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 will
become trapped in a rapidly Nazifying Austria. Several months later the Nazis begin to operate
the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz which is closely connected to forced labour performed by
the inmates in the camp’s granite quarries. Their director becomes Hans Spatzenegger.
Hans Spatzenegger was born on the 1st of March 1900 in Laufen then part of the German Empire.
It was Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression,
beginning in 1929 that most contributed to the Nazi Party’s success. The crisis resulted in
widespread unemployment and poverty and also led to an increase in crime. The resulting
anger and fear left the Germans vulnerable to arguments from both the extreme right and left.
One such German was Hans Spatzenegger, a locksmith by profession, who joined
the Nazi party in May 1931 and in early 1932 he joined the SS.
Immediately after Hitler came to power in January 1933, Germany became a dictatorship,
and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and
established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”. Unlike prisons with which they are
often inaccurately compared today, concentration camps were independent of any judicial review.
The first such camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than 2 months after Hitler became
the chancellor and Spatzenegger joined its staff shortly afterwards becoming one of its guards.
In October of the same year, Dachau’s commandant, Theodor Eicke,
introduced a system of regulations which inflicted brutal punishments on prisoners
for the slightest offenses. Eicke ensured that the Dachau camp served as a model for
all later concentration camps. It also became a training center or “a school of
violence “for SS guards who were deployed throughout the concentration camp system.
During the first year, the camp had a capacity of
5,000 prisoners. Initially the internees were primarily German Communists, Social Democrats,
trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. However, over time,
other groups were also interned at Dachau, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people,
homosexuals, repeat criminal offenders as well as so called “asocials” whom
the regime incarcerated because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment.
During the early years relatively few Jews were interned in Dachau and then only usually because
they belonged to one of the above groups or had completed prison sentences after
being convicted for violating the 1935 Nuremberg Laws which put Nazi ideas about race into law.
In early 1937, the SS, using prisoner labor, began construction of a large complex of buildings on
the grounds of the original camp. Prisoners were forced to do this work, starting with
the destruction of the old munitions factory, under terrible conditions. The construction
was officially completed in mid-August 1938. The same month, Spatzenegger was transferred to
Mauthausen concentration camp which 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.
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 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.
As the war progressed, 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.
At Mauthausen, Spatzenegger became a director of the camps’ quarries.
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.
Spatzenegger was among the most cruel and feared personnel stationed at the camp. If
he thought that the prisoners were not working hard enough,
he often staged "show beatings" which he performed with a stick.
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.
Another Spatzenegger’s specialty was throwing the prisoners on the 380-volt electric barbed wire
fence, or forcing them outside the boundaries of the camp and then shooting them on the
pretense that they were attempting to escape. Others were literally torn to pieces by his dog.
On the 6th and 7th of September 1944, Spatzenegger took part in the murder of 40 Dutch and 7 British
Special Operations Executive – SOE - agents. The objective of SOE was to conduct espionage,
sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers,
especially against Nazi Germany. The 47 agents were brought into
Mauthausen and after being killed, their bodies were cremated. With risk for their own lives,
Mauthausen prisoners, after seeing what those agents had to endure before being
murdered by the SS, then secretly buried the container with the ashes.
Among Mauthausen inmates were also prisoners of war. During the night
of the 2nd of February 1945 approximately 500 inmates, almost all of them Soviet officers,
attempted to escape from the Mühlviertel subcamp of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp.
They attacked the watch towers and managed to occupy one of them. The electrified
barbed wire fence was short-circuited with wet blankets so that the inmates
could climb over it. Many of the escapees were too exhausted to get very far and soon
collapsed. Those who did not manage to reach the woods were shot that night by the SS.
Immediately after the escape, the SS organised a major search in which all the members of the SS
headquarters staff including Hans Spatzenegger, the gendarmerie, army units, SA divisions and
Hitler Youth groups took part. The SS order was "not to bring any inmates back alive".
The hunt for the escapees also called for the assistance of the civilian population and the
people came and willingly obliged. According to the documents and the testimonies given by
witnesses there was no immediate threat to anyone nor was anyone forced to participate
which proves the squalid state of mind and character of a lot of people at that time.
The manhunt was cynically called the "Mühlviertler rabbit chase" by the SS and went on for three
weeks. Except for eleven officers all escapees were captured and mostly killed on the spot.
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.
At the beginning of May 1945, shortly before the camp’s liberation,
Spatzenegger fled in the direction of Salzburg together with the crematorium
manager Martin Roth and was able to go into hiding. However, he did not escape justice.
On the 28th of February 1946 he was arrested in Upper Austria and then
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.
Mauthausen survivor, a Pole Stefan Pręgowski, testified: “I myself have often seen how Hans
Spatzenegger hit inmates with shovel handles or sticks. I watched as Czechs
and members of penal companies were forced off rocks in the quarry about 80 meters deep
to jump to their death. I also saw how Spatzenegger mistreated
Jewish prisoners and almost beat them to death while they worked.”
Numerous other witnesses testified about the brutality of Spatzenegger as a director in the
Wiener Graben quarries and prosecution described him as “the worst pig known to this world.”
On the 13th of May 1946 the Dachau International Military Tribunal sentenced
Hans Spatzenegger to death by hanging. Spatzenegger was 47 years old when he was
executed on the 27th of May 1947 in the Landsberg prison. His last words were,
"I'm not a war criminal. Long live Germany. Goodbye, Pastor.”
There were no tears shed for Hans Spatzenegger.
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