by Tim Townsend
The men of the Eleventh engaged Mauthausen’s “walking skeletons,” as one GI put it, handing out cigarettes and whatever food they had. Some of the former prisoners acted as tour guides, eager to show the Americans just what kind of hell they had survived—the bunker, the quarry, the gas showers, the crematorium. The scene was overwhelming for the soldiers. “These experiences are difficult to think about without wondering why such sadistic acts would be perpetrated purposely on any group by another,” one GI wrote. “Such depravity seems foreign to most men, even in war time, and we were not psychologically prepared to really fully accept the facts before us.”
Another soldier described a long trench, an open grave filled with two hundred bodies lying in a long row with flies buzzing around them. “It was hard to comprehend,” the man wrote. “These men had been purposely starved to death, brutally and systematically. Their eyes stared at the sky in death as they lay grotesquely on the ground, awaiting burial in their mass grave.”
Many prisoners needed instant attention. The SS had destroyed electrical and water facilities before fleeing and it would take two days for nurses from the Sixty-Sixth Field Hospital unit to make it to Mauthausen. In the meantime, O’Connor’s unit acted as de facto medical personnel for five thousand survivors. GIs set to work trying to help those survivors who were near death. Many GIs flinched and vomited as they approached the survivors who lay on the ground in their own waste, covered with flies. One officer gently picked up the body of a man and his uniform became spattered with urine and excrement. His men then followed his example.
Many of the survivors who were not near death found ways to avenge their treatment at the camp. When the SS were fleeing Mauthausen, they had locked the gates and left the fences electrified. They also left many of the kapos and guards inside the prison. With numbers on their side, the prisoners had overrun what authority was left inside the camp and set up a tribunal for the execution of certain guards. On May 4, the prisoners had cut the throats of four guards. Prisoners simply beat some guards to death, while other guards were forced to run up and down the Stairway of Death before prisoners killed them. One guard was tied to a barracks bunk while prisoners took turns urinating and defecating on him.
Among the first duties of the Americans when they arrived the next day was to confiscate weapons from former prisoners and stop the lynch justice set up by the prisoners.
One Eleventh Division doctor was speaking with former inmates outside the walls of the Mauthausen camp when two Germans in civilian clothes approached. The former prisoners, weak as they were, surrounded the two men and roughly backed them into a corner by the prison fence. The Americans watched as the prisoners forced the frightened Germans—now yelling, “Nicht SS! Nicht SS!”—to raise their arms so that their armpits could be inspected. The doctor realized that the prisoners were looking for tattoos of serial numbers that the SS inked under their arms. When the former prisoners saw that these two men were likely regular German army, they let them go.
Had the two men been SS, “we would have seen them beaten and pulled here and there, and kicked violently to death before our eyes,” the doctor wrote later. “Certainly this was a grim and sobering fact—a view of life in the raw—that seemed shocking, even to combat soldiers.”
One soldier walked up to one of Mauthausen’s main buildings and peered through a window. Two SS guards were locked inside, bloodied and bruised from a beating they’d suffered at the hands of their former prisoners. They’d been saved from murder by American GIs and locked away for their own safety. The next day, the same soldier peered again into the same window. One of the guards had hanged himself in his cell.
At times, even the liberators had to be held back from beating the guards. An American photographer in U.S. Army uniform followed a group of former prisoners hunting for their former captors. When they found one in an alley, the men began to beat and kick the guard to death. When the photographer produced a knife, they slit the guard’s throat as the photographer took a picture.
The Americans were able to track down Franz Ziereis, the camp’s commandant, and bring him to justice appropriately. Acting on a tip from former prisoners, six Thunderbolt GIs found Ziereis on May 23 in Spital, Austria, a mountainous region one hundred miles from Mauthausen. When he fled into the woods, the Americans shot and wounded him. They brought him back to the camp for questioning.
According to the camp’s official rolls, Mauthausen held 66,500 prisoners the day before liberation. More than 450 died each day during the following week. The Americans turned the SS sports ground, just outside the camp walls, into a cemetery for the first 700 bodies. The next 1,500 had to be transported to a potato field between Gusen and another subcamp.
The American official in charge of the liberation had twenty of the nearby town’s leading citizens brought up the hill for a tour of the camp. All of them said they were shocked and that they had absolutely no idea this kind of horror had been happening for years. As more victims died, the Americans forced the identifiable Nazi Party members in town to bury them while the townspeople watched. They also brought in four hundred regular German army POWs to get the camp back in working order. Soon, the German soldiers were under attack from former prisoners, and the Americans had to threaten to open fire to calm the situation.
Externally, and officially, O’Connor dealt with his experience at Mauthausen with documentation and numbers. “Troops of this command captured two Concentration Camps, Camp Mauthausen and Camp Gusen, and were assigned the task of directing these Camps until they could be liquidated,” he wrote in his May report. He went on:
From 8 May until 31 May I conducted burial services for 1,834 inmates of Camp Mauthausen and for 1,077 inmates of Camp Gusen. I also visited the hospitals of these two camps and administered the last rites of the Catholic Church to more than 2,000 patients. I found Catholic priests in both camps and secured Mass kits for them and with their help arranged for both daily and Sunday Mass in these Camps. My work still continues at both places.
In the month O’Connor spent at Mauthausen, he made nearly forty trips to the camp cemeteries and buried about one hundred people with each service.
“This unit moved to a new area on 7 June 1945,” he wrote. “Thus the work at the Concentration Camps, Camp Mauthausen and Camp Gusen, came to an end.” That was the last he ever wrote about it. If he ever spoke about it, he didn’t do so publicly.
O’Connor told a few friends after the war that Patton had heard about his soothing of the German POWs’ fears during the Battle of the Bulge, and that six months later the general personally recommended O’Connor for the Nuremberg assistant chaplain position.
In early September, O’Connor was ordered to join the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Division. Within days, he was back in Germany with a new assignment as the Catholic chaplain for the Nazi war criminals awaiting trial at Nuremberg.
The army’s Technical Manual TM 16–205 states that the chaplain who “shares the peril of battle, showing kindness that never fails and a sincere concern” for the welfare of his flock “will gain a place in their confidence that will reinforce powerfully all his efforts to give moral and religious instruction and inspiration.” O’Connor’s flock now included the authors of the slaughter he’d seen at Mauthausen.
BY THE TIME ERNST Kaltenbrunner took the stand in his own defense, in April 1946, O’Connor had been his pastor for eight months. The man who had been a frightening monster during the war became a sickly malcontent in prison. U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley found Kaltenbrunner to be severely depressed just before the opening of the trial. He cried nearly every time the doctor visited.
“The hardness of character which marked him as an executioner had been replaced by this soft, sobbing personality who eagerly sought reassurance as to his future,” Kelley wrote. “A great, hulking, tough-looking murderer who was at heart a shivering coward . . . he was a typical bully, tough and arrogant when in power, a cheap cr
aven in defeat, unable even to stand the pressures of prison life.”
On November 17, 1945, three days before the trials began, Kaltenbrunner had a minor brain hemorrhage that led to serious headaches. He was hospitalized and missed much of the first two months of the trials.
On the stand, Kaltenbrunner’s strategy was simple: lie. Kaltenbrunner said he had never heard of most of the crimes his own attorney laid out. Others he’d heard of but had not been involved with. Any signature that looked like his, he said, was forged. The charges against him were among the most spectacular and horrific of the trials. The Times of London said, “probably more appalling crimes have never been charged against any man.”
After Kaltenbrunner had denied signing one particular letter, the U.S. prosecutor went after him: “Is it not a fact that you are simply lying about your signature on this letter in the same way that you are lying to the Tribunal about almost everything else you have given testimony about?”
Kaltenbrunner shouted that “for a whole year I have been submitted to this insult of being called a liar!”
After his testimony, the Times of London said Kaltenbrunner had “put forward the ugliest defense yet heard at the Nuremberg trial . . . a flood of clumsy denial that would look stupid were it not a sorry attempt to hide behind dead men.”
The newspaper said even Kaltenbrunner’s codefendants “began to look embarrassed” in the dock. There’s no question most, if not all, of the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg couched their own testimonies in varying levels of dishonesty, subterfuge, and fabrication, but Kaltenbrunner wasn’t even trying to make it sound good. Goering couldn’t stomach it and took one afternoon off, claiming to have a cold.
Kaltenbrunner testified that during the last days of the war, he’d ordered Mauthausen to be surrendered intact to Patton. But the prosecution introduced evidence and witnesses that showed Kaltenbrunner had actually ordered Ziereis to blow up all the inmates in the last days of the war. Witnesses testified that he’d given similar instructions to the leadership of other camps—Dachau, Landsberg, and Mueldorf. He’d requested some be bombed by the Luftwaffe. One SS colonel testified that a few days before the war ended, Kaltenbrunner ordered Ziereis to begin killing one thousand inmates each day.
“I consider the statement that I ever saw a gas chamber, either in operation or at any other time, wrong and incorrect,” Kaltenbrunner told the court.
But then a witness for the prosecution told the tribunal that Kaltenbrunner “went laughing into the gas chamber.”
“Then the people were brought from the bunker to be executed, and then all three kinds of executions: hanging, shooting in the back of the neck and gassing, were demonstrated,” he continued. “After the dust had disappeared, we had to take away the bodies.”
“Under my oath,” Kaltenbrunner said. “I wish to state solemnly that not a single word of these statements is true.”
He admitted visiting Mauthausen once but said it was the only concentration camp he’d ever seen and that he’d believed it to be a labor camp where stone was quarried to build Vienna’s sidewalks. He said he’d never heard of Auschwitz until 1943, when Himmler told him it was an armaments factory.
As evidence that Kaltenbrunner had never visited Auschwitz, his attorney called as a witness Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz. But the legal strategy backfired when Hoess testified, in matter-of-fact tones that stunned the courtroom, that in his role at that camp he had supervised the murder of two and a half million people.
Hoess had been an SS officer for many years, and when he was designing Auschwitz, he visited Treblinka to see how the SS killed people there. He later described the gas chamber at Treblinka as a cell, about eight feet by eleven feet, that was connected to motors outside. The SS jammed about two hundred people into the cell, which was made of stone and cement. The cell doors were covered with metal sheeting and when they closed, the SS directed the exhaust from the motors into the cell, killing everyone in it within an hour. The commandant at Treblinka told Hoess they were able to kill eighty thousand people in six months this way. “He used monoxide gas,” Hoess said later, “and I did not think that his methods were very efficient.”
At Auschwitz, Hoess converted two old farmhouses near the camp into gas chambers, ripping out the internal walls and cementing the outsides to prevent leaks. The farmhouses were about seven hundred yards apart and closed off from the outside by woods and fences. Bunker I and Bunker II, called the red house and the white house, could kill about two thousand people at one time. They began operations in March 1942.
The previous July, a group of prisoners had been disinfecting bedding with a chemical pesticide consisting mostly of sulfuric acid called Zyklon B when the gas killed a cat that was wandering by. An SS guard took the discovery to Hoess. In September 1941, camp officers tried Zyklon B on 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 sick prisoners. Later that month, Hoess watched while 900 more Russian soldiers were killed using the gas.
Over the next year, as the red house and the white house were in use, Hoess began building four dedicated gas chambers—disguised as shower rooms—and crematoria. Two of the facilities consisted of an underground gas chamber with a crematorium at ground level. Two more freestanding gas chambers supplied corpses to other freestanding crematoria. SS guards lowered Zyklon B cans through openings in the chamber’s ceilings, into mesh columns. The heat of the victims’ own bodies turned the pellets into fatal gas.
Hoess said later that the effectiveness of the Zyklon B wasn’t consistent. “After all of the observations done all of those years, I feel that it depended upon the weather, the wind, the temperature; and as a matter of fact, the effectiveness of the gas itself was not always the same,” he told a U.S. Army psychiatrist in Nuremberg.
Usually it took from three to fifteen minutes to extinguish all these people, that is, for no sign of life anymore. In the farmhouses we had no peek holes so that sometimes when we opened the doors after a considerable period of time had elapsed, there were still some signs of life. Later on, in the newly erected crematory and gas chambers, which I designed, we had peek holes so that we could ascertain when these people were all dead.
An electrical ventilation system kicked on when there was no longer any movement inside the chamber. According to historian Richard J. Evans,
After twenty minutes or so, the canisters were pulled up again, to remove the possibility of any more gas escaping, while the chamber was ventilated and a special detachment of Jewish prisoners dragged the corpses out into another room, pulled out gold teeth and fillings, cut the women’s hair off, removed gold rings, spectacles, prosthetic limbs and other encumbrances, and put the bodies into elevators that took them up to the crematorium room on the ground floor, where they were put into the incinerating ovens and reduced to ashes. Any remaining bones were ground up and the ashes used as fertilizer or thrown away in nearby woods and streams.
Hoess sent the hair of murdered women to Nazi workshops, where it was woven into special fittings for gaskets.
Burning the bodies of 2,000 people took about twenty-four hours. “Usually we could manage to cremate only about 1,700 to 1,800,” Hoess said later. “We were thus always behind in our cremating because as you can see it was always much easier to exterminate by gas than to cremate, which took so much more time and labor.”
At its most populous, the camp held 144,000 people, roughly the population of Dayton, Ohio. About 7,000 SS men worked at Auschwitz during its existence, not including secretaries and administrators. At one point, when Hoess was using prisoners to dig his many burning pits, the SS forced sixty prisoners to fill their wheelbarrows full of dirt and run as fast as they could behind one another along the rim of the deep pit. Some of the older prisoners fell into the pit with their wheelbarrows and the SS men laughed, called them “saboteurs,” and began using them for target practice. A kapo named Reinhold noticed that an older Jewish man was having trouble scrambling up the side of the pit, and so he sent the man’s
son down after him. As the son began helping his father out, Reinhold ordered him to drown his father in the pit’s standing water. After killing his father, the distraught young man found his way out of the hole, and Reinhold ordered more prisoners to throw him back down, then ordered the Jews left in the pit to drown him in the same water in which the young man had just drowned his father.
Hoess was involved in every aspect of Auschwitz’s evil. He said later that he was present at most, if not all, the gassings. When typhoid broke out in one of the hospital barracks, Hoess gave the order to kill all the patients and anyone who had worked in the hospital. One day, as SS men slowly worked at the drudgery of throwing corpses into the massive burning pits, Hoess arrived, grabbed the body of a small child by the leg, and threw it into the pit. His example cheered morale, and the SS men nearby each grabbed the body of a small child and threw it into the flames.
Hoess’s superior, Adolf Eichmann, had told Hoess that 2.5 million people had been murdered during his reign at Auschwitz. Hoess had thought the number was an exaggeration, but in the immediate aftermath of the war and the relatively recent discovery of the horrors of the concentration camps, he admitted to 2.5 million dead at trial. Historians now believe that despite Hoess’s testimony at Nuremberg, at least 1 million and possibly 1.5 million people were killed at Auschwitz. About 90 percent of those killed were Jews, making Hoess responsible for at least 15 percent of the Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
When the war was over, Hoess went into hiding, disguising himself as a sailor at the Naval Intelligence School on the Island of Sylt in northern Germany. Afterward, he found work on a farm under the name Franz Lang, but British troops eventually arrested him in March 1946. Many Nazi officers carried a vial of cyanide with them so they could kill themselves in case they were caught by the Allies, but Hoess had accidentally broken his vial days earlier. Within a month he was sent to Nuremberg to be a witness in the trials of the major war criminals.