Camp № 3 | concentration camp

 concentration camp  Add category

 Upload a photo

Between the spring and autumn of 1944, the concentration camp was enlarged once again creating camp III with five prisoners’ barracks and two workshops. This area is not a part of the memorial and is therefore not accessible. Here the SS housed some 2,000 civilian prisoners, women and men, from Warsaw. During the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the summer of 1944 they had been, like tens of thousands before them, deported from Warsaw to detention camps and sent to the German Reich to perform slave labour. After a few weeks, some of these people were assigned to perform slave labour in Upper Austrian industries, but the majority remained in Mauthausen as prisoners until the camp’s liberation.

Camp III subsequently served as living quarters for various groups of prisoners, but also stood empty for long periods. By the end of April 1945, two whole weeks before the camp’s liberation, it became the scene of one of the largest acts of killing in the history of the Mauthausen concentration camp. The SS concentrated some 14,000 prisoners from sick-bay/medical camp here, primarily older and physically very weak prisoners, in order to gas them to death in the subsequent days. Faced with Germany’s military defeat, the SS tried to eliminate the visible traces of their crimes, on the buildings - they dismantled parts of the gas chamber - as well as on the people. It was mainly those who knew too much, such as those working crematorium detail in Gusen, and prisoners who showed the signs of extremely hard labour, malnutrition and illness most visibly who were killed. At the same time the discipline and the high-handed attitude of the SS officers crumbled markedly during this period, and several prisoners from camp I were mounting active resistance. Hans Maršálek remembers in his book “The History of the Mauthausen Concentration Camp”:

That same day a duplicate key to the gate to camp III was obtained by the camp recorder/clerk Kurt Pany. During the night the functionaries from the camp typist’s office and the Italian Communist functionary Pajetta, who had been fetched from sick bay, led out groups of up to 20 persons, hid them in the barracks in the main camp and brought them to sick-bay the following day. Or: when the SS officers formed columns of 80 to 100 prisoners intended for the gas chambers, camp recorders/clerk who were present smuggled other prisoners out of the death camp and hid them in block 22 with Hrbek, the senior prisoner there. Between April 21-25 1945, 650 prisoners were killed by the SS with Cyclone B gas in the gas chamber. In addition, a large number of prisoners died in the camp itself. These “cleansing actions” in the overflowing sick-bay ... were probably instigated by the local SS doctor Dr. Wolter and ordered by camp Commandant Ziereis. Certain prisoner functionaries in sick-bay demanded that the SS doctors prevent the sick from being taken. The prisoners in the typists’ office of the SS officers demanded the same. The SS officers approached in this way were uncertain and demoralised by Germany’s hopeless military situation and lacked the courage to refuse to carry out a command issued by their commandant. In the last days of the concentration camp’s existence it had become clear: those who had participated in the crimes over the years were incapable of stopping. The SS doctors pointed to the commandants, the SS officers to the doctors. It wasn’t until April 25, 1945 in the afternoon that the typists’ office in the detention camp finally gave the order to take the prisoners in camp III back to sick-bay.

I will never forget the moment when on April 25, 1945 in the afternoon, the last 378 prisoners who had been rescued were taken back to sick-bay in a closed formation led by the Czech camp recorder Dr. Vratislav Bušek (pronounced: Bush-ek) before the SS officers’ very eyes in a victory march across the roll-call square thought the main gate of the detention camp. For everybody, this was a first taste of success for the prisoners ...”