When American squaddies liberated the Mauthausen Nazi focus camp in Austria 80 years in the past this Would possibly, Spanish prisoners welcomed them with a message of antifascist harmony.
The Spaniards hung a banner constructed from stolen mattress sheets over considered 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 take note the camp’s liberation as a win of their shared combat 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 tens of millions of other folks and imperil democracy throughout Europe.
Global Warfare II, the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazi violence don’t have any fashionable an identical. However, extremism is now threatening democracy in the US in recognizable tactics.
Because the Trump management executes abstract deportations, works to suppress dissent, essentially restructures the government and defies judges, mavens warn that the rustic is popping towards authoritarianism.
As a pupil of the Mauthausen camp, I consider that working out how American squaddies and Spanish prisoners skilled its liberation provides a treasured lesson on the true and provide risks of extremism.
‘We knew then why we had to stop Hitler’
In 1938, the Nazis established Mauthausen, a compelled hard work camp in Austria, with a global prisoner inhabitants. My analysis presentations 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, they’d fought towards Francisco Franco within the Spanish Civil Warfare and Adolf Hitler in Global Warfare II.
The younger males with the eleventh Armored Department of the U.S. Military who liberated Mauthausen would by no means omit the instant they found out the camp. It used to be Would possibly 5, 1945, simply days earlier than the struggle led to Europe. A platoon led by means of Group of workers Sgt. Albert J. Kosiek used to be repairing bridges on this tucked-away nook of Austria when a Swiss Pink Move delegate alerted them to a big Nazi focus camp within sight.
Mauthausen’s global survivors had been a number of the Nazis’ ultimate prisoners to be freed.
American liberators rolling into the Mauthausen focus camp on Would possibly 5, 1945, as photographed by means of 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 used to be 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 mentioned in a 2002 interview for the Mauthausen Memorial’s Oral Historical past Assortment in Vienna.
Some of the 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 automotive.
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 mentioned within the interview.
Frank Hartzell, a technical sergeant with the eleventh Armored Department, used to be 20 when he helped to disencumber Mauthausen. He became 100 this yr. We met in mid-March 2025 and mentioned his wartime revel in.
“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 lifeless stacked up in “piles like cord wood to the point that they had to bring in bulldozers and make mass graves,” and took footage to file it.
The Spanish banner putting at the Mauthausen jail gate, Would possibly 1945.
Franklin Lee Clark/Emory College Archives, Witnesses to the Holocaust Mission
Squaddies from the eleventh Armored Department directed locals to bury the women and men murdered by means of the Nazis. The native Austrians claimed they’d now not recognized about their the city’s focus camp. However a farmer who lived within sight have been dissatisfied about the entire lifeless 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 now not glance clear of the murderous rampage performed of their backyards.
Whilst Boix used to be taking footage of American squaddies throughout liberation, the warriors had been taking footage 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 used to be 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 list the names and private main points of Spanish sufferers of Mauthausen and of the SS who had killed them.
The outcome used to be web page after web page of proof they passed over to American struggle crimes investigators and the Global Pink Move.
Boix, in the meantime, gave the American citizens masses of picture negatives he had rescued from the camp’s images lab.
Boix later testified about those pictures within the struggle 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 struggle crime trials. Francesc Boix’s testimony starts at 7:44. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Nationwide Archives and Information 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 used to be a lifelong vaccine towards extremism.
They witnessed how a fascist chief tore the arena aside. They noticed with their very own eyes the loss of life and destruction of political extremism.
After I interviewed Hartzell, he expressed worry that the US is happening 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.”
