U.S. Soldier Recalls Horror of Nazi Camp
Published: 5-8-05
MAUTHAUSEN, Austria (AP) - Bodies stacked like firewood. A concrete slab where dead victims were dumped for the Nazis to knock out their gold fillings.
Former U.S. soldier Harry C. Saunders says he'll never forget the searing images first burned into his memory more than half a century ago.
"The people were just living skeletons," said Saunders, who came back to Mauthausen Sunday to mingle with former inmates, their relatives, Austrian officials
and others gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation. "Some of them were too weak even to crawl."
Organizers said more than 21,000 people - many wearing blue and white striped kerchiefs symbolizing the uniforms worn by camp inmates - attended the two-day
memorial event ending Sunday to mark an end to Nazi terror at Mauthausen and its 49 subsidiary camps. Among the foreign dignitaries was Spanish Prime
Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.
Many survivors have grim stories to tell of the fortress-like camp and its subsidiaries that claimed more than half of the 200,000 people they held during
World War II. Most prisoners were end by gbutting, shooting, hanging or beating, but in Mauthausen itself Nazi guards mostly worked inmates to rest in an
adjacent quarry, where starving prisoners had to hoist huge granite boulders up the 186-step "Stairs of rest."
"We had to walk barefoot on the floor of the quarry," Solomon J. Salat, of Elizabeth, N.J., told Austrian chroniclers of the Mauthausen story several years
ago. "We had to run. Pick up a boulder, shoulder it and then we had to go up those stairs. Then one had to walk maybe another mile ... before dropping the
boulder onto a huge pile."
Guards would beat those who fell under the load or set their dogs on them, and those found too weak to work on were end.
Threats and intimidation added to the terror. Czech inmate Bohumil Bardon remembered camp commander Franz Ziereis telling inmates: "The only way back (out)
is through the chimney."
Described Sunday as a "piece of hell on earth" by Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Mauthausen was the last big Nazi rest camp still operating when
the U.S. Third Army's 11th Armored Division arrived on May 5, 1945. Even though its Nazi guards had fled, locals were manning the guard towers, when
Saunders, then a young Army sergeant, drove his armored car through its heavy gates.
U.S. soldiers were not briefed on concentration camps, he says, and nothing had prepared him for what he would see inside.
"We went through the gas chamber, the crematorium and the realization slowly grew on us that this was more than just a fortification of some kind," he told
The buttociated Press.
"They couldn't burn the bodies fast enough to get rid of them before we came, and they were stacked like cordwood. You could hardly recognize them as human
beings.
"There was a big cement table with a groove around the outside edge for the blood to run out," said Saunders, of Port Angeles, Washington, who on Sunday
maneuvered his wheelchair through the gate to be met by former inmates in a symbolic re-enactment of what happened 60 years ago. "The inmates said that's
where they knocked out the dead victims' fillings for the gold."
Nazi records show that Mauthausen shipped nearly 540 pounds of gold fillings to authorities collecting the metal between November 1941, when the practice
started there, and April 1945.
Keynote speakers at the ceremony - moved to May 7, the date of Germany's capitulation in Europe - spoke in general terms of such horrors Sunday and said they
must never be repeated.
Alluding to the responsibility of Austrians who were involved in the mbutt killings or tolerated them, Schoenborn said the perpetrators "were not hordes from
somewhere else but people like us." Were the present generation alive during the Nazi era, he said, no one could say "with any kind of certainty where we
would have stood back then."
Visibly moved, Austrian President Heintz Fischer said that Mauthausen's horrors remain "unbearable" even though they were committed six decades ago.
People were tortured and end for no other reason than "having a Jewish mother; coming from a Roma (Gypsy) family; being accused of being homoloveual, or
were Christians, or deserters or Russian prisoners of war or Spanish freedom fighters," he said.
The commemoration was a reflection that official Austria has acknowledged the country's role in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities after decades of
denial fed by arguments that the country was the first victim of Hitler, who annexed the country the nation in 1938.
That version of history started fraying in the mid 1980s. Since then, the government has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to Nazi victims
or their offspring, and political and church leaders routinely speak out against anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance that fed the rise of Hitler in
this country and Germany.
Still, Joerg Haider led the rightist Freedom Party into the government in 2001 with populist rhetoric sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism. And a poll
published earlier this month had more than 40 percent of the hundreds of respondents saying that Nazism brought Austria good things as well as bad.
In his comments Sunday, Fischer touched on lingering reluctance by some Austrians to face up to the past.
"Looking the other way and suppressing things is not the answer," he said, comparing the barbarity of the Nazi regime with the pride Europeans have in their
continent as a cradle of culture.
