KZ GUSEN MEMORIAL COMMITTEE
within ARBEITSKREIS FUER HEIMAT-, DENKMAL- UND GESCHICHTSPFLEGE
and Local-International Platform ST. GEORGEN/GUSEN, Austria
KZ Mauthausen-GUSEN Info-Pages
GUNSKIRCHEN Extermination Camp
Location
Construction
Death Marches
Situation in the Camp
Liberation
Map of Gunskirchen Extermination Camp
Statement of Liberator about Conditions at Gunkirchen Extermination Camp
Gunskirchen Monuments
Literature about Gunskirchen
About the Author
LOCATION
The Gunskirchen concentration camp was one of the sub-camps of the Mauthausen
concentration camp in Austria. The camp was located in a forest in Edt bei
Lambach (a small village south of Gunskirchen) 11 miles from the town of Wels
and 4 miles north of Lambach. Not far from the place where the road between
Gunskirchen and Saag crosses the highway no. 1.
The camp was very well hidden in the "Hochholz" a young forest
of pine which, however, was dense enough for not letting much of the sunshine through.
It was almost invisible from the main highway as well as from the air.
CONSTRUCTION
To build this camp, about 400 Polish an Russian prisoners were transferred from the
Mauthausen main camp to Gunskirchen in December 1944. They were housed in the
old schoolhouse of Gunskirchen. This building was surrounded by barbwire and
guarded 24 hours a day by SS guards.
Hochhuber, the mayor of Gunskirchen at that time, received an order to let the prisoners
chop a lot of trees in the "Hochholz" to build 10 barracks. The planning was to
use these barracks for the war industry.
The prisoners had to walk daily from the schoolhouse in Gunskirchen to the "Hochholz"
to work at the building of the barracks. It often happened that exhausted prisoners
had to be carried back to Gunskirchen at the end of the day by fellow prisoners.
The prisoners were very often beaten and brutally tortured by the SS guards. Even worse was the
treatment they got from the Kapos, guards recruited from the ranks of the prisoners
themselves.
The camp was officially opened at March 12, 1945.
It was planned that the camp should be used as a construction camp for the war
industry. Under its commandant SS-Oberscharfuehrer Heger, the camp had
originally provided the labor force of mainly Hungarian Jews for the firm
"Bauleitung Oberdonau" (Upper Danube Roadwork’s).
An other mentioned camp commander was first SS lieutenant Werner.
The camp was surrounded by barbwire and guard towers for the SS guards, armed with
machine guns and patrolled by armed German soldiers. In April 1945 the camp
existed of 6 or 7 (half finished) one store barracks with mud or stone floors and
two auxiliary barracks.
The barracks, were constructed of so called "Slats ", made from the leftovers
of sawing timbers - the type where the tree curvature and bark remained.
The camp was enclosed with a sturdily made fence approximately 8 feet in height.
The fence wire was of a heavy gauge and the openings were about 2 by 4 inches.
A Large wooden gate was the only means of entrance. This gate consisted of two parts,
each about five feet wide, the gate halves were formed with wide planks as frames
and covered with the fencing material. The area enclosed by the fence was wooded
and the ground was covered by pine needles.
THE DEATH MARCHES
In April 1945 the Mauthausen main camp was not able to house the continuing flood of
prisoners anymore who were transported in from the east. Mass marches were
organized to transport prisoners from the Mauthausen main camp, the Mauthausen
tent camp, Gusen and the other camps in the area to Gunskirchen.
Many of these prisoners had recently been forced to march from the vicinity of Hungary
to Mauthausen and Gusen. Thousands of men were also sent by Auschwitz to Mauthausen and Gusen.
Three columns of prisoners reached Gunskirchen in the "Hochholz"
at the 16th, 18th and 24th of April 1945.
They were all rounded up in the Gunskirchen camp, the prisoners that were already in the
camp had stopped working at that time, they were so exhausted that they were
nearly dead.
The thousands of prisoners had been crammed into the one-story,
frame buildings with sloppy, muddy floors.
The buildings were original built for 300 but now housed approximately 2,500 to 3,000
prisoners. There was not enough room on the floor of the barracks for everybody to sit down and lie down.
They only could sit or lean together. All together there were about 15,000 to 17,000 Jews
in the "Hochholz" in Edt by Lambach.
THE SITUATION IN THE CAMP
There was only one latrine for all the prisoners, and the drinking water was distributed
from a tank of about 1,500 liters that was transported by the fire truck to the
camp once a day. The prisoners fought for a drip of water, they even exchanged
their daily rations of food for it. As the result of about 2,500 people crowded
together in a barrack many of the weaker prisoners were crushed to dead at night.
During the night, some of the weaker prisoners toppled over and burying others underneath,
so that many suffocated. Sometimes it was so crowded in the buildings that people
slept three-deep on the floor, one on top of the other. Often, a man would
awake in the morning and find the person under him dead. Too weak to move even
the pathetically light bodies of their comrades, the living continued sleeping
on them.
The latrine could be used only 6 hours a day. The prisoners were confined to the barracks
for 12 hours at night and during the day the prisoners were lined up and
counted three times for two hours. The latrine consisted of a room for 12 men
and 16 women for the total population. The prisoners had to use these facilities
when they could find time to go, when they were not standing in line or
confined to the barracks.
Diarrhea and constipation affected everyone. Those who could not wait to use the toilet
were executed on the spot. The rule of the SS was to shoot on sight anyone seen
relieving himself in any place but the latrine. Many of the prisoners in the camp had
diarrhea. There were always long lines at the latrine and it was often
impossible for many to reach it in time because of hours spent waiting.
Naturally, many were shot for they could not wait in line. Their bodies were
left there in their own filth. The stench was unbelievable.
Every offence of the camp rules resulted in the fact that everybody in the camp was
denied water for three days.
The daily food rations existed of a piece of black bread and some watery soup.
Very often there was no food at all. The food rations were even less than in the tent camp of Mauthausen.
Many prisoners only survived because of the small food rations in the Red-Cross packets that were
distributed once or twice.
The situation in the camp was horrible. Daily two to three-hundred prisoners died
of dysentery or typhoid. It is said that the circumstances in the Gunskirchen
camp were even worse than in the Mauthausen main camp.
The camp doctor Dr. Richter and Dr. Karl Grehl, a biologist from Rheinland working for the Red
Cross, were appointed to fight the epidemic. They could do very less because
there was no useful medicine available. In the camp there was a lack on the
most elementary hygienic precautions. Ill and healthy people lived close to
each other. And as a result of this the epidemic could spread around. The death
rate increased, and daily a truck collected the bodies of the dead to bury them
in the forest around the camp.
When the death rate increased even more the dead were buried inside the camp.
As long as the SS men were in charge, they made the stronger inmates dig crude pits and bury the dead.
They were buried in mass graves behind the barracks, but the dead rate became so high that the dead were
piled up in rows, randomly along one side of the barrack street.
LIBERATION
When the German SS troops guarding the concentration heard the Americans were coming,
they suddenly got busy burying the bodies of their victims, or rather, having
them buried by inmates, not for sanitary reasons but in an attempt to hide some
of the evidence of the inhuman treatment given their prisoners. There were so
many peoply dying in each hut that the prisoners were ordered for the last two
days to pull these corpses out of the huts and pull them to the side on the
edge of the camp where they just had to be heaped up into larger and larger
heaps of skin and bone corpses. According to one of the survivors it looked
like hundreds.
Two days before the Americans arrived the SS guards gave some of the prisoners who were still alive
what they considered an extremely liberal food ration: One lump of sugar per person and one loaf of bread for
every seven persons. In the period before the inmates had received no water or
food for five days. One day before the arrival of the Americans at May 4, 1945
the SS left the camp. The prisoners stormed the food storage beside the kitchen and took
what ever they could lay there hands on.
The prisoners in the ‘Waldlager’ and in the school were liberated on May 4, 1945.
The Cavalry Reconnaissance group of the 71st Infantry Division, 3rd United States Army
was the first unit to reach Gunskirchen at May 4, 1945. Later a medical unit reached the camp.
At the arrival of the Americans the prisoners were no more than dirty skeletons full of
louse. According to one of the liberators it was impossible to count the dead,
but 200 emaciated corpses would be a very conservative estimate, but there were
many other bodies inside the barracks. An other liberator gives an estimate of
about 2,000 bodies that were laying around in the camp:
You couldn’t walk anywhere without having to walk around or step over a corps.
For the most part they had died during the last two days before the liberation.
They were buried in room sized mass graves.
As the American soldiers neared the camp they found "hundreds of starving, half-crazed
inmates lining the roads begging for food and cigarettes. Many of them had been
able to get only a few hundred yards from the gate before they keeled over and
died. As weak as they were, the chance to be free, the opportunity to escape
was so great they could not resist, though it meant staggering only a few yards
before death came."
Later when the liberators did go further in the woods, they did find more bodies of prisoners
who had gone off from their comrades to die.
Several members of the 71st Infantry Division have written down their experiences
during the liberation of Gunskirchen. Mason H. Dorsey wrote:
"As we arrived at the camp, those who were able, crowded around us, many crying,
hugging, and exclaiming "ich habe hunger" (I am hungry). We gave them
all the K rations and cigarettes we had. They ate the food and cigarettes! I
noticed some going across the road to a bank of dirt or clay-type earth. Some
were eating this while others apparently were attempting to eat the roots of
small bushes and the bark off some of the trees."(1)
"Before we could establish proper control some of the prisoners had globbed down the
food, gorged themselves and died. A starving person must learn to eat all over
again."
After they went in they found inside the barracks, human bodies, although not much
more than skeletons, were lying on top of corpses. The stench was horrible,
some had only enough strength to raise an arm."
One aspect all the liberators agree upon is the fact that the most unforgettable
aspect of those as they encountered the horrors, was the odor, the smell, unlike anything
ever smelled before, or since. "It was a strong and permeating smell made up of all kind of
odors - human excreta, foul body odors, smodering trash fires, German tobacco - which is a stink in itself
- all mixed together in a heavy dank atmosphere, in a thick, ankle-deep muddy
woods, where little breeze could go. It could almost be seen and hung over the
camp like a fog of death. The gound was pulpy through the camp, churned to a
consistency of warm putty by the milling of thousands of feet, mud mixed with
feces and urine."
For the liberators was the fact that suddenly thousands of inmates of the Gunskirchen
camp had to be fed was a serious problem. Extended supply lines made the food
situation a major problem until ingenious doughboys discovered a German supply
train in nearby Wels. The train was drove onto a siding near the camp, arranged
by Captain Swope with the assistance of an excited Austrian girl brakeman.
Physical force was necessary for order when the first food lines were organized
as it was the first food these hunger-sated persons had seen in many days.
The American unit transported the survivors to a temporary hospital in the nearby
town of Wels. At the moment of liberation 5,419 survivors were registrated.
The amount of prisoners that had left the camp the day before the arrival of the
Americans is estimated at about 3,000.
Mr. Wiesner, one of the survivors, and secretary of the society of victims of the
Nazi’s in Hungary, was one of the prisoners that was forced to march from
Mauthausen to Gunskirchen in one of the death marches.
He added this statement to the history of the liberation if the Gunskirchen camp:
"When the American army came closer towards the Gunskirchen camp the SS camp commander
ordered a truck with negotiators and a white flag towards the American staff.
The negotiator had the orders to present a letter to the American command staff.
In the letter the Americans were told that the camp commander had written
orders to lock the prisoners in the barracks, to block the door and windows and
after that to destroy the camp totally. When the American commander agreed to let the SS go
without any hindrance, the order would not be carried out. The American commander told the negotiators that he
agreed with the proposal and as a result of this thousands of lives were saved
in the last day before the liberation. After the liberation hundreds of
prisoners were transported to improvised hospitals in Wels and Hoersching."
After the war seven mass graves were found in the area of the Gunskirchen camp,
containing the remains of 1,227 prisoners. The remains were re-buried at the
honorary burial place "Quarantaene Hof" at the official memorial Mauthausen.
The 71st division signal corps and photography units later compiled a booklet entitled:
"The 71st came to Gunskirchen Lager". It describes and illustrates the camp,
conditions and horrors. This booklet can be found at:
http://www.remember.org/mooney/gunskirchen-intro.html
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Most recent updates of this page were made on
2006-03-07 by Rudolf A. HAUNSCHMIED,
Martha GAMMER, Siegi WITZANY-DURDA and
Jan-Ruth MILLS