Austria: Liberation of Mauthasuen
David Wingeate Pike writes: In the March 12-13 issue of the International Herald Tribune, Eric Pfanner of the New York Times reported from Vienna that the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz "was liberated by Russian troops on March 5, 1945." Neither the attribution nor the date was remotely correct. It is fitting that the right credit now goes to the right people.
The last battle in Europe in World War II was fought not in Germany or Italy but in Austria, which was defended by no fewer than four German armies, including 15 SS divisions, albeit depleted. By May 1, 1945, Austria found itself invaded by five Allied forces: in the East by the Soviets, who had already taken Vienna; in the northwest by the Americans; in the west by the Americans and the French; and in the south by the British and the Yugoslavs. This invasion led to the liberation of the very last of the SS camps, and it happened to be, by SS classification, the very worst of them all: Mauthausen and its 49 subcamps, or Nebenlager, scattered throughout Austria.
The Allied army that achieved the most in the liberation of the camps in Austria was none other than the Third Army under George S. Patton, and the division that liberated Mauthausen's central camp near Linz was the 11th Armored ("Thunderbolt"). On the morning of May 5, witnesses say that the Danube seemed to turn from its usual grey to blue. On that resplendent spring morning, two patrols of Patton's vanguard entered the Gusen valley, liberating three sub-camps before mounting the hill to the granite fortress on the top. Mauthausen had the distinction of being the only SS camp to be built in granite, and for that reason it stands today as it stood then, when the first 64 Americans began the liberation of 65,000 prisoners, many of them too far gone to save.
As elsewhere, the liberators were stunned by what they saw. Like some mass grave reopened, the survivors stumbled forward, living skeletons, half naked, quite naked, or in filthy rags. They clapped their hands without speaking. Their hands were so emaciated, thought one American, that it sounded like the clapping of seals. "A stench that withered grass," wrote Major Hill Blalock in his report, "fouling the air for hundreds of yards around." The sight and smell were too much for some soldiers, who became violently ill. A battalion surgeon, Captain Dr David B. Dolese, described the horrors as the most disturbing experience of his lifetime.
Thousands of delirious prisoners now hugged one another, wept and sang, and everyone cried out the single word, whether Liberté! Freiheit! Svoboda! Wolnosc! Szabadzag! or Libertad! Some danced or hopped around, some screamed hysterically, some broke down in tears. Others lacked the emotional power to laugh or weep, being instead barely conscious in their joy, while joy itself could be a cause of death, the sudden release from tension proving fatal to some prisoners. The Spaniard José Sala, who had survived five years in the camp, committed suicide within an hour of his liberation.
The ex-prisoners now did what victims of starvation almost always do; they ate whatever they found. The cigarettes that were given to them were not smoked, they were swallowed, and a grave mistake was made by the liberators. The Americans fed the ex-prisoners high-fat soup and rice, oblivious to the danger of allowing starving men to decide how much to eat at a time. "The American doctors," wrote the French survivor and dentist Paul Le Caer, "knew nothing about concentration camp pathology. They could think only of figuring out the amount of vitamins need, without thinking of how to reconstruct the digestive system of an undernourished body.? Three thousand died in the days that followed.
On another question, the liberators and the liberated found common ground. All were appalled at the reaction of the local populace. The villagers, in whose taverns the SS had been carousing every night for years, all sang the same refrain: all that had happened on the hill came as a dreadful shock to them. "They are liars," responded a survivor. "Our group was employed every day in cleaning the streets." And a peculiar feature of Mauthausen is that the railroad station through which all prisoners passed is situated on the other side of the village. All prisoners had tramped through it along the only road there was. "At night you might not have dared to look through the window," said an honest villager, "but you could hear them, and you could even smell them".
Meanwhile, in Austria, the war still raged. A restraining line had been established between the Americans and the Soviets, running north-south through Amstetten, but the link-up took longer than expected. It was only on May 8 (the day of Nazi Germany's surrender) that the forces met, near Grein, and in the heat of battle. Sergeant John L. Brady's unit was about to come under Soviet fire when he leapt up, shouting to the Russians, "We are Americans!" The cordiality in the following days was enjoyed by all, while the Soviets achieved one of their immediate purposes. The demarcation line was shifted a little to the west. It was enough to place the Mauthausen fortress just inside the Soviet zone of Austria.