The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg.
The Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and opens the
first concentration camp – Dachau – situated near Munich. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and
its European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites,
including ghettos. The perpetrators would use these locations for forced labor,
detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and mass murder of millions.
One such perpetrator is a commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp Franz Ziereis.
Franz Ziereis was born on the 13th of August 1905 in Munich then part of the German Empire.
He was a merchant by profession and during the
period of unemployment in early 1920s he worked as a carpenter.
On the 1st of April 1924 Ziereis signed up as a
career military officer in the Reichswehr – the German Army.
Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power in 1933 and 3 years later in September 1936,
Ziereis left the army with the rank of sergeant and joined the SS.
He attained the rank of SS-Obersturmführer, which was equivalent to first lieutenant,
and was assigned as a training instructor to the SS Death's Head Units named for the
skull-and-cross-bones symbol worn on the right collar of their uniforms.
Death's Head Units, established in 1934 by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of Dachau
and later inspector of concentration camps, was an independent unit within the SS responsible
for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps throughout Germany and
later in occupied Europe. The units were trained
to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty, and to view
the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the state who should be destroyed if possible.
They were responsible for facilitating what the Nazis called the Final Solution,
known since the war as the Holocaust which was the genocide of Jews in Europe.
In 1938 Hitler announced that they were to become military units. Some groups were then
discharged from guarding the camps for combat duty, serving in Poland and the Soviet Union.
Just as Eicke had trained the units to be barbaric in their treatment of camp prisoners, so did they
act on the field of combat. Death's Head Units were known to be cruel and ferocious warriors.
While at the beginning of World War II, they had
24,000 members, including reservists; by January 1945 that number had increased to 40,000.
In 1937 Franz Ziereis took over the leadership of the
22nd “Hundertschaft” or hundred-man-unit of the SS Death's Head detachment "Brandenburg."
When in the spring of 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria
into the German Reich, Ziereis participated in this operation with Death's Head mobile units.
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,
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 March 11 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 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.
On July 1, 1938 Ziereis was transferred to the SS Death's
Head regiment "Thüringen" as a training instructor. On the 9th of February 1939,
by order of Theodor Eicke, Inspector of Concentration Camps,
Ziereis was sent to take over the post of Commandant of Mauthausen
concentration camp located in Upper Austria, 20 kilometres east of Linz.
Ziereis replaced Albert Sauer who was removed from the camp service due to
negligence and excessive mildness to the concentration camp inmates.
The Mauthausen main camp operated 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 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’ to 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.
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.
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.
Franz Ziereis was the commandant of the Mauthausen concentration camp from 1939
until the camp was liberated by the American forces in 1945
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
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.
Franz Ziereis had fled the camp together with his wife on the 3rd of May, 1945 two days before the
liberation. However, he was discovered by American soldiers at his hunting lodge in the Phyrn
mountain in Upper Austria on the 23rd of May. While trying to escape, he was shot three times
in the stomach. After his capture he was brought to a US hospital in Gusen. On the following day,
the dying Ziereis was interrogated by the authorities and confessed to everything.
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 inmates 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 most cases, Ziereis himself took part in the executions which according to his testimony were
carried out on the order of Heinrich Himmler - the head of the SS, Ernst Kaltenbrunner – the
Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, and Heinrich Müller - Director of the Gestapo.
During the interrogation, which took more than 6 hours,
he lay in terrible pain before finally succumbing to his gunshot wounds.
Franz Ziereis was 39 years old when he died on the 24th of May, 1945.
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.
There were no tears shed for Franz Ziereis.
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