The liberation of Mauthausen

On the afternoon of 5 May 1945 a patrol of 23 American soldiers arrived at the gate of the Mauthausen concentration camp in Upper Austria, some 20 kilometres from Linz. The patrol, from the 41st Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron of the US 11th Armored Division, was led by Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek. Its task was to check a bridge near St. Georgen; the soldiers knew little about the camps in the area. They came first to the subcamp at Gusen and then to Mauthausen. There they found tens of thousands of emaciated prisoners, piles of corpses, crematoria and guards who laid down their arms without resistance.

Mauthausen was the last of the Third Reich’s great concentration camps to be reached by the Allies. It was also one of the harshest: the only camp that the SS placed in 1941 in the most severe category, Category III – for prisoners whose “return was not anticipated”. According to the memorial, some 190,000 people passed through Mauthausen and its subcamps, of whom at least 90,000 died; other estimates, cited in Polish literature, go as high as 120,000 victims.

A camp by the quarry

The camp was founded on 8 August 1938, a few months after the annexation of Austria to the Reich, beside the Wiener Graben granite quarry on the Danube. The choice of site was dictated by the SS’s economic interests: the quarries were taken over by the Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke company, founded by Heinrich Himmler to supply stone for Hitler’s monumental buildings, above all in Linz, which the dictator wanted to rebuild as the “city of his youth”. The granite walls and towers of the camp itself were built by the prisoners from the stone they quarried.

The symbol of Mauthausen became the “Stairs of Death” – 186 uneven steps cut into the side of the quarry, up which prisoners carried granite blocks on their backs, often weighing several dozen kilograms. The columns were forced to run; anyone who fell dragged others down with him. The SS cynically called the edge of the quarry the “Parachutists’ Wall”: prisoners were pushed off it or forced to jump. Crematoria operated from 1941, and from 1942 a gas chamber, in which, according to the memorial, several thousand people were murdered; the last gassing took place on 28 April 1945, a week before the Americans arrived. From 1939 to the end the camp’s commandant was SS-Standartenführer Franz Ziereis.

Around the main camp grew a system of several dozen subcamps – from Ebensee, Melk and Steyr to factories near Vienna. They were worked by prisoners hired out to the armaments industry: Steyr-Daimler-Puch, Messerschmitt, Heinkel and others.

Gusen and the Polish prisoners

The largest subcamp, with more prisoners than the main camp itself, was Gusen, a few kilometres west of Mauthausen. Founded in 1940, it became a place of martyrdom for the Polish intelligentsia. The first large transports of Poles – community activists, teachers, priests, officials and students arrested in the Intelligenzaktion and other repressive operations – arrived from Dachau and Sachsenhausen in the spring and summer of 1940. The SS described Gusen as a camp intended for the “extermination of the Polish intelligentsia”. Poles were the largest group of prisoners at Gusen, and estimates of the number of Poles who died in the Mauthausen-Gusen complex run to several tens of thousands. Even so, the prisoners managed to organise clandestine teaching, an underground and mutual aid at Gusen. The best-known Polish account of camp life was left by the Varsovian Stanisław Grzesiuk, a prisoner from 1940 until the liberation and author of the book Pięć lat kacetu (PL) (“Five Years in the KZ”).

In 1944 further camps were set up next to Gusen: Gusen II at St. Georgen and Gusen III at Lungitz. The prisoners of Gusen II tunnelled into the hillsides to build an underground factory code-named Bergkristall, where fuselages for the Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter were assembled. Work in the tunnels, amid dust and damp, on starvation rations, meant death within a few months for thousands of people.

Hartheim, Block 20 and the last months

Mauthausen was linked with yet another place of murder. At Hartheim Castle near Linz one of the centres of Aktion T4 operated from 1940, where mentally ill and disabled people were killed with gas. After Aktion T4 was officially halted, concentration camp prisoners deemed unfit for work – from Mauthausen, Gusen, Dachau and other camps – were killed at Hartheim under the so-called Aktion 14f13. An estimated 30,000 people in all died at Hartheim, including many Poles, among them priests from Dachau.

Mauthausen received prisoners whom the Reich wanted to do away with quietly: escapees from prisoner-of-war camps recaptured under the so-called Kugel-Erlass (Bullet Decree), “Nacht und Nebel” prisoners, Allied airmen and agents. A separate group were Spanish Republicans, interned in France and handed over to the Germans after its defeat – several thousand of them died at Mauthausen and Gusen. In Block 20, a separate section of the main camp, Soviet officers condemned to death were held in inhuman conditions. On the night of 1–2 February 1945 several hundred of them – about 500, according to most studies – made a desperate escape attempt, pelting the sentries with stones and fire extinguishers. Many died on the wire. The SS organised a manhunt for the escapees with the gendarmerie, the Volkssturm, the Hitler Youth and some of the local population, cynically called the “Mühlviertel hare hunt” (Mühlviertler Hasenjagd). Only a handful – somewhere between a few and a dozen or so – survived, hidden among others by the Langthaler family from a nearby village.

In the winter and spring of 1945 transports poured into Mauthausen from evacuated camps: from Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück, and in April thousands of Hungarian Jews driven on death marches from the Hungarian border. The camp, designed for a little over ten thousand people, was overcrowded beyond all measure. People died of hunger and typhus; in the last months before the liberation the death rate was the highest in the camp’s entire history. Thousands of Jews were crammed into tents and into the reception camp at Gunskirchen, which soldiers of the US 71st Infantry Division reached on 4 May.

5 May

At the beginning of May the SS prepared to abandon the camp. Ziereis and most of the SS men left on 3 May. Guard duty was taken over by members of the Vienna fire brigade and older Volkssturm men, while inside the wire the clandestine International Prisoners’ Committee began to take control. The front was already close: from the east, through Vienna, captured in April, the Red Army was approaching; from the west came General George Patton’s US Third Army, whose 11th Armored Division entered Linz on 5 May.

Kosiek’s patrol first accepted the surrender of the guards at Gusen and then at Mauthausen, where the prisoners welcomed the Americans at the camp gate. The soldiers disarmed the guards and led them away as prisoners, but had to return to their unit that same day. The prisoners were left on their own in the camp. There was rough justice: some of the kapos and guards who had failed to escape were killed. The next day, 6 May, larger forces of the 11th Armored Division arrived at Mauthausen and Gusen and took over the camp; the same day the Americans reached the Ebensee subcamp. According to American estimates there were then some 40,000 prisoners in Mauthausen and Gusen. Despite medical aid, thousands of them died in the following weeks – emaciated, ill with typhus, unable to take normal food.

The survivors included Simon Wiesenthal, who after the war devoted his life to hunting down Nazi criminals, and the Catalan photographer Francesc Boix, who had hidden negatives of SS photographs in the camp’s photographic laboratory; they were later used as evidence at the Nuremberg trial. On 16 May the liberated prisoners proclaimed the so-called Mauthausen Oath – a declaration of shared remembrance of the victims of all nationalities.

Commandant and judges

Franz Ziereis was hiding in his hunting lodge in the mountains. On 23 May an American patrol tracked him down; shot while trying to escape, he was taken to the hospital at Gusen and interrogated in the presence of former prisoners. He died on 24 May (25 May according to some sources), and the prisoners hung his body on the camp wire. His statements, though made as he lay dying and unreliable in many details, were one of the first descriptions of how the camp functioned from the mouth of its commandant.

The Americans tried the camp staff before a military tribunal at Dachau. The first trial (PL), held from 29 March to 13 May 1946, dealt with 61 defendants – SS men, doctors, kapos and also the former Gauleiter of Upper Austria, August Eigruber. Fifty-eight death sentences were passed. Further members of the staff and of the subcamps were tried in subsequent trials. Many perpetrators, however, never faced a court, and after 1955 the Austrian courts rarely took up such cases.

Memory

Mauthausen lay on the north bank of the Danube, in the Soviet occupation zone of Austria. In the summer of 1945 the camp was taken over by the Red Army, which used some of the buildings as barracks, removed the machinery from the underground factories at Gusen and blew up the tunnel entrances. In 1947 the Soviet authorities handed the main camp site over to Austria, which two years later established a memorial there. The site of the former Gusen camp, parcelled out and built over with houses, remained almost forgotten for decades; it was chiefly former prisoners, Poles among them, who campaigned for a memorial, and only in the 21st century did Austria acquire the main remains of the camp.

The memory of Mauthausen long clashed with Austria’s image of itself as “Hitler’s first victim”. The camp lay in the heart of Upper Austria, local people knew of its existence, and civilians too took part in the hunt for the escaped Soviet officers in February 1945. Only in the last decades of the 20th century did these facts enter public debate.

Place in the history of the war

The liberation of Mauthausen closed the spring series of discoveries that revealed to the world the full picture of the German concentration camp system – from Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen to Dachau and Neuengamme, found empty the day before. Austria, which the Red Army had entered at the end of March, proved to be the place where that system operated until the last day of the war – with gassings, death marches and murderous labour in underground factories. For Poles, Mauthausen-Gusen was, alongside Auschwitz, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, one of the chief places of martyrdom of the intelligentsia; many survivors did not return to a country where the communists were taking power. On the same day that Kosiek’s patrol stood at the camp gate, the uprising broke out in Prague, and three days later the war in Europe formally came to an end.