June 1940, Nazi-occupied Europe. After the fall of France, Vichy French authorities turn over to
the German SS and police thousands of Spanish refugees, virtually all of whom fought against
General Francisco Franco's rebel troops during the Spanish Civil War, and who fled to France
after Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic in 1939. The SS and police incarcerate 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 continue to trickle into the camp until the last
weeks of the war. An estimated 197,000 prisoners of virtually every German-occupied country
in World War II will pass through Mauthausen concentration camp and its subcamps during the
time they are operational. Living and working conditions there lead to the death by murder,
mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
One of the perpetrators responsible for these atrocities is a German doctor Eduard Krebsbach.
Eduard Krebsbach was born on the 8th of August 1894 in Bonn, then part of the German
Empire. Krebsbach attended a humanistic high school in Cologne and in 1912 began studying
medicine at the University of Freiburg. In 1919 he obtained his doctorate and in the same year
he was one of the co-founders of the Freiburg local anti-Semitic group. In the early 1920s,
Krebsbach relocated from Freiburg and served as a company and district doctor.
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933, Krebsbach was
dismissed from his position as a district doctor due to suspicions of opposing Nazism.
However, he opened a medical practice in Freiburg later that year and also served
as a contract doctor for the local police department. In the same year Krebsbach
joined the Nazi Party and the SS, becoming a member of a medical squadron in Freiburg.
On the 9th – 10th of November 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated
violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories.
The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses,
homes, and schools, but also destroyed hundreds of synagogues. Furthermore, Jewish cemeteries were
desecrated, and tens of thousands of Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
This event came to be known as Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass because of
the shattered glass that littered the streets afterwards. In addition to the physical violence,
the Nazi regime imposed severe financial penalties on the Jewish community. They
held the Jews collectively responsible for the damages inflicted during Kristallnacht
and used this as an opportunity to confiscate Jewish property and businesses. Krebsbach,
a fanatical antisemite, could finally express his hatred towards Jews when during Kristallnacht
together with several other SA and SS members set the local synagogue in Freiburg on fire.
In the autumn of 1941, Krebsbach became garrison doctor of Mauthausen concentration camp,
tasked with supervising medical care and all medical personnel of the camp.
Mauthausen concentration camp had 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 kilometers 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. 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 as well as 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 Francisco 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.
Following the start of World War II, the number of prisoners arriving in Mauthausen
increased dramatically. 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. Living and working conditions in both camps led to the death
by murder, mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
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. 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.
In the camp, Eduard Krebsbach was responsible for initiating the practice of mass execution
of prisoners that he and other doctors judged unworthy to live or unable to work. This was
performed with lethal injections of phenol directly into the heart. In this way he
killed or supervised the murder of at least 900 Russian, Polish and Czech prisoners for
which he earned the nickname among inmates Dr. Spritzbach or Dr. Injection. There were
cases when through his carelessness, prisoners declared dead, came back to life in the coal room
of the crematorium. Those who awakened were then shot in the neck by a guard.
After the war, Josef Herzler, a former Mauthausen inmate, recalled how cruel and sadistic Krebsbach
had behaved towards prisoners: “Krebsbach sometimes came to a block and had the Jews
paraded before him. He then asked if any of them were doctors and if they were, he would say: 'You
Jewish pig, you’re just an abortionist.' The next day they were done away with by the kapos. If a
Jewish inmate was lying on the floor with a broken limb - a not uncommon occurrence at work - he was
usually thrown over a wall by a kapo. If Dr. Krebsbach was passing, he would say ironically:
'Yes, this broken foot is a hopeless case.'” (5:40)In 1941 the SS started to construct a gas
chamber and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people
and Krebsbach himself was responsible for its construction. Like some other concentration camps,
Mauthausen was equipped with a stationary gas chamber with the capacity to kill up to 80
people at a time by means of Zyklon B gsa and the operations of asphyxiation lasted approximately
thirty minutes. The entire procedure for every group of victims consisted of transport to the gas
chamber, undressing, killing and transporting of the bodies to the crematory ovens, and took about
two to three hours. It is believed that the first to be killed were 231 Soviet war prisoners on the
9th of May 1942. Mauthausen's gas chamber remained operative until the very last days of the war.
Krebsbach used to come to the Mauthausen hospital and wrote down the numbers of the weakest and
very ill prisoners. He always declared that the dangerously ill prisoners would be sent
to Dachau. Since Dachau concentration camp was considered to be a better camp, prisoners were
glad to be able to go there. However, these men were not sent to Dachau. Instead they received
gasoline injections into the heart or were gassed. Krebsbach was a sadist whose greatest pleasure,
together with other doctors, was to watch the suffering of their victims in the gas chamber.
Through a small window they would watch as the Zyklon B caused his victims excruciating pain,
violent convulsions and, finally, a heart attack. At the end of 1942, in Krebsbach's presence,
120-130 Czechs were gassed because of their involvement in the assassination attempt on
Reinhard Heydrich, the deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,
which was the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the German Reich on 15 March 1939.
The career of Eduard Krebsbach at Mauthausen-Gusen ended on 22 May 1943
when he shot Josef Breitenfellner, a young man from a nearby village, who served in
the German Army and at that time was home for vacation. Krebsbach shot this German soldier
because he was disturbed by Breitenfellner and his friends when they awoke Krebsbach from his sleep.
Due to this crime, Krebsbach was transferred to the Kaiserwald
concentration camp in Latvia and stayed there untill the camp's closure in August 1944.
In the spring of the same year he was involved in the so-called “Children's
action”, in which all children under the age of 14 were singled out and murdered.
While at Kaiserwald, Krebsbach conducted selections of camp inmates for execution,
by forcing the prisoners to perform physical exercises to determine their strength and then
identifying the 2000 weakest to be killed. On July 28, 1944, the so-called “Krebsbach
action” took place during which Krebsbach had the prisoners line up in columns and the men
and women were ordered to run back and forth in front of the SS personnel. Those who did not run
fast enough were singled out; 1,000 prisoners, mostly old and weak, were murdered that day.
Following the camp's closure, Krebsbach resumed a career as an “Epidemic Inspector for Latvia,
Estonia and Lithuania” and was then transferred to the regular army as a senior staff doctor.
At the end of 1944 he left the army and worked once again as a company
doctor in a spinning mill in Kassel, Germany.
On the 5th of May 1945 the the 11th Armored Division of the United States Army,
led by General George S. Patton, reached Gusen and Mauthausen. The sight that awaited them was
one of immense suffering, as they discovered thousands of emaciated and exhausted prisoners
who had been subjected to horrific treatment. After the liberation, some prisoners were in
such a weakened state that many still died in the days and weeks that followed the liberation.
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.
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.
Justice finally caught up with Krebsbach when following the end of the war he was arrested 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. During the trial Krebsbach confirmed that he had killed people unable to work or
incurably sick and added that he had carried out his work to the best of his knowledge and belief.
When a prosecutor asked him if it had ever occurred to him that these were human beings,
people who had the misfortune to be inmates or who had been neglected, he replied:
'No. People are like animals. Animals that are born deformed or incapable of living
are put down at birth. This should be done for humanitarian reasons with people as well. This
would prevent a lot of misery and an unhappiness'. On the 13th of May 1946 the American military
government court at Dachau sentenced Eduard Krebsbach to death by hanging.
Krebsbach remained an ardent Nazi until his very end. When asked if
it never occurred to him that what he was doing was a crime, he replied “ No.
I carried out my work to the best of my knowledge and belief because I had to.”
Krebsbach was 52 years old when he was executed by hanging on 28 May 1947.
There were no tears shed for Eduard Krebsbach.
thanks for watching the World History Channel be sure to like And subscribe
and click the Bell notification icon so you don't miss our next
episodes we thank you and we'll see you next time on the channel