction of the prisoners they had once mistreated.
The former SS guards were also submitted to punitive physical exercises such as calisthenics
or crawling on the ground. While survivors and American soldiers were watching, the former SS
guards had to perform the same exercises to which they had been submitting the prisoners for years.
On the 5th and 6th of May, the long-suppressed hatred for the
‘Kapos’, who that had carried out their supervisory roles with extreme brutality,
erupted violently and the hour of revenge began for many prisoners.
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.
A report by Boris Bekeš on the events of the 5th of May 1945 depicts the following:
My attention was directed towards the cries and the noise in the room. The Russians dragged
the “Block leader” out of the room. He had been very rough with the prisoners and had
beaten them up for every minor transgression, especially the non-German prisoners. They tore
off his clothes and beat him and kicked him. Everyone wanted to relieve some of his anger.
Eventually a young Russian picked up a chair and hit him over the head with it as hard as
he could. The man fell and no longer moved. When 2 former inmates Rudi and Hadschi came
back it was already dark. They said that they had been in a block were the majority were Polish.
One of the Poles stabbed a Kapo named Marjan to death with a knife. He had been in Steyr,
one of the Mauthausen’s subcamps, with us and was a decent bloke but
when he became a Kapo he displayed all the qualities that a Kapo must have.
He was also a Pole and he treated his compatriots as roughly as the others. One of his compatriots
rammed a knife into his chest with such force that he was literally nailed to the bed.
The Russians put our “Room elder” head first into a barrel of water,
which was there in case a fire broke out. He kicked and wriggled his feet for a while,
but soon he stopped moving and his legs fell back over the barrel.’
Former camp commandant Franz Ziereis did not fare any better.
On the 23rd of May 1945, while trying to escape, Ziereis, the camp’s commandant
from August 1939 until its liberation, 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.
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, more than 14,000 of them Jewish.
There were many tears shed for all the victims of Mauthausen concentration camp.
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