Mauthausen Concentration Camp Tour

One of the things I had most been looking forward to do while in Europe was to visit a concentration camp. On May 26th I finally had that opportunity when I took a group tour to a lesser-known camp, Mauthausen, as part of my CSI Vienna cultural exchange class. The tour, combined with an approximately 3-hour bus ride each way, was an all day affair. But it was definitely worth it – while I've read a good deal about the Holocaust, actually seeing and walking inside a concentration camp was a very interesting and, even moreso, a very disturbing experience.

Mauthausen concentration camp is located in by the small neighboring town of Mauthausen, which was then part of Nazi Germany but today is part of Austria. The camp itself was designed to hold only 5,000 people, yet at its peak over 22,000 prisoners were held there. To give a sense of perspective, only 2,000 people lived in Mauthausen at the time. Our tour guide described the camp as a city in and of itself (albeit one pretty much totally removed from what we would define as a city today). Over 200,000 people from over 35 nations were brought to Mauthausen, and well over half of those died there.

The main entrance to Mauthausen.

At its core, the concentration camp system was an industry to eliminate those who did not fit into Nazi ideology. In addition to the more well-known religious (such as Jews and Gypsies), racial (Slavic peoples), and political (communists, social democrats, and more generally anyone openly dissenting from Nazi ideology), our tour guide reminded us that many of those people brought to camps like Mauthausen suffered because they were deemed “asocial”. The tour guide mentioned one man from Vienna was brought to, and eventually died at, Mauthausen because he was deemed “shy of work”. And the story didn't even end with his death – the man's wife received a letter a few months later from the SS. In it, they claimed her husband had died of a heart attack. Moreover, the SS used her husband's death as an opportunity to try and make money - in the letter they claimed that the body had to be cremated for 'hygienic reasons,' but offered that she could purchase what was, supposedly anyways, his ashes in an urn for a substantial amount of money.

Anyways, the tour guide took my group on a tour following the process by which new prisoners were initiated into the camp. The path up to the camp was itself very brutal - for example, the tour guide mentioned that, of a group of 25 healthy, mid-20s Polish men being brought to the camp, only 19 made it from the hill from the train alive. Those that survived were likely saw a yellow cloud hanging over the camp. This, according to a former Italian prisoner, was the result of fumes gathering from the crematory when the air pressure was low. In other words, a literal cloud of death hung over the camp; an apt preview of what was to come for most of those brought to Mauthausen.

Once they made it through the gates to the camp, prisoners would go through what were euphemistically referred to as the “formalities of admittance.” Prisoners were first taken to what was called the “wailing wall”, where they had to give up all their belongings, were stripped of their clothes, and were then, naked, made to stand facing the wall. They were sometimes left standing there in place for hours or even days on end – the tour guide mentioned that one group, for whatever reason, was forced to remain standing at the wall for 3 days straight. The camp leader, Franz Ziereis, welcomed new arrivals with his dogs. Any resistance or protest by the prisoners to their new and appealing environment would result in said prisoner being torn apart by Ziereis's dogs in front of the rest of the prisoners.

The wailing wall, where prisoners, upon entering the camp, were stripped of their belongings, their clothing, and were then often forced to stand for hours or even days on end facing the wall.

After that introduction to what kind of life awaited at Mauthausen, prisoners were led to the shower room. Given everything seen so far you might assume that is also a euphemism, but in this case the Nazis meant literally what they said. Of course, showers weren't provided for the prisoner's benefit, but instead were there for logistical reasons: the SS, not wanting to lose their workforce, feared the spread of epidemics in the tightly-packed camp. So, for the sake of greater war production, new groups of prisoners were forced to stand naked in the shower room while being washed off.

Even so, the shower could and was used as an instrument of killing. The tour guide described what was called a “shock shower”. The guards would rapidly (every minute or so) alternate between very hot and very cold water in the group shower, the shock of which would kill weaker prisoners. Efficiency was the rationale behind this - viewing each prisoner solely as a temporary source of labor, the Nazis only wanted to invest their resources (i.e. feed and cloth) those prisoners that would last the longest. The shock shower and the previously-mentioned process of forcing prisoners to stand naked for hours or days on end at the wailing wall were thereby designed to weed out less healthy, and thus less valuable, workers.

Not a euphemism, the shower room was actually used to clean prisoners. Of course, the purpose of this was solely to prevent the spread of disease in the camp (bad for productivity), and in any case the Nazis still found ways to utilize it as an instrument of killing.

After the showers, new prisoners were stripped of all their bodily hair by other camp inmates. Given the sheer volume of new admittances, this had to be done very quickly. You can imagine what the mix of impatient guards and razor blades often led to. After being stripped of their hair (and probably a good amount of skin too), the prisoners were then covered in disinfectant fluid for hygienic reasons.

Onto the barracks. Each was designed to house 300 prisoners, but throughout much of the camp's existence they held between of 600 to 800 prisoners. As you can see in one of the photos, the central room of the barracks I entered has 8 rocks on the ground. These were where the barrack's 8 toilets once stood – 8 toilets for over 600 people. Not only that, but inmates only had 30 minutes each day to make their beds, eat, shower, and to use the toilet. Obviously that was not enough time for each prisoner to do everything. The tour guide mentioned one prisoner's recollections - he had to think along the lines of “can I afford to go to the toilet today, or should I wait until tomorrow? If he went to the toilet, there might not be enough time for him to eat, which would leave him less likely to survive another day of harsh manual labor. And even if he managed to do both, it was highly unlikely there would be enough time to shower, leaving him more susceptible to disease. I can't even begin to imagine what being confronted daily with those kind of dilemmas must have been like.

One of the camp's cremators

Most prisoners were made to work in the quarry, carrying stones weighing between 80 to 120 pounds along a very hazardous path for 10 to 12 hours a day. That alone would be torture. But compounding the woes of the inmates was their lack of adequate sustenance. Just how bad was it? The tour guide mentioned that in 1942 the Nazis carried out a survey of the health conditions. This was at the peak of Nazi power, a time when, if they wanted, the Nazis could have supplied prisoners with adequate food. The results speak for themselves: the average weight of prisoners deemed 'healthy' was only 48 kgs (105 pounds). And the amount of food the prisoners received was only enough to keep a fully bed-ridden person healthy. If anything, I'm surprised the average life expectancy was as high as 2 weeks.

The tour guide recounted that a survivor once told him that you have to be hesitant to call death in the camp a death because, by that point, they were so tired and wasted away. While the image I had of death in the Holocaust was of the mechanized, almost assembly-line style process of the gas chambers, overall this was the fate of most victims: being reduced to an almost-unhuman entity lying in its own waste in a corner, avoided even by fellow prisoners (who didn't want to contemplate that this would likely be their fate in a matter of weeks). Compared to that, the fairly quick death of the gas chambers seems almost humane.

Still, while not the primary means of death Mauthausen did contain a gas chamber. It is pretty self-explanatory what happened there, but one interesting thing I did learn was about the “crematory commandos” (or something like that). They were prisoners whose job it was to pick up dead bodies from around the camp and bring them down the crematory (the reason, again, being for hygienic reasons). As the defeat of the Nazi regime became imminent the Nazis attempted to kill these prisoners, as they knew all of the Nazis's secrets and thus could testify to the allies about the full extent of what went on at the camps. Fortunately, the tour guide mentioned that at least three are known to have survived to tell what happened.

The "Stairs of Death", which many prisoners had to climb for hours on end, while carrying 100+ pound stones from the quarry below, while operating on a totally insufficient diet, and without the aid of the stone steps you see there in the photo (which were put in some time after WWII for tour groups).

Two stories from survivors told by our tour guide stood out most to me. The first was a recollection one prisoner had while walking down to the quarry. On the way past the gate he looked at one of the guards, and the guard looked back. In that instance, this man thought that, if circumstances were different, their positions could well have been reversed. That I think is probably the most frightening aspect about the Holocaust of all – that most of its participates (soldiers, guards, etc) were basically normal people. Their motivations to do this kind of work were, in their own words, things like wanting to have a secure job, a social group where they would fit in, not having to go to the front, and so on. That in no way excuses their crimes, but it is a reminder that the Nazis were, at their core, human. Given the right conditions, such atrocities could happen again, and indeed have in Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and so on.

The second, which I thing speaks most deeply about the horrors of the concentration camps themselves, was a story told by a survivor that the tour guide called the most honest person he had ever met. This man recalled that one day he woke up and noticed that his father was not moving. He said that he had hoped his father was indeed dead, as he knew his father had saved a piece of bread from the previous day to eat in the morning, which the son wanted to survive. The story (and unfortunately I'm probably missing some details) I think illustrates dramatically the depths of dehumanization brought on by life at the camp. As the tour guide said, to really understand life in the concentration camps you have to rethink or forget everything you know about how humans relate to one another.


Additional photos are here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/32227991@N02/sets/72157619071246511/

Also, a couple articles with additional information on the camp:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005196
http://en.mauthausen-memorial.at/index_open.php