First SEALs

by Patrick K. O'Donnell

  Hayden confirmed the colonel’s suspicion.

  “Well, if you’re looking for Hitler, he’s not here,” joked Dixon, pouring Hayden a drink. “Gentlemen, I am going to tell you about the OSS. The OSS is the most fantastic damned organization in all of our armed forces. Its people do incredible things. They seduce German spies; they parachute into Sicily one day and two days later they’re dancing on the St. Regis roof. They dynamite aqueducts, urinate in Luftwaffe gas tanks, and play games with I.G. Farben and Krupp, but ninety percent of this has not a goddamned thing to do with the war.”

  Hayden conducted several missions during his time with the First Army and later was assigned to do some mundane port inspections. He would survive the war and return to Hollywood to star in several infamous roles.

  Meanwhile, deep in Austria, Jack Taylor doubted he would ever return to Hollywood.

  25

  SURVIVING

  JACK TAYLOR WAS TRANSFERRED back to Morzinplatz and assigned a cell with several other prisoners. As in Taylor’s first stay at the prison, the Germans dealt brutality to the inmates. He later recalled,

  Toward the end of March, a woman doctor (M.D.) [taken prisoner by the Germans] was brought into Cell 3 and as was the custom, every personal article including eye glasses was withheld. After several days, another woman prisoner was placed in her cell who had better eyes and discovered that the doctor had lice. The doctor was horrified and begged for her glasses so that she could pick them from her garments, but her pleadings were unheeded. There was no opportunity to bathe or wash clothes. About the same time, another woman, Martha Russ, was brought in and had to have her wrists chained behind her back to the bars so high that she could barely touch the floor. In the night, through exhaustion, her feet slipped out from under and she was left hanging. Her screams were horrible. Later, I got possession of the order for the mistreatment of Martha Russ signed by her Kriminalrat. [Investigator] . . . Toilet paper was non-existent and we were rationed to three small pieces of newspaper or scrap-paper. I always read the scrap paper first and to my surprise found the above order torn in two. It had been written on the back of a useless mimeographed sheet to save paper and when the Meister handed it to me, he saw only the one original mimeographed side. The order directed the Meister to hang Martha Russ by her wrists backwards every night, no food for three days and not to bother the Referrent with any requests.

  On March 31, 1945, Taylor and the other prisoners in the Morzinplatz were awakened at 3:00 a.m. and informed they would be leaving immediately. The Russians were just fifty kilometers away, and the Germans were evacuating the prisoners before the invading army could free them. Taylor and thirty-seven others were taken to the train station. The former dentist recalled, “I was terribly surprised to see the West railroad station absolutely untouched by bombs and everything functioning normally, also the yards were full of coal cars. Farther out, in the yards there were evidences of heavy bombing but all tracks were intact and functioning.”

  Taylor and his comrades were loaded onto a train filled with refugees. He and one of his Austrian companions, Schmeisser, plotted a night escape attempt, but “at the last moment Schmeisser backed out saying his wife and child would be murdered if he escaped.” Taylor later regretted that he didn’t flee without his friend, writing, “I had the windows partially open and blamed myself a thousand times later for not going ahead alone but, due to American bombings [of Austria], the entire civilian attitude towards Americans had changed so that it was questionable whether anyone would take one in alone. With an Austrian speaking that particular dialect it was a 50–50 chance.”

  While Taylor’s train was steaming deeper into the Austrian countryside, the rest of his Dupont team was also devising a plan to escape captivity. Considered traitors to the German army, Grant, Perkins, and Underwood faced beheading. Held in a temporary prisoner cage, a bowling alley in Austria, they tunneled out of the compound. Once outside, the men split up. After weeks of avoiding partisans and evading German patrols, all three miraculously made their way back to OSS headquarters in Italy.

  On the train, Taylor saw a glimpse of the horrors that were to come at his final destination: Mauthausen. One of the other prisoners had previously been incarcerated at Mauthausen and warned that the conditions were even worse than at Dachau, where this same prisoner had also been held. Soon Taylor and the other captives would experience the horrors of the camp firsthand: “We arrived at Enns at 0400 and marched 8 km to Mauthausen, crossing the Danube by ferry just at dawn,” he remembered. “We could see, on the hill, the lights of the most terrible Lager in all Germany which was to become our home until execution.”

  26

  MAUTHAUSEN

  MARCH–APRIL 1945, MAUTHAUSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, AUSTRIA

  The rusty barge pulled up to a small wooden dock on the Danube, and the SS guards pushed the thirty-eight prisoners off the craft. Freely using the sticks they carried, the Germans prodded the condemned men up a steep hill. Jack Taylor paused briefly, turning his head for a last glance of the dark waters of the Danube, now far behind him. To the side of the hill he noticed a massive rock quarry and a long stone stairway descending into its depths. He observed sickly looking, painfully thin men methodically hauling massive rocks step over step. The stream of skeletal inmates fed the line like a conveyor belt in a factory. “They were the most terrible looking half-dead creatures in filthy ragged stripes and heavy wooden shoes,” reported Taylor. “And as they clanked and shuffled along the cobblestones, they reminded me of a group of Frankensteins. We kidded ourselves saying we would look the same in a few days, but we were all struck with cold, dread terror.”

  As the thirty-eight men trudged forward to what would be for most their final destination, they saw a high wall topped with an electric barbed-wire fence that guarded the camp. The group of prisoners didn’t know it yet, but the guards often maniacally tossed inmates onto the fence, electrocuting them to death as a twisted form of entertainment.

  To their left, below the main camp, they saw a line of squat, windowless buildings. Originally built as stables for horses, the low sheds were first repurposed to house POWs and then later converted into a “hospital,” a place that no one would ever willingly enter for treatment.

  The maniacal SS Officer Hans Prellberg was waiting outside the entrance to receive Taylor and the group as they approached the gates. Mauthausen was the epicenter of a constellation of approximately twenty-six satellite camps administered by the SS. In total they held over 91,000 prisoners. The work camps primarily furnished slave labor for various German war industries. Prellberg worked over the prisoners and was “particularly brutal as he slapped, punched, kicked and beat most of us over the head with a cane belonging to a crippled Slovak in our group,” recalled Taylor. “Two young Russians and a Hungarian were unmercifully beaten because they did not understand German. All commands were given in German and I had to keep extremely alert to save myself similar beatings.”

  Taylor’s group was forced to join a larger group of prisoners. The guards reiterated the camp rules and regulations. “If you attempt to escape and are recaptured, you will be shot immediately, like this,” announced one officer. He pulled out his pistol and shot a prisoner standing nearby who had recently attempted escape.

  The officers then marched the prisoners into an open area and lined them up outside the showers. They were stripped, shaved of all body hair, showered, and deloused. The guards issued them threadbare striped prison garb. For three hours they mercilessly questioned each individual, beating, slapping, slugging, and spitting upon the men. “You American swine!” SS officer Hans Bruckner repeatedly shouted as he used the cane taken from the disabled Slovak to strike Taylor’s back again and again.

  Several noncommissioned SS officers, working in “relays,” intimidated the prisoners and ruthlessly interrogated them. “Where are you from? Who are you? Why are you here?” Every time the SS guard would ask a question, “Whatever the answer was, he would
hit you over the head.”

  When the initial interrogation finally ended, Taylor and the rest of the men marched through the main gate at Mauthausen. A heavy iron sign, which proclaimed in German, “Work will set you free,” hung over the entrance.

  The guards led the newly arrived inmates into a courtyard and forced them to stand at attention barefooted for over an hour in the freezing cold. “This S.O.P. (standard operating procedure) was not changed even during the most severe part of the winter when men stood barefooted in the snow,” wrote Taylor.

  Over the next forty-eight hours, the prisoners received no food. However, they did receive prison numbers stamped on cloth next to a colored triangle designating their status. The original prisoners from the camp wore green triangles, and all political prisoners wore red triangles. “Each contained letters abbreviating his nation in the red triangle. [For instance,] F for France and B for Belgium.” The guards then issued the inmates a wrist bracelet with the same number stamped in metal. Taylor’s number was 138070.

  The SS marched the men to Block 13, their crude barracks. Taylor explained, “There were 25 prisoner barracks each normally designed for 220 men, i.e., 70 triple-decker single bunks plus 5 double-decker singles, but at this time holding nearly 400 each. This was increased to almost 600, which made it necessary for three to ‘sleep’ in each single bunk. Toilet and hygienic facilities were proportionately inadequate.”

  The men slept in their clothes for warmth—and to keep them from being stolen. Taylor recalled, “After two days, we began by devious means to get wooden shoes and old trousers or shirts; until then we walked around in the cold and mud barefooted and clad only in ragged underwear. Within a week I had, through friends, collected a full compl[e]ment of assorted rags for clothes.” The barracks were unheated. Thin blankets provided the only source of warmth for the men. “On unusually cold nights, there was heavy nocturnal traffic in blankets. The blankets, incidentally, were collected each morning and redistributed at random each night, thereby spreading lice and fleas from a few to all,” recalled Taylor.

  Life in Mauthausen degenerated as the Germans’ inhumane, brutal treatment of the prisoners turned many into animals. The men had to survive not only the SS but also danger from within the prison population. The SS assigned many convicted German criminals, inmates who were murderous thieves and forgers, as the barracks heads (Blockeldesters), who ruthlessly supervised their fellow prisoners “with a heavy hand.” The barracks heads “used their fists, blackjacks, sticks, rubber hoses and razor straps to maintain ‘order.’”

  The prisoner population shifted between ten and fifteen thousand inmates who were literally worked to death or, later, exterminated in gas chambers. At the time Taylor was one of a few Americans in Mauthausen. He learned of only three others: a woman named Isabella or Carlotta Dien; Sergeant Louis Biagioni, an OSS Secret Intelligence agent; and Lionel Romney, an African American of the U.S. Merchant Marine who had been captured when the Italians sunk his ship. Mauthausen consisted of a diverse population, which included intelligentsia and artists of Third Reich–occupied countries. In Taylor’s bunkhouse were Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, and many inmates from Central and Eastern European countries. One of the most notable was Vojtech Krajcovic, a renowned Slovakian economist who had also served as governor of the National Bank Bratislava and head of the Economic Institute of Bratislava.

  Taylor reported, “We were all forced to work as soon as we got something approaching shoes and many of our group were assigned to the Kommando repairing the railroad and highway around Enns. This was heavy and continuous pick and shovel work for 12 hours with ½ hour off for lunch . . . and included a 16 km round-trip march to and from work. Most of our group were high class professional men and the strain and misery of this type of work at first, can be imagined.”

  Gradually, even the most upstanding men transformed into thieves and savages. Stealing was “practiced on a scale that can’t be imagined.” Taylor recalled, “One had to carry with him at all times his total belongings. Stealing became a matter of life and death” because “one could not support life on the regular prison food.” Mauthausen rations would starve a gerbil. As Taylor recalled, “Food consisted of flavored hot water (very dilute unsweetened ersatz coffee) at five for breakfast. Lunch was one liter of erpsin (beet) soup, much thicker but less palatable than in Vienna. Supper was 1/10 to 1/17 kilo of black bread. The bread was composed of wheat flour, ground potato peelings, sawdust, and straw. On Sunday, in addition we received a slice of margarine or a tablespoon of cottage cheese.”

  Mauthausen was both a slave labor camp and a death factory. Once a human being was used up, he or she was exterminated. Germans gassed prisoners, shot them, beat them to death, or killed them by various other means. To attempt to hide their crimes, the Germans cremated the bodies. One of the first work details to which Taylor was assigned was the construction of a crematorium. Taylor and his work party knew completion of the facility meant the deaths of more inmates—including themselves. “We dawdled at our work to delay completion of the crematorium because we knew that the number of executions would double when cremation facilities were available.”

  But the Germans knew Taylor and his comrades were stalling. “One Saturday morning, Prellberg and SS Hauptscharführer Martin Roth (head of the crematorium) belabored Kapo Jacinto for his failure to finish the work quickly and informed him that it must be finished and ready for operation on the following day or we (workers) would be the first occupants of the new ovens.” The death threat was serious, and Taylor and his fellow inmates “finished the job in the allotted time.”

  According to Taylor, “The crematoriums were large brick structures containing a firebox for burning wood and coal and over this were the ovens fitted with rounded supports at intervals for the bodies. The bodies were carried into the ovens on steel stretchers and with a quarter turn were rolled out. The new crematorium with two ovens could handle twelve bodies at a time, 160 a day and with the old ovens a total of 250 a day. Insufficient cremating facilities held down the number of executions as all bodies showing signs of violent death could not be buried. Gassed bodies were often disfigured from clawing, biting, etc. and chemical analysis of the tissues would show cyanide. All ‘violent-death’ bodies had this stamp on their paper: ‘Die leiche muss aus hygienischen grunden gefert verbreannt werden’ [sic] which says, ‘The corpse must for hygienic reasons be cremated.’”

  With the crematorium finished, the Mauthausen death factory went into full swing. “The next day, Sunday April 10th, 367 new Czech prisoners, including 40 women, arrived from Czechoslovakia and were marched through the gate straight to the gas chamber and christened the new ovens. Black oily smoke and flames shot out the top of the stacks as healthy flesh and fat was burned as compared to the normal pale yellow smoke from old emaciated prisoners. This yellow smoke and heavy sickening smell of flesh and hair was blown over our barrack 24 hours a day and as hungry as we were, we could not always eat,” recalled Taylor. He continued:

  The gas used was Zyklon B cyanide a granular powder, contained in pint-sized cans and the same used for infection of clothing. In a small room, adjacent to the gas chamber, was a steel box connected immediately to a blower, which was in turn connected to the shower system. While wearing a gas mask, the operator bashed in the ends of two cans of powder (one can will kill 100 people) with a hammer and after placing them in the box, clamped the lid on hermetically tight and started the blower. (In winter, when the gas would not evaporate fast enough from the powder, steam was introduced into the box from the other end.) After two hours, the intake blower was stopped and the larger exhaust blower was turned on for about two hours. Wearing gas masks, the prisoner operators removed the bodies to the cold room (capacity 500) where they were stacked like cordwood awaiting cremation. See enclosure ‘Instructions for the service of Pourric [sic] Acid Delousing Chambers in K.L.M’, by the Chief doctor. It is worded for delousing but the instructions were especially for gas c
hamber operators. The blowers and gas receptacle were removed by the SS and attempts made to destroy them. In March 1945, Ziereis and Bachmayer (see protocol) ordered all ventilation sealed in the police wagon and a small trapdoor installed. A group of 30 to 40 prisoners were told that they were being transported to Gusen, a subsidiary camp about 8 km away, were crammed into the wagon, the door locked and a bottle of poison gas dropped through the trapdoor on an angle iron specially placed to break the bottle. The ‘police wagon’ was immediately driven to Gusen and after parking for an hour the prisoners were delivered to the crematorium. The same numbers of Gusen prisoners were then loaded into the ‘police wagon’ for transport to Mauthausen with identical results. From March to October 1945 the car circulated 47 times with an average of 35 victims each way on the round trip, making a total of approximately 3,300. In October, ventilation was installed again, and the police-wagon resumed its original function.

  Whereas many prisoners were gassed, others were simply shot to death. Taylor reported, “Until 1943, daily executions by rifle or tommy-gun were done openly back of Block 15 where those waiting to be executed were forced to watch their comrades, three at a time, being mowed down. When gas and injection deaths practically replaced shooting, all shooting was done individually in another small room adjacent to the gas-chamber. The victim was told that he was to have his picture taken and was led into this room where a camera was set up on a tripod. He was told to face the corner with his back to the camera and immediately he assumed this position, he was shot in the back of the neck with a small carbine by an SS man standing to his left and slightly behind. Prisoner operators stood behind a door looking through a peephole so as to know when to drag the body out. SS Standartenführer Ziereis, commandant of Mauthausen, personally executed three hundred to four hundred men here in the above-mentioned manner during ten shooting ‘expeditions’ over a period of four months.”