When American troopers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi focus camp in Austria 80 years in the past this Could, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.
The Spaniards hung a banner created from stolen mattress sheets over one among Mauthausen’s gates. In English, Spanish and Russian, it learn: “The Spanish Antifascists Greet the Liberating Forces.”
Each American servicemen and Spanish survivors bear in mind the camp’s liberation as a win of their shared combat in opposition to extremism, my analysis on the Spanish prisoners in Mauthausen finds. All of them understood the authoritarian governments of Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain as fascist regimes that used extremist views rooted in intolerance and nationalism to persecute hundreds of thousands of individuals and imperil democracy throughout Europe.
World Warfare II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence don’t have any trendy equal. However, extremism is now threatening democracy in the US in recognizable methods.
Because the Trump administration executes abstract deportations, works to suppress dissent, essentially restructures the federal authorities and defies judges, specialists warn that the nation is popping towards authoritarianism.
As a scholar of the Mauthausen camp, I imagine that understanding how American troopers and Spanish prisoners skilled its liberation gives a beneficial lesson on the actual and current risks of extremism.
‘We knew then why we needed to cease Hitler’
In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a compelled labor camp in Austria, with an worldwide prisoner inhabitants. My analysis reveals that the Nazis murdered 16,000 Jews and 66,000 non-Jewish prisoners at Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, together with 60% of the roughly 7,200 Spaniards imprisoned there.
The Spanish prisoners have been dedicated antifascist resistors despatched there in 1940 and 1941. Referred to as Republicans or Loyalists, that they had fought in opposition to Francisco Franco within the Spanish Civil Warfare and Adolf Hitler in World Warfare II.
The younger males with the eleventh Armored Division of the U.S. Military who liberated Mauthausen would always remember the second they found the camp. It was Could 5, 1945, simply days earlier than the conflict resulted in Europe. A platoon led by Workers Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek was repairing bridges on this tucked-away nook of Austria when a Swiss Pink Cross delegate alerted them to a big Nazi focus camp close by.
Mauthausen’s worldwide survivors have been among the many Nazis’ final prisoners to be freed.
George Sherman was a 19-year-old tank gunner from Brooklyn when his patrol discovered Mauthausen. He was Jewish and had learn concerning the Nazi camps in Europe within the Military’s newspaper.
Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial
Nonetheless, seeing a focus camp along with his personal eyes was alarming.
“The piles of our bodies” struck him, he remembered in an oral historical past recorded for the College of South Florida in 2008. So did “these folks strolling round like God is aware of – skeletons and whatnot.”
Sgt. Harry Saunders, a 23-year-old radio operator from Chicago, additionally remembered the second he noticed the Mauthausen survivors. They have been women and men of all nationalities.
“The reside skeletons, the those who have been within 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 many 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 stored that {photograph} for the remainder of his life. It captured a second of readability for him.
“After we liberated Mauthausen, we actually knew then why we needed to cease Hitler and why we actually went to conflict,” he stated within the interview.
Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the eleventh Armored Division, was 20 when he helped to liberate Mauthausen. He turned 100 this yr. We met in mid-March 2025 and mentioned his wartime expertise.
“What I noticed and skilled appalled me,” Hartzell instructed me.
The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.
‘Starved and crippled however alive’
The American liberators toured the fuel chambers and the crematory ovens in Mauthausen.
Maj. Franklin Lee Clark noticed the lifeless stacked up in “piles like twine wooden to the purpose that that they had to herald bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took photographs to doc it.
Franklin Lee Clark/Emory College Archives, Witnesses to the Holocaust Mission
Troopers from the eleventh Armored Division directed locals to bury the women and men murdered by the Nazis. The native Austrians claimed that they had not identified about their city’s focus camp. However a farmer who lived close by had been upset about all of the lifeless our bodies seen from her property. She filed a criticism asking the Nazis both to cease “these inhuman deeds” or do them “the place one doesn’t see it.”
The American liberators made certain that the townspeople might now not look away from the murderous rampage carried out of their backyards.
Whereas Boix was taking photographs of American troopers throughout liberation, the troopers have been taking photographs of the welcome banner the Spaniards had painted.
On the again of 1 snapshot, a Sign Corps soldier typed out his impressions of their message: “I actually know what that phrase (antifascist) means. We liberated these prisoners within the Mauthausen focus camp close to Linz, Austria. They have been Poles, Hungarians and Spanish Loyalists (bear in mind the Loyalists?). That they had women and men on this camp. Starved and crippled however alive.”
After Mauthausen was liberated, the freed Loyalists set to work documenting the Nazis’ crimes. Alongside along with his countrymen Joan de Diego, Casimir Climent and others, Spanish survivor Joaquín López Raimundo compiled lists of Mauthausen victims and their Nazi captors. Utilizing the Nazis’ personal typewriters, they spent two weeks itemizing the names and private particulars of Spanish victims of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.
The consequence was web page after web page of proof they handed over to American conflict crimes investigators and the Worldwide Pink Cross.
Boix, in the meantime, gave the Individuals lots of of picture negatives he had rescued from the camp’s images lab.
Boix later testified about these photographs within the conflict crime trials at Nuremberg and Dachau. He described seeing the Nazis beat, torture and homicide their victims in Mauthausen after which {photograph} the our bodies. For 2½ years, Boix stole the photographic proof of their crimes.
He “couldn’t maintain these negatives as a result of it was so harmful,” he testified at Dachau, so he “hid them in varied locations till the liberation.”
A lifelong vaccine in opposition to extremism
For the American liberators, their up-close view of the horrors of Mauthausen and their interactions with the Spanish antifascist survivors was a lifelong vaccine in opposition to extremism.
They witnessed how a fascist chief tore the world aside. They noticed with their very own eyes the dying and destruction of political extremism.
Once I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the US goes down a harmful path.
“The USA at the moment will not be the USA I fought and got here near dying for,” Hartzell instructed me.
As American Mauthausen liberator Maj. George E. King warned an interviewer in 1980:
“That is the lesson we’ve to study: It might occur right here.”
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