| Ebensee is located in Upper Austria, Austria, at the south end of Lake Traun (Traunsee) and has a population of about 8500. Linz lies approximately 90 km to the north. The nearest towns are Gmunden and Bad Ischl. A dark point in Ebensee's history was the placement of a Nazi concentration camp (codename "Zement"), part of the Mauthausen network, at the town. Approximately twenty thousand inmates were worked to their deaths to construct giant tunnels in the surrounding mountains. Together with the Mauthausen subcamp of Gusen, Ebensee is considered one of the most horrific Nazi concentration camps. The construction of the Ebensee subcamp began late in 1943, and the first 1,000 prisoners arrived on November 18, 1943, from the main camp of Mauthausen and other Mauthausen subcamps. The main purpose of Ebensee was to provide slave labor for the construction of enormous underground tunnels in which armament works were to be housed. These tunnels were planned for the evacuated Peenemünde V-2 rocket development, but, on July 6, 1944, Hitler ordered the complex converted to a tank-gear factory. Prisoners arose at 4:30 A.M. and worked until 6:00 P.M., constructing and expanding tunnels. After some months, work was done in shifts, 24 hours a day. There was almost no accommodation to protect the first batch of prisoners from the cold Austrian winter, and deaths increased astronomically. Bodies were piled in heaps and taken every three or four days to the Mauthausen crematorium to be burned; Ebensee did not yet have its own crematorium. The bodies of the dead were also piled inside the few huts that existed. The smell of the dead, combined with the stenches of sickness, phlegm, urine, and feces, was nearly unbearable. Prisoners wore wooden clogs, or went barefoot when the clogs fell apart. Lice infested the camp. In the morning, food rations consisted of half a liter of ersatz coffee; at noon, of three-quarters of a liter of hot water containing potato peelings; and, in the evening, of 150 grams of bread. Because of this treatment, the death toll continued to rise. As the Second World War in Europe came to an end, mass evacuations from other camps put tremendous pressure on the Mauthausen complex, the last remaining concentration camp in the area still controlled by the Nazis. The 25 Ebensee barracks had been designed to hold a hundred prisoners each, but they eventually held as many as 750 apiece. To this number, one must add the prisoners being kept in the tunnels or outdoors, under the open sky. The crematorium was unable to keep pace with the deaths. Naked bodies were stacked outside the barrack blocks and the crematorium itself. In the closing weeks of the war, the death rate exceeded 350 a day. To reduce congestion, a ditch was dug outside the camp and bodies were flung into the quicklime. On a single day in April, 1945, a record eighty bodies were removed from block 23 alone; in this pile, feet were seen to be twitching. During this period, the inmate strength reached a high of eighteen thousands. American troops liberated the camp in May, 1945. A museum now stands on the site of the concentration camp, and the tunnels can be visited as a memorial to the thousands who died at Ebensee. |
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Ebensee?
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