Danube - Austria Sept 5

Linz to Grein

It rained most of the night with thunder storms pounding away.  As we ate breakfast we saw the forecast had a window starting after 9 that could pose a nice rainless couple of hours.  So off we set.  We rode for a while until we came to the town of Mauthausen.  I never heard of the town before but from this point on it will be in my memory.

If you do not want to hear the bad of what transpired during the war, you should stop reading at this point...

Mauthausen was the site of a concentration camp.  I have not been to one before this.  I had been to a holocaust museum in Chicago but not seen the actual place of infamy.  And that is what it was...

It is hard to believe that man could be so cruel and inhuman to another.

These are the gates to the camp.  The prisoners were brought by train to the town of Mauthausen.  Then they were marched up the hill from town to the camp.  Once inside the gates the real hell began.  On the march up to the camp if any person lagged behind or was unable to keep up the march, they were shot on the street.  A trolley would come by after and pick up the body.  They had a recording of one of the village girls who said after the march of prisoners came through they were told to go to the fountain and fetch buckets of water.  They would have to wash down the blood and brains from the cobblestones or walls.

Mauthausen is the site of a granite quarry.  The prisoners were sent to this concentration camp to die of hard labor.  

They were marched into the court yard where their abuse only just began.  There are over 81,000 names of victims who are known to have died in this camp.  And as they said, that is only those who were known to have died.  Many records were destroyed as the Allies were moving closer to the camp in early 1945.  The camp was liberated by the Americans on May 5, 1945. 

The walls and the guard towers that kept them in.

The barracks that housed the SS guards to the camp.

The showers where the prisoners were stripped and then given their striped prisoners outfits.

The door to the gas chamber...

The first room of the krematorium.  It had refrigerator pipes to keep the bodies from decomposing too quickly as they waited to be incinerated.

The ovens...

At first they would only use the ovens at night because the townspeople complained of the stench.  But later they were operated day and night because of the backlog...

Memorial to those that perished...

The walls where many left their last messages and loved ones who have come since marked the horrific passing of their brothers, sisters, wives, husbands mothers, fathers...

The room that has listed all the 81,000 names of the victims who were murdered at Mauthausen.  This is just a sampling of the panels that lined the room.  It was unbelievably moving.

As you walked through the exhibit you could read and hear on recordings testimony to what happened here.  They talked about the SS officers who referred to those that they pushed off the cliffs of the quarry as parachutists.  Or the story of the Italian who did escape bit was captured 15 kilometers away.  He was paraded back then beaten and tortured.  They then sicked a dog on him repeatedly until he was mauled to death. All the while he was pleading with his captors for mercy.

The guards would tell prisoners to go pick up rocks along the fence.  Then the guards in the towers would shoot them because they would get a bounty from killing escaping prisoners.

The camp had an electrified fence with 380 volts going through it.  At times prisoners would fling themselves onto it to commit suicide.  It was out of sheer hopelessness and despair.

There was a recording of one of the prisoners who got a job as a clerk.  He said you could cower in the corner waiting for death or you could choose to survive.  He worked his way up to being a clerk for the SS guards.  He said though, at one point he realized he had become part of the death machine.  He talked about a group of Russian prisoners who he watched singing one night, then the next morning he had to cross all their names off the daily roll because they were marched into the chamber.  At other times he would have to pass word to prisoners that they should report to the gate.  At first the prisoners would be excited because they thought they were being released.  But it soon came to be known that they were going to be shot.

Each prisoner was given a cap to wear.  The prisoners had to remove the cap as they approached a guard.  If they didn't take it off in the right time (so many steps away from the guard) they were beaten with a leather strap.  If they lost their cap, they were shot.  At daily roll call the command was given,  "caps off!"  The prisoners had to take the cap off and stomp their feet to attention.  A witness said it made a thunderous noise.  After roll call the command  "caps on" was given.  If you were too slow or not enough emphasis, you were beaten.

As the clerk said, so many came into the camp.  But no one left...

Lest we forget...