Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

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little grey rabbit
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Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#1

Post by little grey rabbit » 10 Jan 2017, 05:25

I have come across an account of a reprisal on a Kapo at Ebensee camp. It seems to me surprisingly sadistic to be true - although I wouldn't rule it out. Has anyone read anything that might confirm it?

The reference I have is Storming the Eagle's Nest by Jim Ring (p 298-299). But the original reference is: The Straits of hell: The Chronicle of a Salonika Jew in the Nazi Extermination Camps, Auschwtiz, Mauthuasen, Melk, Ebensee (2005) by Moshe Ha-Elion

In Jim Ring's account
In scenes repeated at other concentration camps across what was left of the Reich, the inmates of Ebensee then turned against those who remained of their captors. Moshe Ha-Elion recounted that one of these was a Kapo - a prisoner in charge of supervising the camp labour. Gypsy Kapo - as he was known - was notorious for his cruelty. He was captured by a group of Russian-Ukrainian Jews who were then joined by a lynch mob. They beat the Kapo to the ground and stoned him till he seemed dead. They then set off carrying him to the camp's crematorium through the cordon of cadavers. The Kapo regained consciousness and began to struggle. Someone shouted, 'Let's burn him alive!' He cried in horror, seeing the end that await him. He was dragged to the crematorium and thrown onto the iron stretcher used for offering up the bodies to the furnace, shouting and screaming at the top of his voice. 'Someone took a long bar, which served for the purpose of pushing the corpses from the carriage into the oven and thrust the hook into the Capo's groin and pushed his body into the oven....the door of the oven was shut. The cries were no more heard.'
I would like in no way to suggest this was typical - obviously there were some reprisal killings, but hopefully few reprisal immolations. One possible objection is the Germans may have struggled to maintain sufficient fuel supplies to keep the crematoria running during the final collapse in early May 1945.

Then again, perhaps it is well known anecdote from other sources.

The Black Rabbit of Inlé
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#2

Post by The Black Rabbit of Inlé » 10 Jan 2017, 22:26

Benjamin Ferencz told the Washington Post that he had witnessed just such an incident:
While it was perfectly legal under military law to hand over suspects for further questioning to DPs, says Benjamin Ferencz, who was a lead U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals in 1945 and 1947, knowingly delivering suspects for execution was not. And of course the DPs were not interested in extracting information.

Ferencz, who today is 85 and lives in New York, cautions against making sweeping armchair moral judgments. "Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was," he says. "I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 680_5.html


The Black Rabbit of Inlé
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#3

Post by The Black Rabbit of Inlé » 10 Jan 2017, 22:36

On an official looking website about Ferencz, there's confirmation that he witnessed this murder at Ebensee:
In another nearby camp at Ebensee, slaves were used to dig large chambers out of the granite mountain as underground workshops for the aircraft industry. I directed a group of passing Germans to help bury the bodies of inmates strewn along the campgrounds. There, some inmates caught one of the SS guards as he was trying to flee—judging by the violence of the assault, he may have been the camp commandant. First he was beaten mercilessly. Then the mob tied him to one of the metal trays used to slide bodies into the crematorium. There he was slowly roasted alive, taking him in and out of the oven several times. I watched it happen and did nothing. It was not my duty to stop it, even if I could have, and frankly, I was not inclined to try. There seemed to be no limit to human brutality in wartime. I headed back to Munich to write my reports. They would serve as the basis for later war crimes prosecutions. I was grateful that the war was coming to an end. I learned that there never has been, and never will be, a war without atrocities. The only way to prevent such cruel crimes was to prevent war itself.

http://www.benferencz.org/1943-1946.html
Tom Hofmann quotes from this text in his book about Ferencz [judging by a google books search].

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TheSearchers
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#4

Post by TheSearchers » 08 Aug 2020, 21:48

"The Ukrainian Weekly" No. 18, dated 5 May 2002 contains an article "Dying and living in Ebensee: recollections of prisoner No. 120482" (author: Dr. Michael Marunchak) about this incident:
http://ukrweekly.com/archive/pdf3/2002/ ... 002-18.pdf
By noon, there was a new order in the camp. The masses took to emptying the food stores. The kapos, block leaders, and the schreibers disappeared. The inmates remembered all the cruelty of this “crowned” elite, and retribution began. From one of our hospital windows we watched how these anointed camp leaders fled past the barbed wire from the throng. The guards did not shoot after them. The longest search was for the kapo called Tsyhan (“Gypsy”), named Hartmann. He could not hide himself in time. He was pulled from outside the fence and thrown live into the crematorium. The search was then on for the high-ranked Kapo from Melk, also called Tsyhan, who during his “reign” had gutted hundreds of inmates alive. But this monster, known to so many, did escape the people’s justice and was tried by military court only after the war. Jean Lafitte, a French inmate, wrote in his memoirs “Die Lebenden”, that 52 functionaries of the camp died at the hand of this prima eval justice. By evening the camp was calm.
Further information on author and source for the article above:
"Dr. Michael Marunchak, 87, lives in Winnipeg. He is a survivor of the Nazi prison in Lviv, Ukraine, and the camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Ebensee. He is a founder of the World League of Ukrainian Political Prisoners, and the author of close to 30 books, most on the history of Ukrainians in Canada, and about the experiences of Ukrainian political prisoners in Nazi Germany. This text was taken and translated from his memoir “Ukrainian Political Prisoners in Nazi Concentration Camps,” Winnipeg: World League of Ukrainian Political Prisoners, 1996. 364 pp. An abridged version of this article appeared in The Globe and Mail on Easter Saturday, April 14, 2001."

Dr Marunchak passed away on 21 November 2004 at the age of 80:
http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/2004/510412.shtml
https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/1995 ... -marunchak

This site reveals the following about the capo Tsyhan named Hartmann:
Another notorious Kapo, who was in charge of some 700 prisoners, was the illiterate German gypsy Hartmann. No day went by when he not returned to camp with at least three dead bodies, and this excluded any prisoners who died from natural causes. When the camp was liberated, he was set upon and killed by his fellow countrymen.
http://dachaukz.blogspot.com/2012/11/eb ... art-2.html
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#5

Post by TheSearchers » 09 Aug 2020, 23:22

Correction: There was a typo in #4 above. Dr Marunchak passed away at the age of 90, not 80.
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#6

Post by David Thompson » 10 Aug 2020, 18:33

Two posts from history1 -- one containing an opinion rant and one with insults directed at another member -- were removed pursuant to the forum and section rules.

history1 -- review those rules before you post here again.

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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#7

Post by TheSearchers » 10 Aug 2020, 18:45

More traces, but they are vague as well:
"After the SS retreated shortly before the liberation, the SS handlers were settled.

Claus*** reported on this from the Ebensee concentration camp:
“On my block 17 a gypsy capo is taken out of bed who had taken the lives to hundreds of Jews and other prisoners in various camps. In some minutes he's done."

Concentration camp survivor Fritz Ruske also spoke in an article about a large number of kapos judged by prisoners. He was deported from the Melk concentration camp to Ebensee where he had witnessed the liberation."

Source: http://othes.univie.ac.at/26530/1/2013- ... 500498.pdf (DE language; page 106)
Diplomarbeit "Erinnern, Berichten, Bewahren. Displaced Persons schildern ihre Situation in Österreich und Deutschland 1945-1947. Eine Inhaltsanalyse der DP-Zeitungen „Landsberger Lager-Cajtung“, „Nazi-Opfer/Der KZ-Häftling“ und „D.P. Express“
verfasst von Sandra Knopp
Wien, 2013; Studienkennzahl lt. Studienblatt: A 312

*** probably Claus Salomon (see footnote on page 105)

"Some minutes" does not really seem to match with the other accounts. But then again, there may have been several capos with a Roma or Sinti background at the time, who knows.
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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#8

Post by wm » 10 Aug 2020, 20:27

Those people weren't soldiers and couldn't become POWs.

And it happened frequently, for example in KL Gusen most kapos were killed.

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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#9

Post by David Thompson » 10 Aug 2020, 21:09

An off-topic post from history1 was removed pursuant to the forum and section rules.

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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#10

Post by history1 » 10 Aug 2020, 21:12

wm wrote:
10 Aug 2020, 20:27
Those people weren't soldiers and couldn't become POWs.

And it happened frequently, for example in KL Gusen most kapos were killed.
Do you claim that the man in the video I linked to and which got tortured by a former inmate is not a POW?

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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#11

Post by history1 » 10 Aug 2020, 21:35

TheSearchers wrote:
10 Aug 2020, 18:45
[...] "Some minutes" does not really seem to match with the other accounts. But then again, there may have been several capos with a Roma or Sinti background at the time, who knows.
"Some minutes" is obviously not the only error in this work. On p. 103 the author writes
[...]
Die KZ-Häftlinge mussten nicht nur vonseiten der SS und des KZ-Personals Gewalt fürchten.
In den Lagern quälten auch Funktionshäftlinge, sogenannte „Kapos“, die Gefangenen.

= The concentration camp prisoners had to fear violence not only from the SS and the concentration camp personnel. In the camps, prisoner functionaries, so-called 'Kapos', also tortured the prisoners.
Such generalisations are never correct. Not every Kapo did turn against his fellow inmates.

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Re: Liberation-reprisal at Ebensee

#12

Post by TheSearchers » 10 Aug 2020, 23:53

wm wrote:
10 Aug 2020, 20:27
And it happened frequently, for example in KL Gusen most kapos were killed.
The point of this thread was not that the former inmates sought reprisal with killings as such. The point was the particularly sadistic way the liberated inmates took it out on the Kapo in this case.

As far as I am concerned, another point is that someone like Benjamin Ferencz - who turned out to become the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen-trial a few years later - was actually eye-witnessing this atrocity without feeling inclined to intervene and is even stressing that on his(?) website some 80 years later.
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