Liberating the Austrian Spirit

"No one cared about us. It was trauma in the camp and afterward, too."
"I survived. And the others didn't."
"[At the camp there were 186 steps in 'the Stairway of Death', that slave laborers had to climb with blocks of granite on their backs ... when a Nazi guard asked who would like to rest, most said they would.] 'Well then, sit over there' [said the guard] and shot them. He said the inmate tried to escape the camp.. That happened umpteen times every day."
Aba Lewit, Mauthausen survivor

"[The years 1938 to 1945 represents] one of the most horrible chapters in our history. [We should] never forget and to elevate values such as tolerance, democracy, non-violence and solidarity."
Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann

Entrance gate to the main compound at Mauthausen. Just inside the entrance gate is a courtyard where prisoner formations were sometimes held. The large iron eagle over the gate was removed immediately following the liberation.  (Museum KZ-Lager Mauthausen)

Mauthausen, the longest operating of the Nazi concentration camps in northern Austria was the last of the camps to be liberated. Dignitaries and delegations from Europe and beyond were present at the 70th anniversary of its liberation. There were over 20,000 people at the ceremony on Sunday; among them 50 survivors. The concentration camp welcomed its first railroad wagon of prisoners in 1938. At the time of its liberation and that of its almost 50 satellite camps in May of 1945, more than 100,000 people had perished there.

The main camp had a "Category III" designation, marking it out as a slave labour camp whose inmates would approach death through labour; starvation, privation, emaciation, disease and illness would all follow. Most who died there were Jews, but there were also conscientious objectors and political prisoners along with any opponents outspoken against German's Nazi regime. At the labour camp, planes and other military equipment were built.

The factories themselves were located in tunnels dug and deeply entrenched at the auxiliary camps. And then there was a huge granite pit, excavated as well, for the war effort. Where laborers worked 12-hour days, clambering the stairs which were uneven slabs up to a half metre high, carrying immensely heavy pieces of granite. Most people died of exhaustion, were shot or died after transfer to a barracks for the ill.

Where no medical care was available and epidemics swept through the inmates and killed them, a not difficult task for their weakened condition. On Sunday, at the ceremonies, cows could be seen grazing peacefully on nearby meadows, with tidy farmhouses in eyesight of the walls of Mauthausen. People going about their daily business in nearby villages. Just as they had during the war years. How were they to know Mauthausen was a death factory, after all?

Like most of the German population, most Austrians claimed never to have known about the camps or their purpose, let alone the vast death toll it accounted for. Public opinion had it that Austria was victimized by Hitler, certainly not that the country was a willing accomplice after its 1938 annexation, to Germany's unspeakable atrocities. Perhaps it made sense that Austrians took pride that Hitler, the ruler of the Third Reich, was an Austrian.

What fine and noble sentiments emitted from the mouth of the Austrian Chancellor. How ironic that the United Nations, transformed from the League of Nations after World War II, as a world body traumatized by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust had as its fourth Secretary General from 1972 to 1981, Kurt Waldheim, a former member of the Hitlerian Nazis. When his Nazi past was revealed, Austria rose to his defence, their native son.

World Jewish Congress, via Associated Press

MAY 1943 Lt. Kurt Waldheim, second from left, serving with a German infantry division in Podgorica, in what was Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

His nobility as an Austrian was reflected in his elevation to President of Austria, from 1986 to 1992.

"Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime."
"But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes."
Professor Robert Edwin Herzstein, historian, University of South Carolina