chalutzim
Member
Joined: 09 Nov 2002
Posts: 434
Location: Brazil
Posted: Tue Aug 05, 2003 5:30 pm
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Germanica wrote:
As far as I know, all camps that existed on German and Austrian soil were concentration camps, used for the labour and internment of those the NSDAP deemed as threats. Gas chambers may have existed, but it is plausible that such structures were for the purpose of de-lousing/disinfection. Even Simon Wiesenthal has stated that "no extermination camps existed on German soil".
Really?
Quote:
Mauthausen
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Mauthausen
With Mauthausen, we begin to deal with the type of concentration camp (Konzentrationslager) that was not specifically designed as an extermination center (Vernichtungslager) as well (as Auschwitz and Maidanek were). Among such camps Mauthausen is a special case: more prisoners were killed by gas there than in any of the others. Some victims were gassed in the main camp; some in Gusen, its largest annex; and some in the gas van that shuttled between Mauthausen and Gusen.
In the main camp, set up in August 1938 east of Linz, work on a gas chamber was started in the autumn of 1941. It was in the cellar of the bunker that served as a prison, near which the crematoria were also located. It was a windowless room, 3.8 meters long by 3.5 wide, disguised as a shower room. A ventilating system had been installed. The walls were partly tiled, and the two doors could be hermetically sealed. All the switches and faucets for lighting, ventilation, water, and heat were outside the room. From a neighboring room, called "the gas cell," the gas was directed into the room through an enameled pipe, which had a slot in it about a meter long on the side nearest the wall (in other words, on the side invisible from the room). The remains of this gassing facility can still be seen today.
When the SS men evacuated Mauthausen, they considered it necessary to kill the prisoners who had been obliged to work in the crematorium and gas chambers until the end, because these men knew too many secrets. Three of them, however - Johann Kanduth, Wilhelm Ornstein, and David Zimet - managed to hide while the others were shot on 2 May 1945.
Less than a week later the war in Europe was over, and before a month was out those concentration camp officials that had been captured began having to answer for their crimes. On 23 May the commandant of Mauthausen, SS-Standartenfiihrer Franz Ziereis, stated that the gassing facility had been built on the basis of arrangements made by SS-Gruppenfiihrer Richard Glucks, then inspector of concentration camps, and under the supervision of the garrisor doctor, SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Eduard Krebsbach. But Krebsbach, brought before the court, put the blame on a pharmacist, SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Erich Wasitzky, although Krebsbach did admit to having taken part personally in the selection of "about two thousand prisoners of all nationalities sent to their death in the gas chamber," and in the gassing of "about two to three hundred prisoners." Of the SS leaders who after the liberation were accused of sharing responsibility for what happened at Mauthausen, none tried to deny the existence of a gas chamber there.
It was a court at Hagen in Westphalia that studied the gassings at Mauthausen in the greatest detail. The accused, former SS-Hauptscharfiihrer Martin Roth, had been the SS leader of the work detail in charge of the crematorium from early May 1940 until the camp was liberated. He admitted that between March 1942 and the end of April 1945 he had taken part in the murder by Zyklon B of 1,692 prisoners, and in other executions as well.
The reasons given for his conviction were based on testimony given by numerous witnesses, as well as on documents that the SS had not had time to destroy. These documents consisted of the death registers (the "books of the dead" ) that were kept in the various sections of the camp; an "execution book": and a book of "cases of unnatural death" kept by the political division. Other documents cited were "reports on changes in strength" (Verdnderungsmeldungen) that, under the heading "Departures," gave the names of the prisoners who had been executed.
Among the depositions cited in the sentence are those by members of the political division who had belonged to the special work detail, assigned to the crematorium. Of particular interest are the statements made by Kanduth, leader of the work detail, and his fellow-prisoner Ornstein. From 18 or 19 August 1944 to 2 May 1945 Ornstein had been the secretary of this work detail, and he turned over to the court the notes he had made in that capacity.
In the judgment rendered against Roth, the gassing process is described as follows:
If a gassing was to take place, . . . Roth gave orders to one of the prisoners of the crematorium work detail, who were his subordinates, usually to the witness Kanduth, to heat a brick in the crematory oven. Roth took the burning-hot brick in a shovel and placed it in the apparatus for admitting the gas. The apparatus consisted of a metal chest with a removable cover, which could be hermetically sealed by means of wing screws and airtight packing. By giving off heat, the brick led to the quick release of the poison gas, which was fixed to shreds of paper.
Meanwhile, the victims . . . had been led to the cloakroom, where they were to undress. Then they went into the neighboring room, where there were several SS noncommissioned officers, dressed in white coats. . . . These latter stuck a wooden spatula into the victims' mouths to see if they had any gold teeth. If so, the prisoner was marked with a colored cross on the chest or the back. Then the victims were taken . . . into the tiled gas chamber that had shower fixtures. . . .
Barely fifteen minutes after the gas had began streaming into the room, the accused, Roth, saw through the peephole in one of the two doors that none of the victims was still moving, and he turned on the fan . . . that sucked up the gas into a chimney and expelled it outside. . . . After checking - by means of colored paper prepared for the purpose - that there was no more gas inside, Roth then opened both doors of the gas chamber and ordered the prisoners under his command to carry the corpses to the crematorium morgue. . . .
Before cremation, . . . the female victims' long hair was cut and the SS dentists extracted the gold teeth from the victims marked with a cross. The witness Tiefenbacher, who belonged to the corpse carriers' detail, also had to do this work several times. Roth took the gold teeth in little bags to a camp office designated for the purpose; from there, what was known as "dental gold" was sent to the Reich Security Main Office.
Among the firms that furnished Zyklon B to the camp was Slupetzky, a supplier of disinfectants located in Linz. Its owner, Anton Slupetzky, was an Obersturmbannfuhrer in the Sturmabteilungen, commonly known as the SA - the brown-shirted "storm troopers." He personally participated in gassings at Mauthausen and Gusen. In addition, he attended the well-known "prussic-acid congress" held in Frankfurt-am-Main on 27 and 28 January 1944. It was there that the SS leadership informed the representatives of the production and distribution firms, such as Degesch (Frankfurt), Tesch and Stabenow (Hamburg), Heerdt-Lingler (Frankfurt), the Dessau Works, and I. G. Farbenindustrie, of further plans to use Zyklon B.
In the verdict of the Hagen Court, a "special action" (gassing) is described in detail, using depositions and documents:
On 24 October 1942, by order of the Reich Security Main Office, 261 Czech prisoners were executed, including at least 130 women and children. They were asphyxiated in the gas chamber, in successive groups, the men and women separately, according to the process alreadv described. This operation was very probably carried out as a consequence of the shooting on 29 May 1942 of SS-Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Security Main Office, who died as a result on 4 June 1942.
The Czechs had arrived a few days earlier at the Mauthausen camp. They were wearing their city clothes, and most of them - especially the women, some of whom were pregnant - were housed in the bunker. The day of the execution, when they were taken in groups to the cloakroom, then to the vestibule of the gas chamber, where they were examined by the SS men in white coats looking for gold teeth, they suspected nothing. . . .
When they entered the gas chamber, some of them were even laughing, and all were expecting to take a shower. Only a group of men . . . understood, at the very last moment, when the door to the gas chamber was closed, why they had really been taken there. They expressed their realization by yelling "Heinous Murderers!" and banging desperately against the doors of the room. The whole operation took more than twenty-four hours. . . .
Although the gassings were supposed to be carried out in strict secrecy, this order naturally did not mean that they were kept secret from the National Socialist leaders. Kanduth, the former prisoner who had worked at the crematorium, remembered the leaders he had seen: "I myself saw Obersturmfuhrer Karl Schulze, in the company of Kaltenbrunner, Eigruber, Ziereis . . . tour the gas chamber in 1942 or 1943; I don't remember the date exactly. On that occasion the prisoners, men and women, were led from the bunker and executed. Three methods were used: hanging, a bullet in the nape of the neck, and gassing. After the execution session, the SS leaders present came out of the gas chamber, laughing, and went into the courtyard of the bunker."
Ernst Kaltenbrunner had succeeded Heydrich as head of the Reich Security Main Office; August Eigruber was the Reichsstatthalter (governor) as well as the Gauleiter (district party leader) of Upper Austria, then known as Oberdonau, or the Upper Danube.
Murders continued to take place in the gas chambers of the main camp until just before Mauthausen was liberated. During the last weeks, the camp administration tried feverishly to eliminate the sick, whose numbers kept increasing. Vratislav Busek, a Czech prisoner who was the sick-camp secretary in the Mauthausen base-camp sector, noted that between 21 and 25 April 1945, 1.411 sick prisoners were taken from the "sick-camp" to the gas chamber. The number of victims would have been still higher if the prisoners belonging to the camp staff had not succeeded in saving several hundred. In the final days, many Austrian antifascists who had been deported to Mauthausen were murdered in the gas chamber. The last gassing took place on 28 April. It was ordered for reasons quite different from the earlier ones: Eigruber indicated that "the Allies must not find in the Alpine provinces any elements who would be inclined to collaborate in reconstruction."
During the following days, the SS men removed the technical equipment and walled up the opening between the gas chamber and the little adjoining room from which the gassing operations were controlled. The pipe through which gas was introduced into the gas chamber was also removed.
It is impossible to say exactly how many victims were claimed by the gas chamber in the main camp. The files that have been preserved give information on "cases of unnatural death," but there were other means besides the gas chamber of inflicting "unnatural death" on a prisoner. On the basis of research carried out by the courts, which never accepted anything but reliable minimum figures, the total has been estimated at 3,455 dead.
I
In the annex camp, Gusen, incontrovertible proof has been found of two gassings. On 2 March 1942, a number of sick Soviet prisoners of war were murdered with Zyklon B. The Polish prisoner Jerzy Osuchowski, who was secretary of the block where these prisoners were housed, later stated that 164 men were gassed on that day.
A still larger gassing operation took place in Gusen on 21 and 22 April 1945, when the camp command decided to free Gusen from the burden of the sick and those unable to work, in order to make space for expected new arrivals. Some German prisoners - block leaders and heads of work details (kapos) - who were assigned to this job dared to show that they were against it. The; were told that if they refused to obey they would never get out of the camp alive. The gassing took place in two sessions, because there were too many victims to be killed all at once. Among the 684 prisoners whose names were written that day in "the book of the dead," at least two were in perfect health: Wladyslaw Wozniak and Piotr Grzelak, young Poles who had been surprised by an SS man marking the changing contours of the front on a map I
The prisoners employed in the camp hospital, and in particular the two Polish doctors, Anton Goscinski and Adam Konieczny, tried to oppose the gassing of the sick and of the two young men who had been condemned to death. All they could do for these two was to put them to sleep with a shot of Evipan before they were transferred to block 31, where the gassings were to take place. Because he had been unable to prevent the mass murder of his patients, Dr. Konieczny committed suicide on the afternoon of 24 April by taking drugs himself.
There are indications that other gassings also took place at Gusen, but concrete evidence is lacking.
Many statements made after the war by SS members and prisoners who had taken part in the operations show that gassing at Mauthausen and Gusen was done not only in a gas chamber and in barracks temporarily equipped for the purpose but also in gas vans. When it took place in the vans, the gassing was usually done during the journey between Mauthausen and Gusen, a distance of about five kilometers. In 1961 a former inmate named Joseph Schoeps was tried for his role as prisoner leader of the quarantine camp (blocks 16 to 20) from the autumn of 1941 to the autumn of 1942. The grounds for the verdict of acquittal included the following testimony: "The gas van was an airtight closed truck into which exhaust fumes, and possibly other gases, were directed. Sometimes the van shuttled between Mauthausen and Gusen: in each of the camps prisoners, most of them sick, were loaded into the van, and their bodies were unloaded at the other end. Sometimes it drove around inside the Mauthausen camp until its human load was no longer alive, and then took the load to the crematorium. . . . It was the SS men, and in particular the garrison physician, Dr. Krebsbach, who chose the victims. "
The execution of Soviet war prisoners in a gas van was confirmed by another former prisoner, Hans Kammerer, the prisoner leader of block 17: "The Russian war prisoners were taken to Gusen in the gas van, and they died, asphyxiated, during the journey. In this operation, which I personally knew about, more than a hundred Russians were killed."
A letter from SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Walter Rauff, dated 26 March 1942, reveals that the garrison doctor had ordered a "special vehicle" of the type used by Rauff's own services in occupied parts of the Soviet Union (see chapter 4). Rauff begins by describing the delays in fitting out the vans. As soon as the work is finished, he continues, "I shall be ready to put one of these special vans at the disposal of the Mauthausen concentration camp for a given length of time. . . . However, as I suppose that the camp cannot wait indefinitely for it to be delivered, I am requesting the delivery of steel bottles of carbon monoxide or other auxiliary means necessary for execution."
The vehicle was delivered. The camp commandant, Ziereis, admitted that he had driven such a vehicle himself several times. The prisoners who were locked in the van at Mauthausen and killed during the trip were unloaded at Gusen and their bodies burned there, and vice versa. But it cannot be said with certainty how many times the van was used. One witness talks about fifteen trips; another thinks he remembers at least twenty; a third is sure he counted forty-seven round trips. If we assume that about thirty prisoners, most of them sick, were killed during each trip, and if we remember that each instance included two trips, we may conclude that between nine hundred and twenty-eight hundred prisoners were killed under these circumstances.
Former SS-Hauptscharfuhrer Johann Haider, who ran the camp secretariat, later explained how gassings were camouflaged: "For gassings that took place in the gas chamber inside the Mauthausen camp, not `gassing' but, most of the time, 'execution' was indicated as the cause of death."
Furthermore, the cause of death was not indicated in the same way in the various places where the death was registered - the lists of "departures" or "changes in strength" that were prepared by the secretaries of the political division, of the prison, or of various offices. In the garrison physician's "book of the dead," for example, in the column indicating the place of death, we find under the dates of 22, 24, and 25 April 1945 the word "gaz," not capitalized, after the notation "in the prison." The word was written by the secretary, Josef Ulbrecht, a prisoner of Czech nationality. Not knowing how to spell "gas" in German, he wrote it phonetically, with a z instead of an s.
The register known as the "operations book" of the Gusen hospital was really a death register; parts of the original are preserved in Vienna. The last volume lists all the deaths chronologically, beginning with no. 13,651 (12 April 1943) and continuing through 1 May 1945. For the final days (2 to 5 May 1945), typewritten lists were added.
From all the documents and indications available, it is clear that between March 1942 and 28 April 1945, gassings claimed more than five thousand victims at Mauthausen (see note 39). Most of them were Soviet citizens, but there were many Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles as well, and, in the last period of the murders, mostly members of the Austrian resistance, though also Germans, Italians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, and citizens of other countries.
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Work cited: Nazi Mass Murder - A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas (YUP, 1993).
posted by Hebden in the "CODOH" Forum (though currently deleted)
http://pub86.ezboard.com/frodohforumfrm ... ID=5.topic
by Lucius Felix Silla on 04 Aug 2003 18:34 
