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. One of them is Francisco Boix.
Francisco Boix Campo was born on the 31st of August 1920 in a working-class district
in Barcelona, Spain. His father was a tailor by profession and ran a shop under the family home,
where in his spare time he hosted meetings with left-wing Catalanists.
He was also an amateur photographer and his fascination for photography would inspire
in his son a passion for taking pictures that would define the course of his life.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out July 17, 1936, Boix, then just 15 years old,
joined the Catalan communist party and started to work for youth magazines as a photographer.
The civil war in Spain was fueled by political, social, and economic divisions and involved
the leftist Republicans, comprised of various leftist and anarchist groups,
against the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco, who sought to establish a fascist regime.
The Spanish Civil War attracted international attention, and both sides received support from
foreign powers. While the Republicans had assistance from international volunteers
and the Soviet Union, the Nationalists received aid from fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. It was
a great opportunity for Nazi Germany to test and develop methods of strategic bombing which would
soon be used during the Second World War. The war was marked by brutal tactics and
atrocities committed by both sides. About 500,000 people lost their lives in the conflict and of
these, about 200,000 died as the result of systematic killings, mob violence,
torture, or other brutalities. Anarchists and other left-wing radicals often took out their
anger against the Catholic clergy, whom they saw as an obstacle to major reform.
Almost 7,000 Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were killed, primarily in the first months of the
revolt. By May 1937, most of the mass killings of priests by Leftist radicals subsided. On the other
hand, Nationalist forces massacred civilians in Seville, where some 8,000 people were shot
and 10,000 were killed in Cordoba. In Granada, where working-class neighborhoods were hit with
artillery and right-wing squads were given free rein to kill government sympathizers, at least
2,000 people were murdered. In February 1937, over 7,000 were killed after the capture of Málaga.
After spending almost a year documenting the grueling conflict Boix became compelled
to fight and in May 1937, just 16 years old, he enlisted in the 30th division Spanish Republican
army. As Franco’s forces closed in on Barcelona in January 1939, Boix headed for the French border,
along with hundreds of thousands of women, children and the defeated remnants of the
Republican army. Rather than being welcomed by the French as their Republican brothers,
refugees were forced into overcrowded camps often without food, water or sanitation.
With the threat of invasion, Boix, along with many Spanish refugees, was
conscripted by the French army to build defenses. World War II began on September 1, 1939, with the
German invasion of Poland. The German invasion of France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands
started on the 10th of May 1940 and became known as the Battle of France. Initially, British
and French commanders had believed that German forces would attack through central Belgium as
they had in World War I, and rushed forces to the Franco-Belgian border to meet the German attack.
The main German attack, however, went through the Ardennes Forest in southeastern Belgium and
northern Luxembourg and German tanks and infantry quickly broke through the French defensive lines
and advanced to the coast. Belgium and the Netherlands surrendered in May 1940. Between
26 May and 4 June 1940, more than 300,000 French and British troops were evacuated from the beaches
near Dunkirk across the English Channel to Great Britain. Paris, the French capital,
fell to the Germans on June 14, 1940. After the French defense lines were overrun by
the German Blitzkrieg or Lightning War, Francisco Boix was captured by the Germans and held in
various prison camps in France. The ideologies of the Spanish republicans made them natural
enemies of the Nazis, and this has been assured by the Spanish fascist government, who renounced
the citizenship of the Spanish republicans, thus making them stateless citizens, just like Jews or
gypsies, who could be worked to death. On the 27th of January 1941, Francisco Boix together
with 1,f506 other Spanish prisoners arrived at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
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. 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. On their arrival, Boix and other republicans
were forced to strip and pass like cattle through showers. Then they were given stripped
uniforms and under horrible conditions they were forced to work in munitions factories,
assembly plants and especially quarries. Because Boix learned basic German in prison
camps in France he was used by the Nazis as a translator and thanks to his cheeky and kind
personality he soon gained trust of the guards. Most of the Spanish inmates died in the first
year upon arrival mostly due to malnutrition and overwork. 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 labor 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 gunpoint 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 labor 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.
With the arrival of other nationalities like Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs or Czechs
the Spanish survivors gradually began to take over more ‘privileged’ positions,
displacing the German common criminals. However, this was not because they were now treated any
better, but rather because they were now so well organized; held together by their
anti-fascist political beliefs and in part by the discipline of the Communist Party.
They managed to keep alive as many Republicans as possible, though favoring party members.
The Nazis were obsessed with systematically taking photos documenting every prisoner, death,
and high-profile visit to the camp. Though only the SS photographer Kornacz took the photographs,
he employed inmates to handle the developing, printing and filing of the images. Kornacz took
mug shots of arriving prisoners and the inmates who died in the camp. He ordered his prisoner
assistants to make five copies of each photograph: one for the camp archive and one each to be sent
to Berlin, Oranienburg, Vienna, and Linz. 2 of Korznacz’s lab assistants were Catalan, Antoni
Garcia, and a Polish prisoner named Grabowski. They both began developing a sixth print of key
photographs, which they hid in the ceiling behind a wooden beam, thus compiling a secret archive.
In June 1941 Kornacz was replaced by SS Hauptscharführer Paul Ricken,
who distanced himself from the violence of his SS cohorts and treated his prisoner
assistants with consideration. Ricken, a trained photographer, reorganized the lab.
At Garcia's suggestion, he appointed Francisco Boix, to work in the lab and very soon the
young Catalanist helped Garcia and Grabowski to print an extra, sixth copy of key photographs.
After Germany’s defeat at Stalingrad in February 1943, it became evident that
the Nazis were no longer winning the war and the SS began destroying photographs
which provided evidence of the atrocities committed inside the concentration camps.
In 1944 Grabowski committed suicide, and in February 1945 Garcia fell seriously ill and
was taken to the camp infirmary where he remained for over a month. Upon his return he discovered
that the secret archives were missing. When questioned Boix confessed that he
had removed the photographs and delivered them to the camp's Spanish Communist underground.
After receiving the secret archives from Boix, the Spanish underground temporarily concealed
the photographs in several locations within the administrative complex of the camp while
looking for a safer hiding place outside the camp. Ultimately, they decided to transfer the
photographs to the Poschacher Kommando. This labor brigade, made up of Spanish teenagers,
worked in quarries outside the camp and during the last months of the war, the brigade worked with
little SS supervision. Over time, the Spanish youth had become friendly with Anna Pointner,
an Austrian socialist who lived near their work site. She frequently tossed them extra food and
eventually confided her political views to them. Sensing they could trust her, the youths asked
whether she would be willing to hide some small parcels for them. Pointner, who prudently was
wary of house inspections by the SS, concealed the negatives inside the stones of her garden wall and
here they remained until the end of the war and the liberation of the Mauthausen camp in May 1945.
On the 5th of May 1945 the US Army reached Gusen and Mauthausen and the Americans were welcomed
with a huge banner proclaiming 'The anti-fascist Spaniards welcome the liberating forces’.
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. Russian and Polish prisoners were the biggest victims,
along with Jews. Of the some 7,200 Spaniards who entered Mauthausen,
barely 2,200 were alive by their liberation in 1945. Another 2,000 probably died in other camps,
such as Dachau and Buchenwald. Many of those who survived until the end of the war were at
the limits of their resistance and half were dead within a year of liberation.
Most of the survivors who could not return to Franco’s Spain were given asylum in France.
After the war Boix retrieved the hidden archives of up to
3,000 photographs and as the only Spaniard he was invited to testify at the Nuremberg Trials.
He described slave labor, torture, public executions enlivened by a gypsy band forced
to play polkas and how the SS guards received bonuses for shooting Jews.
But most importantly, he testified to the presence at the camp of Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer and
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the latter of whom had denied any knowledge of the camps, and who was convicted
directly as a result of Boix’s testimony. After the war, Boix settled in France and
continued his photography work, but he faced personal challenges and battled depression
resulting from his traumatic experiences during the war. Tragically, on July 7, 1951, Boix,
then only 30 years old, died from kidney failure caused by his time in the camp.
There were many tears shed for Francisco Boix.
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