Ebensee concentration camp
Encyclopedia
The Ebensee concentration camp was established by the SS to build tunnels for armaments storage near the town of Ebensee
Ebensee
Ebensee is a market town in the Traunviertel region of the Austrian state of Upper Austria, located within the Salzkammergut Mountains at the southern end of the Traunsee. The regional capital Linz lies approximately to the north, nearest towns are Gmunden and Bad Ischl...
, Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
in 1943. It was part of the Mauthausen network
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp
Mauthausen Concentration Camp grew to become a large group of Nazi concentration camps that was built around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, roughly east of the city of Linz.Initially a single camp at Mauthausen, it expanded over time and by the summer of 1940, the...
.
Due to the inhumane working and living conditions, Ebensee was one of the worst Nazi concentration camps for the death rates of its prisoners. The SS used several codenames Kalk (limestone), Kalksteinbergwerk (limestone mine), Solvay and Zement (cement) to conceal the true nature of the camp.
Formation
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 MauthausenMauthausen
Mauthausen is a small market town in Upper Austria, Austria. It is located at about 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz, and has a population of 4,850 .During World War II, it became the site of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex....
and its 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
V-2 rocket
The V-2 rocket , technical name Aggregat-4 , was a ballistic missile that was developed at the beginning of the Second World War in Germany, specifically targeted at London and later Antwerp. The liquid-propellant rocket was the world's first long-range combat-ballistic missile and first known...
development, but, on July 6, 1944, Hitler ordered the complex converted to a tank-gear factory.
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.
Jews formed about one-third of the inmates, a percentage increased to 40% at the end of the war, and were the worst treated, though all inmates suffered great hardships. The other inmates included Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
ns, Poles
Poles
thumb|right|180px|The state flag of [[Poland]] as used by Polish government and diplomatic authoritiesThe Polish people, or Poles , are a nation indigenous to Poland. They are united by the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe...
, Czechoslovaks, and Gypsies, as well as German and Austrian political prisoners and criminals.
Conditions
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 greatly. 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 said to be 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. Thanks to such paltry rations, abysmal living conditions, and the onerous demands of labour, the death toll continued to rise.
Liberation
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 thousand.
American troops of the US 80th Infantry Division arrived at the camp on May 6, 1945 - though for many inmates liberation came too late and they died of hunger, disease and exhausion despite the efforts of American doctors to save them.
Post-war commemoration
In the immediate aftermath of liberation, former Polish inmates erected a stark concrete monument on the mass graves of their fellow prisoners who did not survive. In the first decades after the war, however, no other commemoration efforts were undertaken. To the contrary, the site of the concentration camp was designated for development as a residential area; many of the remaining camp structures except for its gate were demolished. Moreover, during the 1960s a former SS officer for some time became mayor of Ebensee, without his Nazi past arousing much attention.However, a drastically changed attitude followed in the wake of the 1988 election of Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Waldheim
Kurt Josef Waldheim was an Austrian diplomat and politician. Waldheim was the fourth Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981, and the ninth President of Austria, from 1986 to 1992...
as President of Austria
President of Austria
The President of Austria is the federal head of state of Austria. Though theoretically entrusted with great power by the constitution, in practice the President acts, for the most part, merely as a ceremonial figurehead...
and the revelations of his Nazi career. Ebensee, like many other locations in Austria, was touched by the controversy and the need to face Austria's past.
In Ebensee there was a determination to commemorate the events and preserve what camp remnants were still there. The tunnels, which had been dug by the slave labourers, remained intact but they were neglected and their existence largely unknown.
In 1997 Mayor Herwart Loidl presided over the placing of memorial plaques in the tunnels, commemorating the severe hardships of the slave workers who built them, and to those who had died there. Access to the underground chambers was created through the stairs known as "Lowengang" (Lions' Walk). The tunnels since opening have seen increasing number of visitors, from abroad as well as Austrian students who are learning about their nation's past.
Today, a former school house has been turned into the Zeitgeschichte Museum und KZ-Gedenkstätte Ebensee, which holds regular lectures and readings, publishes a journal about the war period, and hosts an annual commemoration attended by surviving former inmates from different countries. It exhibits photographs, testimonies and relics from the camp.