When American squaddies liberated the Mauthausen Nazi focus camp in Austria 80 years in the past this Might, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist unity.
The Spaniards hung a banner comprised of stolen mattress sheets over certainly one of Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it learn: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”
Each American servicemen and Spanish survivors keep in mind the camp’s liberation as a win of their shared struggle towards extremism, my analysis at the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen reveals. All of them understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist perspectives rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute thousands and thousands of other people and imperil democracy throughout Europe.
International Conflict II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence haven’t any trendy similar. However, extremism is now threatening democracy in the USA in recognizable tactics.
Because the Trump management executes abstract deportations, works to suppress dissent, essentially restructures the government and defies judges, professionals warn that the rustic is popping towards authoritarianism.
As a student of the Mauthausen camp, I imagine that figuring out how American squaddies and Spanish prisoners skilled its liberation gives a precious lesson on the actual and provide risks of extremism.
‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’
In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a compelled exertions camp in Austria, with a world prisoner inhabitants. My analysis displays that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, together with 60% of the more or less 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.
The Spanish prisoners had been dedicated antifascist resistors despatched there in 1940 and 1941. Referred to as Republicans or Loyalists, that they had fought towards Francisco Franco within the Spanish Civil Conflict and Adolf Hitler in International Conflict II.
The younger males with the eleventh Armored Department of the U.S. Military who liberated Mauthausen would by no means overlook the instant they came upon the camp. It was once Might 5, 1945, simply days earlier than the warfare led to Europe. A platoon led through Team of workers Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was once repairing bridges on this tucked-away nook of Austria when a Swiss Pink Go delegate alerted them to a big Nazi focus camp within sight.
Mauthausen’s global survivors had been a number of the Nazis’ final prisoners to be freed.
American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen focus camp on Might 5, 1945, as photographed through prisoner Francesc Boix. Sgt. Harry Saunders is status at the left fender.
Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial
Nonetheless, seeing a focus camp along with his personal eyes was once alarming.
“The piles of bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral historical past recorded for the College of South Florida in 2008. So did “these people walking around like God knows – skeletons and whatnot.”
Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, additionally remembered the instant he noticed the Mauthausen survivors. They had been women and men of all nationalities.
“The live skeletons, the people that were in the camp, it was indescribable, it was such a shock,” he stated in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral Historical past Assortment in Vienna.
One of the most Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a digital camera from the SS within the chaotic moments earlier than the camp’s liberation. Boix photographed Sgt. Saunders rumbling into the focus camp on an armored automobile.
Saunders saved that {photograph} for the remainder of his lifestyles. It captured a second of readability for him.
“When we liberated Mauthausen, we really knew then why we had to stop Hitler and why we really went to war,” he stated within the interview.
Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the eleventh Armored Department, was once 20 when he helped to free up Mauthausen. He became 100 this yr. We met in mid-March 2025 and mentioned his wartime enjoy.
“What I saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell advised me.
The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.
‘Starved and crippled but alive’
The American liberators toured the gasoline chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.
Maj. Franklin Lee Clark noticed the useless stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took pictures to report it.
The Spanish banner putting at the Mauthausen jail gate, Might 1945.
Franklin Lee Clark/Emory College Archives, Witnesses to the Holocaust Challenge
Infantrymen from the eleventh Armored Department directed locals to bury the women and men murdered through the Nazis. The native Austrians claimed that they had no longer recognized about their the city’s focus camp. However a farmer who lived within sight have been disappointed about all of the useless our bodies visual from her belongings. She filed a grievance asking the Nazis both to forestall “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”
The American liberators made positive that the townspeople may not glance clear of the murderous rampage performed of their backyards.
Whilst Boix was once taking pictures of American squaddies all over liberation, the warriors had been taking pictures of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.
At the again of 1 snapshot, a Sign Corps soldier typed out his impressions in their message: “I really know what that word (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners in the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz, Austria. They were Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (remember the Loyalists?). They had men and women in this camp. Starved and crippled but alive.”
After Mauthausen was once liberated, the freed Loyalists started working documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Along side his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen sufferers and their Nazi captors. The use of the Nazis’ personal typewriters, they spent two weeks record the names and private main points of Spanish sufferers of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.
The end result was once web page after web page of proof they passed over to American warfare crimes investigators and the World Pink Go.
Boix, in the meantime, gave the American citizens loads of picture negatives he had rescued from the camp’s images lab.
Boix later testified about those photographs within the warfare crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and homicide their sufferers in Mauthausen after which {photograph} the our bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic proof in their crimes.
He “could not keep those negatives because it was so dangerous,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in various places until the liberation.”
Testimony within the Nuremberg warfare crime trials. Francesc Boix’s testimony starts at 7:44. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Nationwide Archives and Data Management. Manufacturer: US Sign Corps)
A lifelong vaccine towards extremism
For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was once a lifelong vaccine towards extremism.
They witnessed how a fascist chief tore the sector aside. They noticed with their very own eyes the dying and destruction of political extremism.
After I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed worry that the USA is taking place a deadly trail.
“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell advised me.
As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:
“This is the lesson we have to learn: It could happen here.”
