Mauthausen Report: Stolen Tape as Evidence of Genocide

Prisoners recount the killings in Europe's biggest concentration camp and that everyone knew about it

Arrival of prisoners of war at Mauthausen concentration camp

Maurice Lampe:

“When we arrived at Mauthausen, the SS officer who received this convoy of about 1,200 Frenchmen informed us in the following words, which I shall quote from memory almost word for word: "Germany needs your hands. You are, therefore, going to work; but I want to tell you that you will never see your families again. When one enters this camp, one leaves it by the chimney of the crematorium”.

Stairway to the quarry at Mauthausen concentration camp

Maurice Lampe:

“The quarry at Mauthausen was in a hollow about 800 metres from the camp proper. There were 186 steps down to it. It was particularly painful torture because the steps were so rough-hewn that to climb them even without a load was extremely tiring”.

Mauthausen prisoners in the quarry

Maurice Lampe:

“We started work at seven o'clock in the morning. By eight o'clock, one hour later, two of my comrades had already been murdered. They were an elderly man, M. Gregoire from Lyon, and a quite young man, Lefevre from Tours. They were murdered because they had not understood the order, given in German, detailing them for a task. We were very frequently beaten because of our inability to understand the German language”.

Mauthausen concentration camp inmate shot “in escape attempt”

Jean-Frederic Veith:

“…They were forced to work to excess, to carry heavy stones. Then they were beaten until they took heavier ones; and so on and so forth until, finally driven to extremes, they turned towards the barbed wire. If they did not do it of their own accord, they were pushed there; and they were beaten until they did so; and the moment they approached it and were perhaps about one metre away from it, they were mown down by machine guns fired by the SS guards in the watchtowers. This was the usual system for the ‘killing for attempted escape’ as they afterwards called it… They were driven to the barbed wire by the SS guards who accompanied them, and the entire Mauthausen staff was present… They could see it so well that once or twice some of the guards refused to shoot, saying that it was not an attempt to escape and they would not shoot. They were immediately relieved from their posts, and disappeared”.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp Prisoners

Maurice Lampe:

“When the Allied armies were advancing, various camps were moved back toward Austria. Of a convoy of 2,500 internees that had left Sachsenhausen, only about 1,700 were left when they arrived at Mauthausen on the morning of the 17th of February. Some 800 had died or had been killed in the course of the journey. The Mauthausen camp was at that time, if I may use this expression, completely choked. So when the 1,700 survivors of this convoy arrived, Kommandant Dachmeier had selected 400 from among them. He encouraged the sick, the old, and the weak prisoners to come forward with the idea that they might be taken to the infirmary. These 400 men, who had either come forward of their own free will or had been arbitrarily selected, were stripped entirely naked and left for 18 hours in weather 18 degrees below zero, between the laundry building and the wall of the camp. When we went in or came out of the camp we saw these unfortunate men. Several of them rapidly got congestion of the lungs, but that did not seem fast enough for the SS. Three times during the night these men were sent down to the shower-baths; three times they were drenched for half an hour in freezing water and then made to come up without being dried. In the morning when the gangs went to work the corpses were strewn over the ground. I must add that the last of them were finished off with blows from an axe.

I now give the most truthful testimony of an occurrence which can easily be verified. Among those 400 men was a captain in the French cavalry, Captain Dedionne, who today is a major in the Ministry of War. This captain was among the 400. He owes his life to the fact that he hid among the corpses and thus escaped the blows of the axe. When the corpses were taken to the crematorium he managed to get away across the camp, but not without having received a blow on the shoulder which has left a mark for life. He was caught again by the SS. What saved him was probably the fact that the SS considered it very funny that a live man should emerge from a heap of corpses”.

Prisoners of war brought to Mauthausen concentration camp

Maurice Lampe:

“There were about 10,000 Frenchmen in Mauthausen and its dependencies. Three thousand of us came back. Eight thousand Spaniards arrived in Mauthausen in 1941, towards the end of the year. When we left, at the end of April 1945, there were still about 1,600. All the rest had been exterminated”.

“There was a particularly dramatic episode in connection with this. At Mauthausen, there were 3,000 Czechs, 600 of whom were intellectuals. After the murder of Heydrich, the Czech colony in the camp was exterminated with the exception of 300 out of the 3,000 and six intellectuals out of the 600 that were in the camp”.

“At Mauthausen, the Jews had the hardest tasks of all. I must point out that until December 1943, Jews did not live more than three months at Mauthausen. There were very few of them at the end”.

Prisoners of war on admission to Mauthausen concentration camp

Maurice Lampe:

“…The ‘Revier’ (infirmary) was built by the first Soviet prisoners who arrived in Mauthausen. Four thousand Soviet soldiers died; they were murdered, massacred, during the construction of the 8 blocks of the Revier. These massacres made such a deep impression that the Revier was always referred to as the ‘Russen Lager’ (Russian Camp). The SS themselves called the infirmary the Russian camp”.

Victims of the Mauthausen concentration camp

Jean-Frederic Veith :

“At one time the method for eliminating sick persons via injections was adopted at Mauthausen. It was particularly used by Dr Krebsbach, nicknamed ‘Dr Spritzbach’ by the prisoners since it was he who had inaugurated the system of injections. There came a time when the injections were discontinued, and then persons who were too sick or too weak were sent to a castle which, we later learned, was called Hartheim, but was officially known as a Genesungslager (convalescent camp). Of all of those who went there, none ever returned. We received the death certificates directly from the political section of the camp; these certificates were secret. Everybody who went to Hartheim died. The number of dead amounted to about 5,000”.

François Bois, prisoner of war. Photo fixation on entering the Mauthausen concentration camp

Francois Bois (Francesc Boix in Catalan) was born in Barcelona in 1920. His father was a professional tailor and amateur photographer. Since childhood, the boy had adopted his father's passion for photography. At the age of 14, he began working in a photo studio, and at the age of 16 he became a photojournalist for the magazine “Spanish Socialists”. His political views were formed at that time. Subconsciously, Francois had joined the left movement.

At the age of 17, he volunteered for the Republican Army and took part in the Civil War. Francois kept his camera by him all the time, now his photographs from that period are stored in the National Archives of Catalonia.

The Spanish Republicans lost to the Francoists, and 19-year-old François was forced to flee to France, who supported the ousted Republican government of Spain at that time. Together with his fellow refugees, he participated in the construction of defensive lines against the advancing Wehrmacht units. But the advance of the Germans deep into France already was impossible to stop, and the Spanish company was captured.

François Bois, prisoner of war, inmate of the Mauthausen concentration camp.

On 27 January 1941, after having passed several camps, Francois Bois became a prisoner of the Mauthausen concentration camp. His number was 5185.

The profession helped the twenty-year-old to survive in the camp: he was assigned to work in a photo lab. Its official task was to take photographs of prisoners in case of escapes, as well as ceremonial photography for reports to Berlin. However, in practice, photographers (all of them were SS officers) captured everything: executions, suicides, everyday life, and labour of prisoners.

Together with another prisoner-lab assistant - the Spaniard Antonio García Alonso - Francois Bois planned to steal and hide the negatives of the incriminating shots. The friends could not escape the camp on their own, so they contacted the captive Spaniards taken to work in a quarry near the town of Mauthausen daily.

The young prisoners became friends with local resident Anna Pointner and her daughters. The Spaniards secretly took the negatives of 20,000 frames outside the camp, and Anna's family hid them under a brick in the garden fence of her house.

Witness François Bois testifies before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

After his release from the camp, Francois took invaluable documents, went to Paris and published some of the photographs in the communist press. This is how the French prosecution office in Nuremberg learned about them. Francois Bois became a witness at the trial, and the footage he saved was used in evidence.

In Paris, Francois continued to work with leftist publishing houses as a photographer. He wrote a book about his tragic experience at Mauthausen and called it “The Spaniard”. Unfortunately, it was not published – the manuscript was lost.

François Bois after his liberation

In 1951, at the age of 30, Francois Bois died of a kidney disease, which he had suffered since childhood. In 2017, his remains were moved to the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The reburial ceremony was attended by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, a native of Spain.

Mauthausen concentration camp on photographic film stolen by prisoners

François Bois:

“This was taken in the quarry during a visit from Reichsführer Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, the Governor of Linz, and some other leaders whose names I do not know. What you see below is the dead body of a man who had fallen from the top of the quarry (70 metres), as happened every day”.

“This staged the scene of an Austrian who had escaped. He was a carpenter in the garage and he managed to make a box, a box in which he could hide and so get out of the camp. But after a while, he was recaptured. They put him on the wheelbarrow in which corpses were carried to the crematorium. Some placards were saying in German, ‘Alle Vogel sind schon da’, meaning ‘All the birds are back again’. He was sentenced and then paraded in front of 10,000 deportees to the music of a gypsy band playing the song ‘J'attendrai’. When he was hanged, his body swung to and fro in the wind while they played the very well-known song, ‘Bill Black Polka’”.

Mauthausen concentration camp prisoner who committed suicide

François Bois:

“A Jew whose nationality I do not know. He was put in a barrel of water until he could not stand it any longer. He was beaten to the point of death and then given 10 minutes in which to hang himself. He used his own belt to do it, for he knew what would happen to him otherwise”.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner (left) and Heinrich Himmler (centre) during an inspection of the Mauthausen concentration camp

François Bois:

“Visitors usually examined all the camps. It was impossible for them not to know what was going on. An exception was made only when high officials or other important persons from Poland, Austria, or Slovakia, from all these countries, would come. Then they would show them only the best parts. Franz Ziereis would say, ‘See for yourselves’. He sent for cooks, interned bandits, fat and well-fed criminals. He would select these so as to be able to say that all internees looked like these”.

(...)

“I recognised Speer on 36 photographs which were taken by SS-Oberscharführer Paul Ricken in 1943, during Speer's visit to the Gusen Camp and the quarry of Mauthausen. He always looked extremely pleased in these pictures. There are even pictures which show him congratulating Obersturmbannführer Franz Ziereis, then commander of the Mauthausen camp, with a cordial handshake”.

Freed Mauthausen prisoners remove Nazi sign from concentration camp wall

François Bois:

“To become a Kapo, one had to be Aryan, pure Aryan… They had the right to treat us like beasts. The SS gave them carte blanche to do with us what they wished. That is why, during the liberation, the prisoners and deportees executed all the Kapos they could lay their hands on.

Shortly before the liberation, the Kapos asked to enlist voluntarily in the SS and they left with the SS because they knew what was awaiting them. Despite that, we looked for them everywhere and executed them on the spot… Many among us could have become Kapos for their work because they were specialists in some field or another in the camp. But they preferred to be beaten and massacred, if necessary, rather than become a Kapo”.

Several witnesses from different countries in Europe, people who managed to survive in Nazi concentration camps, made a statement before the audience of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Most of the stories were devoted to the Austrian camp Mauthausen – an exceptionally terrible creation of the Reich. The Tribunal not only listened to the oral testimony of former prisoners, but also saw unique photographs that the Germans took for internal use. The prisoners managed to steal the negatives and hide them with the help of local residents.

Soviet Union – Highest Human Toll

Mauthausen was a complex of facilities – a central camp and 49 subcamps. The central camp was built by prisoners from Dachau – the very first Nazi concentration camp, opened in 1933. During Mauthausen’s existence from 1938 to May 1945, 335,000 people went through the hell of this camp, 122,000 were executed or died of hunger and diseases. The camp was international: civilians from all over Europe, as well as prisoners of war, including those from the United States and the Soviet Union, were kept and killed there. Most of the victims were citizens of the USSR – 32,000 people.

In early May 1945, almost all of the administration left the camp, leaving about 30 SS men to guard it. Most of the kapos, the guards recruited from criminal prisoners, escaped as well. By that time, the prisoners had managed to gather a small arsenal in case the SS men decided to resist the advancing Allied forces. But that did not happen. The US Army entered the almost unguarded camp. The Nazis and kapos who remained there were killed by the prisoners themselves. The hidden weapons also came in handy for later clashes with fleeing SS men around the camp.

The witnesses were called by the French prosecution. Their stories shocked those present in Courtroom 600. These people witnessed mass executions and sophisticated methods of murder. The Nazis did not attempt to conceal it from the prisoners – they massacred people overtly.

‘If You Do Not Obey, I Will Send You to Mauthausen’

The cross-examination of witnesses never really took place. At first, some lawyers tried to catch witnesses making errors, but it quickly became clear that it was not the prisoners who were confused, the lawyers had little idea of the reality they happened to live in.

Mauthausen's witnesses may not have known of the level of awareness of the Berlin lawyers. But they knew for sure that high-ranking defendants at the Nuremberg Trial, such as Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Albert Speer, perfectly understood what kind of “enterprise” they were inspecting – their visits to the camp were depicted on film.

The former prisoners had no doubt that the inhabitants in the vicinity of the camp and Vienna, as well as workers of German enterprises that used prison labour, knew everything or almost everything.

“I was working at Messerschmidt's”, recalled Maurice Lampe, one of the witnesses. “The foremen were mobilised German civilians who, in the evening, went home to their families. They knew quite well of our sufferings and privations. They frequently saw men fetched from the shop to be executed, and they could bear witness to most of the massacres I mentioned a little while ago. I should add that once we received - I am sorry I put it like that - once there arrived in Mauthausen 30 firemen from Vienna. They were imprisoned, I think, for having taken part in some sort of workers' activity. The firemen from Vienna told us that, when one wanted to frighten children in Vienna, one said to them, ‘If you do not obey, I will send you to Mauthausen’”.

Mauthausen Witnesses

Francois Boix

Spanish citizen, Catalan. Born in 1920. Photo reporter.

Fought in the Spanish Republican Army, was captured in 1940, and was held in Mauthausen until his liberation in May 1945.

Maurice Lampe

French citizen. Was born in 1900. Communist and trade union worker, participant of the Spanish Civil War.

Arrested on 8 November 1941, was held in prison. On 22 March 1944, he was taken to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he remained until the camp’s liberation.

Jean-Frederic Veith

French citizen born in Moscow in 1903.

A prisoner at Mauthausen for two years: from 22 April 1943 to 22 April 1945. Was sent to the labour distribution department of the camp.

Source:

Sergei Miroshnichenko, “Transcript of the Nuremberg Trials”, Volume V

Mauthausen Report: Stolen Tape as Evidence of Genocide

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Lida Baarova

Leni Riefenstahl

Gabrielle (Coco) Chanel

Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson

Hugo Boss

Dmitry Merezhkovsky and ZinaidaGippius

Mikhail Prishvin

Edith Piaf

Charles Aznavour

Olga Chekhova

Marlene Dietrich

Erich Maria Remarque

Marcel Marceau

Evelyn Waugh

Jean Gabin

Rebecca West

Billy Wilder

Elsa Triolet and Louis Aragon