Mauthausen gas chambers again

[Lucius Felix Silla]

Wulpe wrote:

"Mauthausen is classified as a concentration camp, although it had gas chambers. "

Proofs and sources for this statement?

Best Regards
LFS

[Wulpe]

Wulpe wrote:

"Mauthausen is classified as a concentration camp, although it had gas chambers. "

Proofs and sources for this statement?

Best Regards
LFS

"Mauthausen is classified as a concentration camp..." - proof and source is the graphic in the first post

"... although it had gas chambers."

Is this not common knowledge ? I have been there twice with school, once at the age of 13, and once at the age of 17. It´s quite usual for austrian schools to send their pupils there.

From its official establishment until the liberation of the camp by the 3rd U.S. Army on 5 May 1945 altogether almost 200,000 prisoners from numerous European and non-European countries had to endure the inhuman conditions of internment and torture by the SS. More than half of them did not survive their imprisonment. The prisoners died of exhaustion as a consequence of the exploitation of their labour power, of epidemics due to the disastrous hygienic conditions, were tortured to death, shot by SS guards or gassed in the gas chambers of Mauthausen, in the sub-camp Gusen and in the Hartheim “Euthanasia institution”.

Source: Memorial website (Austrian Ministry of the Interior)

[Lucius Felix Silla]

Wurpe write:

""Is this not common knowledge [the existence of gas chamber of Mauthausen] ? I have been there twice with school, once at the age of 13, and once at the age of 17. It´s quite usual for austrian schools to send their pupils there. ""

Me too i have been numerous times at Mauthausen, but the explications given by the guides of the Museum were so confused and unreliables that i have think if all this is serious. Nobody have explicate for me
- what gas was employed;
- how gas enters in the supposed "gas chamber";
- what system exist to ventilate the "gas chamber";
Maybe you can help me to resolve this mistery....
So the "proof" of the existence of the "gas chambers" (sic!) at Mauthausen is photo nr.3. I'm sorry, but the room looks to me like nothing more than a simple shower room and one can see nothing that would lead one to think that it was a homicidal gas chamber with all the equipment which in such a case would have been indispensable.

Also noted historians have much doubts about the existence of this alleged "gas chamber".
According to Yehuda Bauer," A History of the Holocaust ", Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, assisted by Nili Keren, Toronto, Franklin Watts Publisher, 1982, p. 209:
<<Although no gassings took place at Mauthausen, many Jews, as well as non-Jews, died there in a process the Nazis called "extermination through labor.">>
Olga Wormser-Migot, author of that doctoral dissertation, " Le Système concentrationnaire nazi, 1933-1945", Presses Universitaires de France, 1968 ( p. 541), wrote that, in spite of the confessions of the SS after the war and some "testimonies" claiming there was a gas chamber in the camp at Mauthausen, she does not believe it and thinks that such allegations "seem to be nothing more than myths." (fr. or. "ces affirmations nous paraissent de l'ordre du mythe"). She says also that a large number of prisoners denied the existence of such a gas chamber but unfortunately she does not give the name of those prisoners.

For photos nr.1 and 2 (Hartheim Castle and Gusen "gas chambers") you show me photos of simple rooms?

This don't signify, obviously, to deny, but a little of attention in this delicate matter is necessary.

Best regards
LFS

[David Thompson]

Additional material on the Mauthausen gas chambers may be found on these threads:

Mauthausen
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=15149

Claims of forged, altered or missing evidence (p. 14)
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=14260

The last words of Franz Ziereis
http://www.thirdreichforum.com/viewtopi ... ht=ziereis

[Wulpe]

Me too i have been numerous times at Mauthausen [...] So the "proof" of the existence of the "gas chambers" (sic!) at Mauthausen is photo nr.3. [...] For photos nr.1 and 2 (Hartheim Castle and Gusen "gas chambers") you show me photos of simple rooms?

I find it hard to believe that you have been at Mauthasen "numerous times" when you didn´t recognize that photo 1 and 2 show the entry to the gas chamber on photo 3, and have nothing to do with Hartheim or Gusen .... (which I never claimed or implied)

Anyway, unless someone thinks that gas chambers didn´t exist at all, nowhere in any camp, I still fail to see a reason why several people should fabricate a conspiracy, which could only weaken their agenda when discovered, to make a point already well known.

To put it cynical: one gas chamber more or less, does it matter ? Why would they take the risk to fake the Mauthausen one ?

[Lucius Felix Silla]

Dear Mr. David Thompson,

Thank You for Your suggestions.
The materials and opinions posted by various members are very interesting.
As for the Ziereis "confession", i must note that more than a "confession" this seem to me a true extortion through torture.

Best Regards
LFS

[Lucius Felix Silla]

Dear Mr. Wulpe,


1) You write:
"I find it hard to believe that you have been at Mauthasen "numerous times" when you didn´t recognize that photo 1 and 2 show the entry to the gas chamber on photo 3, and have nothing to do with Hartheim or Gusen .... (which I never claimed or implied)"


I'm sorry, but in reality You have written that at Mauthausen exist "GAS CHAMBERS" whereas, according to official history only one "gas chamber" have been erected, so i have supposed that the photos were taken at Hartheim Castle or at Gusen (and this signify that You or me don't have never have been in Mauthausen?).
Photo nr. 3 is the supposed "gas chamber" of Mauthausen.
Photo nr. 2 is the vestibule room to "gas chamber" of Mauthausen.
Photo nr.1 is another vestibule room to "gas chamber" of Mauthausen.

It is obvious that the three photos show three differents rooms and not the same room, that is, the supposed gas chamber of Mauthausen: the colour of the floor is white-grey in ph.3, dark grey in ph.2, red-violet on ph.1. Also doors visibles on ph. 1 and nr. 2 are quite differents: and them show the entry of the "gas chamber" of Mauthausen, because is well knowned that Mauthausen "gas chamber" have a DOUBLE-DOOR entry (which is very curious for a supposed "gas chamber").
Also dimensions, colours and materials of the interiors and walls are differents.


2) You write
"Anyway, unless someone thinks that gas chambers didn´t exist at all, nowhere in any camp, I still fail to see a reason why several people should fabricate a conspiracy, which could only weaken their agenda when discovered, to make a point already well known.

To put it cynical: one gas chamber more or less, does it matter ? Why would they take the risk to fake the Mauthausen one ?"

Assuming that the "gas chamber" of Mauthausen was and is only a faked, I think that this invention have been originated by the convinction that show to Austrian people those species of horrors, can help to prevent a resurgence of Nazism or Antisemitism in Your country. Nothing more, i suspect.

LFS
Best Regards

[demonio]

Also doors visibles on ph. 1 and nr. 2 are quite differents: and them show the entry of the "gas chamber" of Mauthausen, because is well knowned that Mauthausen "gas chamber" have a DOUBLE-DOOR entry (which is very curious for a supposed "gas chamber").
Also dimensions, colours and materials of the interiors and walls are differents.

Why so curious re double doors, it could be one entry for victims and one door to cremation section

[Georg_S]

According to LFS statement
"Thank You for Your suggestions.
The materials and opinions posted by various members are very interesting.
As for the Ziereis "confession", i must note that more than a "confession" this seem to me a true extortion through torture."

Regarding to the information I have got on Ziereis he was never tourtured, but he was badly wounded during a fight against US troops who found him in his Hunting lodge together with his wife.

Regards,

Georg

[David Thompson]

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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Quote:
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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

[Lucius Felix Silla]

Also here i must postpone to first days of September my observations about these pages taken by famous work "Masstoetungen durch Giftgas". Also an in deep analysis of Ziereis "confessions" is assured.

Best Regards
LFS

[chalutzim]

(...) Also an in deep analysis of Ziereis "confessions" is assured.

Signore Silla, before you leave us, could you answer this:

this "deep analysis" will involve the total or partial dismissal of Ziereis' confessions?

[michael mills]

The most glaring anomaly in the account of homicidal gassing with Zyklon-B in a stationary facility at Mauthausen is the claim that work on the gas-chamber began in Autumn 1941.

At that time, the first experiments at Auschwitz with the homicidal use of Zyklon-B, for the purpose of killing selected Soviet POWs sent to the concentration camps for execution, were only just beginning. Some historians date the first experiment to September 1941, others think it was as late as December 1941.

After those initial experiments, an ad-hoc gas chamber was mocked up in the Crematorium at Auschwitz main camp, at the beginning of 1942. A larger chamber, in the converted peasant house in Birkenau, was not provided until May 1942.

Thus, at Auschwitz, there is a long process of development of the methodology of homicidal gassing with Zyklon-B, over several months. It was during that period that an efficient technique was developed that could be applied.

Yet we are asked to believe that, almost before that developmental process began at Auschwitz, a gas-chamber using Zyklon-B was being built at Mauthausen. That is simply incredible.

Far more credible is the account of a gas-van being used at Mauthausen and/or Gusen. A number had been built toward the end of 1941, and it would have been quite easy to send one to Mauthausen. One was sent to Belgrade in 1942.

Accounts of sick prisoners being sent to the nearby Schloss Hartheim for "euthanasia" are also credible. Hartheim was one of the Euthanasia Institutes, and there is a lot of evidence about it.

What with the proximity of Hartheim and the availability of a gas-van, there seems to have been plenty of killing capacity at or near Mauthausen for disposing of sick and weak prisoners. There seems to have been no need for another stationary Zyklon-B gas-chamber.

Scott Smith has suggested that the portable device found in the camp designed to evaporate and circulate HCN gas from Zyklon-B pellets, which according to prisoner accounts was used to produce and introduce gas into a homicidal gas-chamber, was actually a portable fumigation device, used for fumigating buildings within the camp. It could be moved from building to building, as and when they required fumigation, thus obviating the more cumbersome and dangerous process of scattering the pellets on the floor of each room in the building.

That expalantion seems quite plausible to me. Howver, the possibility that that device was also used on occasion for a homicidal purpose canot be ruled out.

In order to gain an accurate picture of what happened at Mauthausen, we need to examine the evidence critically, and note the anomalies such as the one I have identified. We need to be prepared to jettison the suspect evidence where necessary, and retain only that which is verifiable and fits in with the entire context.

Other elements of the story are also a bit dodgy, such as the claim that Ziereis himself drove the gas van several times. It seems to me highly unlikely that the commandant of the camp would have wasted his time on such a mundane task when drivers were available. It's a bit like him doing all his own typing.

[Luca]

..."Mauthausen had gas chamer.The first of its victims were 208 Soviet POWs in May 1942. This device was in operation throughout the remainder of the war, and was used as late as April 1945, when 1.800 men and woman were gassed. The latest gassing under the Nazi-Regime took place in Mauthausen on April 28 - 1945 when 44 prisoners, mostly Austrians, were killed. A crematorium was also part of this arrangement. Additionally a Genickschussanlage (Neck - shot place) and Gaswagen (Gas vehicle) were used. Medical experiments on prisoners also took place in KZ-Mauthausen.
A special extermination centre was established in 1940 in Schloss Hartheim where more than 18.000 persons were gassed. More than 7.000 of them were prisoners from KZ-Mauthausen. Schloss Hartheim was initially instituted as part of the Euthanasie - Aktion T4 for extermination of inferior human groups and in service of the Gesundung des Volkskorpers. The gassing of prisoners in Schloss Hartheim stopped in December 1944. The equipement was then dismantled and the traces covered up."......

Luca

[Dan]

Luca, even those who believe in homicidal gas chambers there usually don't put the total figure above 5000.