Throughout the Second World War, there were many commandants of concentration camps who
exhibited such brutality and evil as their staff condemned thousands of people to their
deaths.
The Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoss would on a specially built gallows inside of his
former camp be hanged in front of a number of witnesses.
But there were many other former commandants who were sentenced to death for their running
of sites, such as Josef Kramer who became known as the Beast of Belsen.
One of the most harrowing and difficult concentration camps for inmates was Mauthausen, which became
know for being one of the most severe sites.
There was a huge stone quarry there which prisoners were forced to carry heavy granite
blocks up the 186 steps, and the SS guards would play sick games to mess with the prisoners
that often resulted in their deaths.
But there was one former commandant of Mauthausen who after his death, was subjected to a horrific
ordeal in which the inmates of his former camp got their revenge.
Join us today as we look at the posthumous execution of the monster of mauthausen, and
to support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
Franz Ziereis was born on the 13th August 1905 in Munich.
He had a rather normal upbringing and after attending college he then on the 1st April
1924 enlisted in the Reichswehr, the German Army which was allowed after the loss of the
First World War.
He remained in the army for over a decade, and he served with the 19th Bayerische Regiment.
12 years later he then left at the sergeant rank.
But in September 1936, he then joined the SS the paramilitary group of the Nazi Party.
He was awarded the rank SS First Leftenant a day later, and then a year later he was
given command of the 22nd Hundertschaft of the SS Totenkopf.
This was the Death’s Head detachment which would later become infamously known for their
brutal and barbaric war crimes, and much of the Death’s head units controlled the concentration
camps and various other prison camps across Nazi Germany.
He was promoted in September 1937 to being an SS Hauptsturmfuhrer or Captain, and his
unit was one which was drafted to Austria following the German annexation of Austria
known as the Anschluss.
Ziereis was there to help keep uprisings and protesters down with his SS group, and they
were part of the occupation of Austria.
But then he was transferred to work as a training instructor and he would work here at Buchenwald
for a number of months, training guards how to become brutal and savage members of the
SS.
He was injured at some point, however because of his work inside of the SS he had a number
of admirers.
One of these was Theodor Eicke who was considered the Inspector of the concentration camps.
Eicke acknowledged Ziereis’ abilities in the military and also in leadership and he
believed he would be the perfect person to replace Albert Saur as the commandant of the
newly opened Mauthausen Gusen Prison camps.
He did this on the 9th February 1939, and by may that year the camp was then designated
a concentration camp.
In August 1939, he was promoted to an SS major, and he was now overseeing Mauthausen Gusen
which was a huge and brutal camp.
It’s believed that around 190,000 people were imprisoned within the site and that more
than 90,000 people were killed inside of Mauthausen by execution, the conditions or the incredibly
hard labour they were forced to conduct.
To begin with the camp did not have a gas chamber of its own, and those who were too
sick to work or were dying were sent to other concentration camps to be executed and killed,
or they were executed by doctors at the camp by lethal injection and were then burned in
the local crematoria.
A mobile gas chamber was then brought to the site, before a permanent one was built.
But the conditions that the prisoners of mauthausen were subjected to were awful.
There were constant beatings administered by the SS guards, and the labour was incredibly
hard.
The quarry’s production was all year around, meaning that inmates were forced to work in
temperatures as low as -30 degrees celsius.
The food rations inmates were given were also not sufficient and as the war went on these
were diminished and were reduced, leading to more people starving to death.
Medication and health care was poor and non existent, but one of the worst sites of Mauthausen
was the Stairs of death.
This was where inmates would be forced to carry heavy blocks of stone up 186 stairs
one behind the other.
Many inmates collapsed from the work, and then a domino effect occurred with prisoners
falling on top of each other, and they would fall down the stairs.
Prisoners were whipped all day to carry as much as they could.
One former prisoner said, ‘if you stopped for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed
you off the cliff to your death.’
They often had this game that they played known as the Parachutists wall, where the
SS would force inmates to stand on the edge of the cliff.
They were then told to push the person off in front of them or they would be shot dead
on the spot.
Other guards threw prisoners into the high voltage electric fence killing them also,
and icy showers were used which resulted in 3000 people dying of hypothermia.
Because of all this it was believed that on average the inmates lived less than three
months towards the end of the war.
Things got worse also as the war was turning against the Germans.
Franz Ziereis was the commandant of Mauthausen, and he remained in this position until the
very end of the war.
This shows you that the SS who had a habit of swapping their commandants must have sickeningly
valued the work he was doing in the mass slaughter of people at the site.
The oversaw the expansion of the site to include many other sub camps under his command, but
Ziereis was ultimately the one at the top of the tree of the whole complex.
Inside of these sub camps thousands more would be killed doing back breaking work.
But as the war was coming to an end, there were many measures taken by the SS.
One of these was to make sure that the inmates of many of the concentration camps were evacuated
back towards Germany.
Franz Ziereis instead prepared Mauthausen for defence against a Soviet Red Army offensive.
The remaining prisoners were forced to build granite anti tank obstacles to the east, and
many prisoners who could not do this effectively were then killed in large numbers.
But it was at a stage where one piece of bread was now feeding 20 inmates.
The evacuation of the camp was being prepared also.
Ziereis had his final meeting with Ernst Kaltenbrunner on the 10th April 1945, and after this he
was promoted to become an SS colonel for his alleged outstanding service as a camp commander.
But as the American army was approaching from the west, and the Soviets approaching from
the East, Franz Ziereis decided to flee Mauthausen with his wife and their three children.
He managed to evade capture for around 20 days until on the 23rd May 1945 he was identified
by a former polish prisoner.
Following this he was arrested inside his hunting lodge in Upper Austria.
He then as the Americans arrived at his compound tried to flee, however during this he was
then shot by the Americans and was wounded.
They were trying to prevent him running, and he had been shot once through the upper left
arm, and he also had been shot in the back and the lung, with one bullet exiting through
his stomach.
This wound would be fatal.
But Franz Zeieris was still alive, and he was given first aid and was then transported
to the American 131st Evacuated Hospital in Gusen.
He got there 3 hours after he was shot.
He was then made comfortable and he was questioned for 8 hours that evening about commanding
Mauthausen and what actually happened at the site.
However at 7:30am the following morning Franz Ziereis died of his wounds.
But this would not be the end of his story.
From the mortuary of the hospital, Polish and Russian former prisoners of Mauthausen
stole Ziereis’ body.
They took it to the nearby camp of Mauthausen, and they would subject it to almost a posthumous
execution, displaying it in shame for the crimes he committed at Mauthausen.
His body was later found placed onto a barbed wire fence at Mauthausen, and he was completely
naked.
On his back, he had been painted with anti nazi graffiti and covered in swastikas.
It was not the Americans that did this, but was most probably hurting and pained from
their experiences at Mauthausen.
The Americans because of the experiences of the prisoners decided to not look for who
had done this, but Zereis was left there for a number of days.
He was only taken down off public display at the camp he once oversaw because there
was such a smell from his dead body that an officer ordered it to be taken down.
Franz Ziereis was a brutal and barbaric monster who oversaw Mauthausen Concentration camp
with great horror.
He was a man who set the precedent for the other SS guards to follow with the fact they
were to execute and drive thousands of prisoners to their deaths through hard work or starvation.
The fact he remained the commandant for many years shows how horrifically Heinrich Himmler
valued his awful work inside one of the toughest concentration camps.
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