When American troopers liberated the Mauthausen Nazi focus camp in Austria 80 years in the past this Might, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist solidarity.
The Spaniards hung a banner made out of stolen mattress sheets over one in all 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 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 tens of millions of individuals and imperil democracy throughout Europe.
World Conflict 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 consider that understanding how American troopers and Spanish prisoners skilled its liberation affords a invaluable lesson on the actual and current risks of extremism.
‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’
In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a pressured labor camp in Austria, with a global 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 towards Francisco Franco within the Spanish Civil Conflict and Adolf Hitler in World Conflict 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 Might 5, 1945, simply days earlier than the warfare 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.
American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen focus camp on Might 5, 1945, as photographed by prisoner Francesc Boix. Sgt. Harry Saunders is standing on the left fender.
Francesc Boix/Courtesy of Collections of the Mauthausen Memorial
Nonetheless, seeing a focus camp along with his personal eyes was 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 second he noticed the Mauthausen survivors. They have 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 many Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen, Francesc Boix, had stolen a digicam 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 automotive.
Saunders stored that {photograph} for the remainder of his life. 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 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 saw and experienced appalled me,” Hartzell instructed me.
The outrage has stayed with him for 80 years.
‘Starved and crippled but alive’
The American liberators toured the fuel 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 doc it.
The Spanish banner hanging on the Mauthausen jail gate, Might 1945.
Franklin Lee Clark/Emory College Archives, Witnesses to the Holocaust Challenge
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 useless our bodies seen from her property. She filed a criticism asking the Nazis both to cease “these inhuman deeds” or do them “where one does not see it.”
The American liberators made positive that the townspeople may now not look away from the murderous rampage carried out of their backyards.
Whereas Boix was taking pictures of American troopers throughout liberation, the troopers have been taking pictures 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 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 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 end result was web page after web page of proof they handed over to American warfare crimes investigators and the Worldwide Pink Cross.
Boix, in the meantime, gave the Individuals a whole lot of picture negatives he had rescued from the camp’s images lab.
Boix later testified about these photos within the warfare 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 “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 begins at 7:44. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Nationwide Archives and Information Administration. Producer: 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 a lifelong vaccine towards extremism.
They witnessed how a fascist chief tore the world aside. They noticed with their very own eyes the loss of life and destruction of political extremism.
After I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed concern that the US goes down a harmful path.
“The USA today is not the USA I fought and came close to dying for,” Hartzell instructed 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.”
