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Mauthausen Robert H. Abzug
After the unimaginable sights of Ohrdruf, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the others, it would be hard to believe that some new level of horror might be reached. Yet on May 5, as the American 11th Armored Division and other units reconnoitered along the Danube in the environs of Linz, Austria, they found at the mother concentration camp of Mauthausen and such satellite camps as Gusen, Ebensee, and Gunskirchen, new histories and varieties of death and degradation. Indeed, Mauthausen and its branches had a reputation among prisoners, from Dachau in the West to Auschwitz in the East, as the camp to avoid at all costs. The history of Mauthausen dated from 1938, when Heinrich Himmler sought to expand the economic base of the SS by exploiting slave labor in the extractive and manufacturing industries. He needed new camps and new business opportunities. Soon after the Anschluss that made Austria a part of Germany, he chose a site near the village of Mauthausen which offered a combination of attractive features. The future camp would be built next to the Wienergraben, a municipal quarry which was a principal supplier of paving stones for Vienna and other cities and thus had a secure economic future. The quarry was located in isolated farm country, but near enough to Linz to be useful. Mauthausen also was a stop on a railway line, thus easing both transport of stone and labor. By July 1938 prisoners from Dachau were leveling the ground for a complex planned to cover almost four square miles, more than a square mile of which was quarry. Three months later the first inmates arrived, about a thousand German political prisoners with a sprinkling of others. A year later the prisoner population had grown over two and a half times; SS statistics listed, among the major groups, 688 political prisoners, 143 Jehovahs Witnesses and other religious objectors, 51 homosexuals, 930 asocials (a catchall category), and 946 criminals. This last category was of particular importance, for German criminals supplied the SS with cruel prisoner-taskmasters who sometimes exceeded the Nazis themselves in sadism. As the years passed, the camp kept expanding its barracks and administrative facilities. Mauthausen shared with other concentration camps the usual array of atrocities: medical experiments, exterminations, torture, and the rest. But what set it apart from other campsin Robert H. Abzug, Inside the vicious heart: Americans and the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, Oxford University Press, 1985. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLS
fact what gave it its damning reputation among prisoners at Dachau, Buchenwald, and even Auschwitzwas its quarry. Stone cutting and hauling is an arduous occupation in the best of circumstances but, under the supervision of the SS, work at the Wienergraben became torture almost beyond belief. Slave laborers in the quarry had a life expectancy of between six weeks and three months, and that was the case only if an unplanned punishment did not get in the way. Though pneumatic tools were used and blasting was sometimes employed to loosen stone, most of the labor was with pick and axe. As for moving stone from the quarry, prisoners hauled heavy chunks of granite on their backs up 186 steep and narrow steps that connected the camp to the quarry. The quarry was the site of not only impossibly hard work, but also unspeakable sadism. Hundreds of Dutch Jews were forced to jump to their deaths from the high cliff overlooking the quarry floor, a cliff which in the grim humor of the inmates became known as the parachutists wall. In one instance, the SS orchestrated a blasting operation that made even jaded prisoners tremble. The Nazi officer in charge ordered an Italian Jew known to have a beautiful voice to stand atop a rock mound and sing the Ave Maria. As he sang, charges were laid around the rocks. In midsong the officer pressed the plunger and blasted both the Jew and the rocks. Every day at the quarry brought new and novel forms of death. In addition, Mauthausen was one of the few camps in the West to employ its gas chamber regularly. At first a mobile gas van shuttled back and forth between the main camp and Gusen sub-camp. On each trip it killed thirty prisoners, and apparently was in constant use. By December 1941 a permanent gas chamber, one that could hold about 120 prisoners at a time, seems to have been put in operation. It was small by Nazi standards, and when large transports earmarked for extermination arrived at Mauthausen, most persons were sent to the larger facilities at nearby Hartheim Castle. It is estimated that between 1942 and 1945 a total of about 10,000 persons were executed in Mauthausens gas chamber, at Hartheim Castle, and in the vans. As with the other camps, conditions at Mauthausen began to get even worse after 1943 with the movement of prisoners west from Poland. Mauthausen, because of the geographical proximity of Hungary, was particularly affected by the late but efficient roundup of that countrys Jews. Especially after the evacuation of Auschwitz in December 1944, the Nazis sent thousands of Hungarian Jews to Mauthausen and its sub-camps. Marched through the winter with little clothing or food, those that survived to enter the camp gates were in desperate physical and psychological condition. In short, Mauthausen doubled as a profitable enterprise for the DEST (Deutsche Erdund Steinwerke, or German Earth and Stone Works) and an alternative method of extermination to meet the SSs other goals. One estimate puts total deaths at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945 at about 55,000, this out of a total prisoner population of about 185,000. But even these statistics are conservative, since they do not adequately take into account the reuse of prisoner numbers (more than one death occurring as represented by a prisoner number), the deaths of thousands of prisoners, especially at the end of the war, who were shipped to Mauthausen and died, and the number of prisoners at Mauthausen who were never properly registered. Nor does the human destruction that Mauthausen spawned appear in its true magnitude if one limits oneself to the mother camp alone, for radiating out of the main camp was an extensive system of brutal sub-camps. This kind of proliferation of labor camps was common enough in the systemBuchenwald, Dachau, and other centers had their own satellite operationsbut none contained a more consistently cruel set of sub-camps than Mauthausen. The major ones were Gusen and Ebensee. Gusen, founded in 1940, was an independent camp until 1944, when it came under the umbrella of Mauthausen. Six kilometers west of the mother camp, it too specialized in quarry work. Inmates at Gusen and its sub-camps also built underground armaments factories for production of machine guns and other weaponry, as well as fuselages for Messerschmidt aircraft. In 1945 Gusen became an end-destination for death marches from other camps, and death lists from the Gusen camps add up to over 38,000. Ebensee was created in 1943 to provide labor for the construction of underground factory tunnels, but by 1945 had become a grisly center for dying transported prisoners. In all there were close to fifty camps, big and small, that operated within Mauthausens sphere of administration. They supplied labor for a wide variety of SS and privately owned industries, and were spread all over Austria. As Allied troops swept across most of Germany in March and April 1945, the SS had to decide what to do with Mauthausen. At first Himmlers order was to turn it over to the Allies intact, but that was soon countermanded by more sinister plans to destroy the camp, subcamps, and the prisoners that were left. The second plan was never put into operation. In late April, Nazi Commandant Zereis handed over administration of the camp to a captain in the Vienna police, leaving a small group of SS to help guard the camp. Underground groups in Mauthausen proper as well as at Gusen quickly began sabotage and resistance operations, but the sad fact was that what was needed mostfood, medicine, clothing, and final liberationhad to await the arrival of American forces some days later. Until then the camps festered in dirt and disease. Thousands of prisoners died. Conditions were especially appalling among the latest transported prisoners. These men and women had survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and forced marchesonly to perish at Mauthausen in the final week of the war. It was, above all, these last arrivals that shocked the Americans as they entered Mauthausen and its sub-camps on May 5 and the days that followed. The knowledge that such camps existed, that in the previous month thousands of GIs had seen similar scenes, did nothing to lessen the impact. Here were human beingsdead, close to death, wandering in a haze, starved and beaten into a chilling samenessnaked and semi-naked and in any case stripped of all the things we rely upon to identify someone as human. Here the Americans responded in much the same way their fellow soldiers had in other camps. There seemed to be no limit to how bad conditions could get, only to how one could react. When you see them, one GI remembered, there is nothing to distinguish them, you know. Shaved heads and sunken cheeks … there is no way, it is hard to even see them as human. Under the circumstances you try to avoid seeing them too much. It is too hard to do. It is too hard to handle. Indeed Mauthausen, like the other camps, was the stuff of which nightmares are made. George E. King was probably not alone in feeling victimized by his very presence in the camp, even as a liberator. He described one of his dreams: You are the captured. And you go through this agonizing labor of trying to escape. In these cases you are always moving in slow motion, as if you were up to your hips in mud … you are making a maximum effort to run, but you are just barely moving …. The fear of becoming one of the prisoners; assuaging guilt over not being one by joining the imprisoned in ones dreams; being tortured by the memory of all that surrounded onethese were some of the dreadful themes that only sometimes surfaced in the conscious or even dream world of the liberator. Those Americans who entered Mauthausen, like GIs at other camps, sometimes exhibited strongly contradictory urges to remember and to forget. Franklin Clark felt he must photograph what he saw, and he wanted his wife to see the pictures as well. When he sent them to her, he asked her to burn them. I didnt want them around, he recalled. I didnt even want to be reminded of them. Yet finally he kept them. Others seemingly had no conflict about remembering their experience and informing others. Like the Seventh Army at Dachau, the 71st Division, which liberated the sub-camp of Gunskirchen, published a small pamphlet of text, photographs, and drawings to convince those who read it of the reality of the experience: The Seventy-First Came … to Gunskirchen Lager. Gunskirchen Lager had been the destination for transports of Hungarian Jews, who once totaled 17,000 at the sub-camp. Only 5000 were alive when the 71st came upon the site. In one barracks there were 2600 people. Filth all over, read the report of one medical doctor. No water, no heating, no light, no food. About 500 bodies lying in the area. The living bodies were skin and bones. People full of lice and dirt. Capt. J.D. Pletcher described Gunskirchen the morning of its discovery: Of all the horrors of the place, the smell, perhaps, was the most startling of all. It was a smell made up of all kinds of odorshuman excreta, foul bodily odors, smoldering trash fires, German tobaccowhich is a stink in itselfall mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick, muddy woods, where little breeze could go. The ground was pulpy throughout the camp, churned to a consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with feces and urine. The smell of Gunskirchen nauseated many of the Americans who went there. It was a smell Ill never forget, completely different from anything Ive ever encountered. It could almost be seen and hung over the camp like a fog of death. As we entered the camp, the living skeletons still able to walk crowded around us and, though we wanted to drive farther into the place, the milling, pressing crowd wouldnt let us. It is not an exaggeration to say that almost every inmate was insane with hunger. Just the sight of an American brought cheers, groans, and shrieks. People crowded around to touch an American, to touch the jeep, to kiss our armsperhaps just to make sure that it was true. The people who couldnt walk crawled out toward our jeep. Those who couldnt even crawl propped themselves up on an elbow, and somehow, through all their pain and suffering, revealed through their eyes the gratitude, the joy they felt at the arrival of Americans. We were taken through the crematoriumsand one of the attendants of the crematorium swore to us that he had seen several bodies put in there alive. We looked in the crematorium and there were piles of ashes and bones inside. And outside of the crematoriums, the bodies were stacked like firewoodlike hides and carcasses you see hanging of half a cow in a butcher shopthe spine, you could count every vertebra in the spine and every rib and these were the dead, but the living looked exactly like them. The living that were walking around were so gaunt; their heads were shaven; they had sores on their bodies. Some were walking around naked in a daze; others had blankets wrapped around them held together by a belt and their facial features were normal size, but everything else was completely out of proportion.Bert Weston on conditions at Ebensee The situation at Ebensee was hardly better. Bodies, ashes, the living dead riddled the compound, and even those who could stand sometimes just collapsed and died. One liberator recalled giving showers to the survivors and watching one collapse from the shock of the water. The conditions at Mauthausen and its satellite camps were so bad that every day hundreds continued to die from exhaustion, dehydration, starvation, typhus, and tuberculosis. Americans witnessed these crushing scenes of death and human degradation even as millions of men and women safe in America danced wildly in the streets in celebration of V-E Day. The prisoners presented their own victory ceremony, with Allied officials and camp inmates present. The liberators at Mauthausen cheered, though with the muting knowledge of human carnage all around them. As for the liberated, some celebrated, others tried, and still others hardly knew what happened before they perished.
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83-76 points Review of relevant theoretical literature is evident, but there is little integration of studies into concepts related to problem. Review is partially focused and organized. Supporting and opposing research are included. Summary of information presented is included. Conclusion may not contain a biblical integration. |
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