Transcription
In the center of Austria, about 150 km west of Vienna, stands a former hub of Nazi horror, Mauthausen concentration camp. In January 1941, Mauthausen was determined to be a camp of no return. If you were sent to Mauthausen, then you were not going to get out.
More than half of the 200,000 Europeans deported to this 15-hectare camp did not survive. They were not sent here for work only. Time of work and then time of death. Stone quarries for constructing buildings for the Third Reich and secret underground weapons factories made the Mauthausen system a key part of Adolf Hitler's master plan.
A huge network of more than 40 sub-camps was created all over the eastern part of the Austrian territories. It was run by ruthless men trained to kill.
That's my father. When he put on his uniform, he became a monster. Everyone in the camp was afraid of him. He was known as the devil of Gusen.
After the war, much of Mauthausen disappeared, erased by the Nazis, destroyed by the Allies after the liberation, or willingly forgotten by the people of Austria. But the Mauthausen fortress and other vestiges still stand. They would cram at least 50 people into this gas chamber.
Suddenly, now through exclusive access to the most secretive parts of the Mauthausen compound, along with computer-generated imagery, you're about to delve into this dreaded Third Reich landmark and discover the dreadful ordeal that awaited the deported. We have a lot of archives from Mauthausen. Unlike the other camps, over 75 years after the liberation, this investigation will unveil one of the most formidable and destructive concentration camps of the Second World War.
On the eve of World War II, Adolf Hitler sought to build the greatest empire the world had ever seen with the Third Reich. In the spirit of his limitless ambition, five cities dubbed the "Führer cities" were completely redesigned to fit Adolf Hitler's personal vision: Berlin, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Munich, and Linz in Austria, which was annexed in 1938. Building these gigantic architectural projects required stone, and a lot of it. So he turned to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler.
Back then, Himmler was already overseeing three concentration camps that imprisoned enemies of the Third Reich and provided the ideal workforce, both abundant and cheap. After implementing concentration camps in Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Buchenwald, he decided to build a new one. This time, close to stone quarries. It was in Austria, some 22 km east of Linz, that a small granite-rich village attracted his attention: Mauthausen.
Mauthausen has a long history as a stone-producing town, a stone-producing region actually, because all around Mauthausen there are also several villages that have stone quarries that had been in use since the 18th century. Himmler saw it as an ideal location. In August 1938, he built Austria's first concentration camp, the first in a long series. Perched on top of a hill, the imposing fortress of the camp still dominates the local skyline.
The appearance of the fortress was absolutely key. It needed to look intimidating and crushing. The first camp was built around four barracks: one for the SS and three for the prisoners. But the Third Reich expanded rapidly, and the growing influx of new prisoners meant the camp needed to be continuously expanded. Month after month, the number of SS buildings at Mauthausen grew, along with additional barracks for prisoners brought to the camp from new territories occupied by Nazi Germany. The camp grew beyond its own compound until finally, it covered some 15 hectares.
The first prisoners here at Mauthausen actually were Austrians and Germans. Only after, actually towards the beginning of the Second World War, the first political prisoners arrived actually to Mauthausen. We know of more than 40 nation-states at that time.
War prisoners, political prisoners, people who were deported for their religion, their background, or their sexuality were all funneled into a dehumanizing system as soon as they arrived at the camp. Shaved and stripped, they were crammed into a large room with common showers. Nazi capos stood on the curb that surrounds the area on four sides, forcing all the prisoners into the center. In the middle, the water was either freezing or boiling.
The shower was not meant to offer any relief to prisoners after their difficult journey. It was meant to inflict suffering. At the exit, prisoners were given a uniform and a number that became their new identity. They were then isolated from the rest of the camp in quarantine to avoid spreading any possible diseases to the other prisoners. They were sent to the showers and then they were disinfected. As part of that, they were put in isolation as a lesson in surrender.
After weeks in quarantine, prisoners were integrated into the so-called "free part" of the camp. It was surrounded by granite walls and electrified barbed wire, surveyed by SS guards from watchtowers, and it contained dismal 400m wooden barracks. Normally, those barracks were supposed to house up to 300 prisoners altogether, but we know that in several camp parts, there were up to 2,000 prisoners housed in one of these barracks.
Prisoners were fed bread and broth, only receiving daily 1,500 calories, 2/3 of a normal daily requirement. This constant feeling of being hungry seems to be one of the worst parts of the torture prisoners had to suffer here in the camp. But apart from this permanent hunger, this permanent lack of sleep, there was also a permanent state of violence. The SS at Mauthausen, as they did in many other camps, connected just the daily routine of life to torture and to beatings and to murder.
The center of the camp was another key part of the prisoner's daily life: the roll call square. This was where we learned the first torment of the concentration camp world: waiting. We waited for roll call. We waited to go to work. We waited to be fed. We waited to sleep. Always waiting. Take a minute to think about that. The first ill to afflict the deportees was waiting.
Roll call could take several hours despite the cold, which was glacial in winter. And any hint of defiance was immediately punished. A prisoner would be attached to this chain and left to die. That was the punishment for error. You were left to die.
Below the camp was a stone quarry that was more than 1 km long and 110 m deep. Thousands of prisoners were sent here to work. There were between 1,000 and 4,000 men working in the quarry every day. Some of them carved stone, but those who carried it were exposed to even greater risk. It was very dangerous work, and they were often times killed. The work itself was created as torture. They died of exhaustion, and they died from the constant demands from the capos who always wanted more from them, working them to death.
Every stone extracted from the quarry was carried on a prisoner's back up this staircase. These 186 steps became a symbol of torture. The granite was carried up the steps on people's backs. Stones weighing 30, 40, or even 50 kilos every day for years. They had to move quickly beneath blows coming from all sides and in fear of falling. And when they fell, they took everyone down behind them, creating a chain of injuries. It was horrendous.
The Waffen-SS were trained to kill people. And their job in the quarry was not to produce stones. It was to produce murder. It was to kill people. It was to humiliate the inmates in the quarry. They combined the violence of the SS project of exterminating people with the project of creating building materials and exterminating people. This is a bad business model, but it is the business model of the SS.
The SS regularly made a spectacle out of a prisoner's death. This, the highest cliff in the quarry, was darkly nicknamed the "Parachutist's Wall." Men were forced to jump off this cliff. They were told that if they didn't do it of their own accord, they'd be beaten to death. They were then left to contemplate their fate, and given the choice, some of them chose to jump.
In addition to being used in Third Reich construction throughout Europe, the quarry stone was also used to build and enlarge the Mauthausen camp itself. These photos, rare relics in concentration camp history, are some of the only existing images documenting the work. They were taken on behalf of the camp's identification department and were saved from destruction by a handful of detainees who worked there.
In Spain, at the History Museum of Catalonia, 500 negatives from Mauthausen are carefully preserved in cold storage. They include photos of the liberation, but also 320 photos taken by the SS during the war. These images immortalized key moments in the camp's history, like the visit of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. There are also portraits of new inmates meant for their administrative files and photos of the prisoners at work.
Of course, the photographs also had a propagandistic function. The propagandistic idea of the SS was to show the concentration camps as orderly, well-functioning places with prisoners who were put to do hard labor but not maltreated. They were rather being educated to be good German citizens. They only show part of what the concentration camp really was. They're not necessarily fake, but there's so much more to the true story that was never photographed.
Many of the photos depict SS soldiers on duty or detainees that seem to work without surveillance or reprisals, as if the daily violence didn't even exist. For example, there are no photos of the dogs that were kept there to attack the prisoners. But other photos reveal the true horror of Mauthausen: photos of abandoned bodies. SS records caption them as "attempted escape."
In very few of these cases, it was really an attempt to escape by the prisoners. SS and also prisoner functionaries intentionally tried to force prisoners towards the camp fence, for example, by taking their cap and throwing it close to the fence, which then in turn would be interpreted by a guard in the watchtower as an attempt to flee. There was no exit, so to say.
In 1943, as the balance of power between the Third Reich and the Allied forces began to shift, Berlin gave orders to destroy all the negatives from the camps to erase any evidence of the crimes that were committed there. At the time, Francisco Boix, a Spanish political prisoner, worked with a few other detainees in the camp's photo lab. Risking their lives, they decided to save certain negatives from being destroyed. It was sensitive material and undeniable proof of what had actually taken place in the concentration camp.
They carefully wrapped the negatives and smuggled them out of the lab, passing them from hand to hand. While on work assignment outside the camp, they managed to hide them until the liberation with the help of Anna Pointner, an opponent of the Nazi regime. Anna Pointner's house had a wall out back, and they managed to hide packets of negatives in between the stones of that wall. Anna Pointner, Francisco Boix, and his co-detainees saved more than 2,000 photos.
We have a lot of archives from Mauthausen that we don't have from the other camps. But despite the large quantity of photos saved from destruction, certain sectors of the Mauthausen camp don't appear in any of them: buildings that are still there today, but which the SS attempted to erase from history. Places specially designed for torture and murder.
In January 1941, Mauthausen was determined to be a camp of no return. If you were sent to Mauthausen, you were not going to get out. The camp's building that was dedicated to extermination was known as the bunker. The upper section contained cramped cells meant to hold a specific type of prisoner.
Important people were held in those cells. These were specific detainees who had information that the Nazis wanted. They were condemned to death, but while they waited, they were tortured and made to talk. That was the prison. The basement contained the rooms used to exterminate the prisoners. They were killed individually with a bullet or in groups in a gas chamber. The victims all followed a predetermined path. First, they were taken to a room to be examined. Then, they were led through other rooms until they came to a door that only opened from the outside, which led to a shower.
We're in the gas chamber. They would cram at least 50 people into this 13m room. Once the door closed, a toxic gas known as Zyklon B was sent into the chamber from a room next door. From the moment when the gas was introduced into the gas chamber by a ventilation system, it took between 5 to 15 minutes until all the prisoners were dead. A peephole in the door allowed the SS to watch the prisoners die.
A trap door allowed them to vent the gas once the deed was done. The trap was opened with a lever that passed through a conduit to the other side where it could be opened with a handle. When the trap was opened, ventilation carried the toxic gas outside, and an hour or two later, they could open the door on this side again. Only 10% of the people who passed through that door came out alive. Those 10% worked here in the gas chambers and the crematorium ovens. An estimated 8,000 people were gassed in this room.
Inside the bunker were also a cold room for storing the bodies, a dissection room for recuperating gold teeth or for carrying out experiments, and crematorium ovens. On average, between 150 and 200 cadavers were incinerated every day. The ashes of the dead meant nothing. They were used as fertilizer, as dirt to level roads or burial grounds, or dumped in a public landfill. That's it. That's the great crime of the Nazis. They stuffed their ovens with people, treating them like they were nothing. That's just unforgivable.
Not too far from the Mauthausen fortress, a sub-camp was built to house detainees who were extracting the stone. Just 5 km to the west, it was also next to a granite quarry and was called Gusen. Before the sub-camp was built, Mauthausen detainees had to walk to the quarry under SS surveillance. Marching prisoners to and from Mauthausen took up time, and it also killed them before they could do the work that killed them. They decided to build a camp at Gusen in order to improve productivity at the Gusen quarry.
In 1940, a new camp was built to the north of Gusen. Due to the influx of prisoners, it grew even faster than Mauthausen had, until it became the largest concentration camp in Austria. By the end of 1941, there were actually 1,000 more prisoners at Gusen than there were at Mauthausen. After the war, the Gusen camp was razed. A few old buildings that were part of the camp were transformed into housing, like the "Jur Haus," the old main entrance to the camp. Almost nothing remains of the roll call square. Nothing reminds us of the many crimes that happened here. There were two gallows for hanging some prisoners, and still remaining is the basement of the kitchen.
The granite quarry is no longer used, but the industrial area around it still contains a lasting vestige dating from World War II: a gigantic stone crusher. The Nazis called it "the biggest one of all Europe." There was an elevator on the back side, and small basins filled the interior of this mill, and they were cut into pebbles. And sometimes humans were cut into pieces inside. They were not sent here for work only. Time of work and then time of death. That's the idea: dying by working. If someone survived Gusen, this was a very special chance.
We naively thought those thugs at Mauthausen were the best at perpetrating these horrific acts, but we quickly learned that those at Gusen were even better. The Gusen camp was run by SS Commander Karl Schimanski, who is known for being merciless. Walter Schimanski was 11 years old when his parents moved to Gusen. Back then, his father had just been named the camp director.
This is my father. That's my father. At home, he was someone else. But when he put on his uniform, he became a monster. Everyone in the camp was afraid of him. He was known as the devil of Gusen amongst the prisoners. They didn't speak of his father's work at home, but Walter passed through the SS part of the camp on occasion to go to the doctor or to get a haircut.
I was about 12 years old in this photo. I had just gotten a haircut. The hairdresser was actually a deportee. Sometimes on his way home, he'd walk along the barbed wire that sealed in the prisoners. That's where I saw things. When it was below zero, I saw half-naked prisoners being sprayed with cold water. People died right there, or they died a few days later when they got pneumonia. One day I asked my father, "Why do you do that? Why do you treat people like that?" And he said, "They're all parasites and criminals who want to destroy the Third Reich. Don't worry, they get what they deserve."
At the end of 1941, the Gusen camp counted almost 8,500 prisoners, and Mauthausen around 7,500, most of whom worked in the granite quarries. But as activity at the camps ramped up, changes on the war front forced Berlin to modify its strategy. In 1942, combat was raging between the Third Reich and the Russian forces. Hitler demanded that every available resource be mobilized to help arm the Third Reich forces. Deportees from all over Europe were sent to the Austrian camps at Mauthausen and Gusen to participate in the war effort.
New satellite camps were formed to train them in what became known as the Mauthausen system. A huge network of more than 40 sub-camps of Mauthausen was created all over the eastern part of the Austrian territories, mostly at places where there already was important armament or war industry. Between 1942 and 1943, the Allied air forces carried out large-scale bombings all over Nazi territory. In just a few months, over 200,000 bombs were dropped on Third Reich cities and factories.
To protect his arms industry, Hitler had to move all of his factories and hide them underground. Immense subterranean infrastructure was built in record time by Third Reich engineers using the camp prisoners as workers, at the cost of many lives. One of these colossal worksites was located near Camp Gusen, close to the small village of Sankt Georgen. It was here in 1943 that Gusen II came to be. Over many months, thousands of war prisoners dug tunnels 40m below the earth to create a gigantic underground complex known as "Beringkristall."
The Beringkristall tunnels were really state-of-the-art tunnels. They were dug by slave labor and then reinforced with reinforced concrete. This was a pretty new project. It's estimated that perhaps up to 9,000 prisoners died in constructing the tunnels. Between March 1944 and May 1945, Gusen II prisoners dug 8 and a half kilometers of tunnels. While most were destroyed after the war, 2 km of them remain today.
This immense underground complex was built to meet the needs of the German air force. This was where the Messerschmitt Company assembled the Me 262, the world's first operational jet-powered fighter aircraft. The Me 262 might have changed the course of the war, or certainly delayed the Allied victory, had it been produced earlier in the war. It presented a real threat to both bombers and Allied fighter planes. All of the industrial components have now disappeared, having been carried off by the Americans and the Soviets after the war. In total, over 950 Me 262 fuselages were produced here.
Approximately 80% of every fuselage ever produced for this type of aircraft was produced by inmates of Gusen here in this huge underground facility. So it was of extreme importance. It is certainly one of the largest, if not the largest, underground secret weapons factory of the Third Reich. Although the Me 262s were built near Gusen II, they were not the only miracle weapon Hitler built using prisoners from Austria's concentration camps. Another weapon in the Mauthausen system captured everyone's attention: the V-2 missile.
The V-2 was actually the first long-range missile ever produced. It was propelled by liquid fuel. There were some 5,000 missiles altogether produced and used in the war. These 13-ton missiles could carry 800 kg of explosives over a distance of 300 km. It was a revolutionary missile which was designed to be able to strike London from the Netherlands.
As part of the V-2 development plan, multiple sub-camps of Mauthausen were built in Austria: Wiener Neustadt, Ebensee, and the small camp of Redl-Zipf. In addition to being close to the railway tracks, the small village of Zipf had another advantage: a brewery at the foot of the hill, equipped with underground chambers for producing and storing beer. In 1943, the brewery was requisitioned by the SS to serve as a secret V-2 missile test site, and a new sub-camp was built in a neighboring field.
Deportees worked underground for 7 months to enlarge the chambers and build a 40m vertical shaft which connected the chambers to a hidden bunker in the forest. This is where a key piece of the German army's new weapon was tested: the V-2 missile propulsion unit. The propulsion units came by train directly into the tunnels to be unloaded in total secrecy. They were then taken by elevator up to the bunker.
Once the propulsion unit got to the top of the elevator, it was brought into the bunker via a set of rails and suspended about 3m high. The bunker is still pretty well preserved. You can notably see the rails they used to transport the unit from the elevator to the bunker. And you can see the metal part that supported the propulsion unit. The propulsion unit was then tilted so that the flame released during a test would shoot into this large trench.
The first test at Zipf took place on May 1st, 1944. Nazi scientists observed the experiment from behind a window in an observation bunker. It was a success for the SS. It was cause for celebration. Thanks to the infrastructure built by the prisoners, over 500 V-2 propulsion units were tested in Zipf before being sent to the front lines. There is a certain irony to it that prisoners had to work on weapons that would be used against themselves and against their nations.
The SS records indicate there were over 300 inmate deaths in Zipf during the facility's construction. Numerous other prisoners, exhausted by the inhumane conditions and rendered incapable of work, were sent back to the main camp in Mauthausen to die. Some were then even taken to another location, a dedicated killing facility: Hartheim Castle. Located 35 km west of Mauthausen, near the small town of Alkoven. It was called the "Hartheim Euthanasia Center." It was built inside a castle that was requisitioned by the Nazis before the war and outfitted for their "Aktion T4" project, which was designed to exterminate handicapped people. But in 1941, the Third Reich decided to end the project. The Hartheim Castle was then dedicated to another, even deadlier plan: "Aktion 14f13."
The staff of "Aktion T4" knew how to kill people in a very short time, in a very efficient way. That's why the Nazis used this know-how in mass murder. Hartheim became the extermination center for four concentration camps: Dachau, Ravensbrück, Gusen, and Mauthausen. Before the end of the war, the SS tried to get rid of all evidence of crimes in Hartheim. They destroyed the gas chamber, disassembled the crematorium oven, and blocked the chimney's conduit.
But nowadays, the archive depository is packed with vestiges. Recent digs carried out next to the castle revealed human remains and over 8,000 objects, including leftover pieces of infrastructure, dishes, and personal items. Most of them are belongings of the victims of "Aktion T4." But from the prisoners of the concentration camps, a few identification tags were found. Most of the tags are from prisoners from Gusen concentration camp, but also some from Mauthausen concentration camp. Cross-referencing Nazi registers with the plate registration numbers found at the castle made it possible to identify some of the victims who were executed in Hartheim. For example, we have the prisoner tag with the number 8570: Henry Leszczynski, he was a prisoner from Poland at Gusen concentration camp.
Not a single Hartheim survivor could provide testimony after the war. Some 30,000 people were sent there, and every single one of them was killed. All the prisoners who were brought to Hartheim Castle were killed in about 3 hours. No one of them stayed longer or stayed overnight here in the castle.
At the end of 1944, Nazi Germany was in disarray, and the Hartheim euthanasia center was closed. But the camp at Mauthausen was still active, and the final months of the war there were deadly. Some prisoners were specifically persecuted by the Nazis and knew there was no way they could escape death. Many of them were Slavic, and notably Soviets.
In February 1945, almost 600 Soviet officers were locked in Block 20 in Mauthausen. For weeks, the SS gave them next to nothing to eat. Knowing they were going to die, they decided to make a desperate attempt. One night in early February, they threw wet blankets over the electrified barbed wire and managed to climb over the enclosure wall by killing all capos and SS in their path. Over 400 of them managed to escape.
A mass escape was pretty rare from a concentration camp. It really showed that these Soviet prisoners had no hope. The Mauthausen camp commander mobilized all the local inhabitants to help the SS hunt the fugitives and threatened to punish anyone who helped them. The locals joined the SS in a bloody manhunt, cynically nicknamed the "Mauthausen Hunt."
The day after the escape, a dozen kilometers from the camp in the village of Schwitzberg, 14-year-old Anna Hako was getting ready for church with her mother when two strangers arrived at their house. They were scantily clad. They wore only tops and striped pants. They weren't even wearing shoes. And there was a lot of snow outside. It was really cold. The two strangers only asked for some food. But seeing how they were dressed, Anna's mother, Maria, immediately understood that the two men, who were named Nikolai and Mikhail, were escapees from the Mauthausen camp. Despite the danger, she agreed to let them into her home.
Much later, they told her why they had thought the family inside that home might have been willing to come to their aid. After fleeing Mauthausen through the forest and the fields, they looked around our house and they saw the cross near the barn. And that made them think they could knock on our door and that we were good people. That's good. Despite multiple raids by the SS, Nikolai and Mikhail remained hidden in the basement of the barn for 3 months until the liberation. They stayed one more month with us, and then they left with heavy hearts because we had practically become family to them. Mutual aid and fear had created very strong ties between us.
Of the 400 Soviet prisoners who managed to escape Mauthausen's Block 20, only 11 survived the manhunt. The day after the Soviet forces captured the Reichstag, as Hitler had committed suicide and the end of the war was imminent, the SS abandoned Mauthausen, leaving it to Austrian authorities. Two days later, the 11th US Armored Division liberated their camp.
When they arrived at Mauthausen and Gusen, they were somewhat prepared for what they would see, but nobody could be prepared. They were confronted, yeah, with a very difficult situation. Obviously, many starving prisoners close to death, and also at the same time, piles of dead prisoners. It only took 2 days for all the Mauthausen and Gusen sub-camps to be liberated, signaling the end of the Nazi hell in Austria.
In less than 7 years, the Mauthausen concentration camp system had exploited almost 200,000 prisoners. Of the 200,000, we think 120,000 died. Mauthausen had a reputation as being one of the worst camps in the system. It is important that the world learns that the high technology we are using today in everyday life was developed with the blood of the deported people from many, many European nations.
The Mauthausen fortress is one of the only remaining testaments to this dark part of Austria's history. The other camps were destroyed during the liberation and even seem to have been forgotten. People go to Mauthausen, and just a few ones have the idea there was a second camp of Gusen because Gusen was dropped. Even the idea, the remnants of Gusen, was dropped in Austria.
Today, multiple organizations and historians continue to fight to preserve Mauthausen's remains, one of the worst Nazi camp systems that ever existed, to honor those who lost their lives there.