Mauthausen Warns! – A Struggle Behind the Barbed Wire – a rare and detailed documentation of the horrors of the ...

Mauthausen Warns! – A Struggle Behind the Barbed Wire – a rare and detailed documentation of the horrors of the Mauthausen camp

Mauthausen mahnt! – Kampf hinter Stacheldraht (Mauthausen Warns! – A Struggle Behind the Barbed Wire) – “Facts, documents, and reports on Hitler’s largest extermination camp in Austria.” Editor and author: Hans Maršálek – a survivor of the camp, historian, and former political prisoner. “Given the brutality of the SS guards and the inhuman forced labor in the quarry, everything that history can recount in terms of crimes and atrocities over the past thousand years was committed here by the ‘guards of the Thousand-Year Reich’ in a relatively short period of six years.” (From the author’s introduction.) Published by the Mauthausen Committee of the Association of Prisoners and Political Persecutees in Austria (Mauthausen-Komitee). Vienna, [1950] – First edition. Extremely rare.

An early documentation of the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the Mauthausen camp – one of the most brutal torture sites in the Third Reich. Maršálek provides an unfiltered, detailed account of the horrific conditions in the camp, as he personally experienced and witnessed them: the forced labor, the torture, and the beastly executions carried out by the guards, as well as the gruesome medical experiments performed on the bodies of prisoners: “In a place where killing people by gasoline injection was the daily routine of the SS camp doctors…”. He describes in detail the arrival of transports of political prisoners and Jews beginning in July 1942 – from initial selection to death – as the Nazis subjected them to unspeakable acts intended to strip them of their humanity through infernal torment and horrific executions. He writes of deportee groups who arrived in the summer of 1943, and of the brutal abuse suffered by a group of prisoners who arrived at the camp from Linz in September 1944, among other accounts.

Among other revelations, Maršálek exposes secret directives issued by the camp commanders regarding the liquidation of prisoners in the event that Allied forces approached a number of which fell into the hands of resistance groups at a relatively early stage. For example: “If possible, the prisoners are to be transported to the nearby Gusen tunnels and killed there using Zyklon B gas after sealing the entrances with explosives. In the event of air raids, cyanide or other available poison is to be mixed into the prisoners’ food, ” and other such instructions. He also describes the activity of the resistance movement inside the camp - how it established and organized independent resistance cells, paved the way for prisoner escapes (particularly notable is the mass escape in early February 1945, during which approximately 700 prisoners managed to flee; in retaliation, 68 sick prisoners who remained in the camp were massacred by the SS), and managed under horrific conditions to mobilize international support. 

The resistance also played a crucial role in reviving the will to live among the inmates, securing food for dying prisoners by bribing kapos, and more. Maršálek provides a detailed account of an escape operation carried out by a group of prisoners in July 1943.

In a special chapter under the title “Such Was Mauthausen – German Science Needs Laboratory Animals, ” the experiments carried out by the camp doctors on the prisoners are described in detail. At the end of the spring of 1942, when a group of German military scientists arrived at the camp, the doctors required lice for various experiments; at that time no lice were available in the camp, as they had been exterminated shortly beforehand. The urgent need to obtain lice reached the point where prisoners who found lice sold them in exchange for loaves of bread! In the course of these horrific experiments, hundreds of healthy prisoners, particularly Jews, were operated on by Dr. Richter without any anesthesia whatsoever. Some were even subjected to castration, hormone injections, “dietary experiments, ” injections of hydrochloric acid or gasoline, ice-cold showers, and more.

The book is accompanied by numerous harsh photos, harsh to view, which were found on the bodies of SS soldiers themselves. Among them: aerial views of the camp barracks; the staircase used to torture prisoners; the chain used to strangle hundreds of inmates; a prisoner shot while trying to escape; the crematorium; prisoners who died on the camp fence from high-voltage electricity; a prisoner who escaped from Block 20 and was found dead after three days of freedom, located 50 kilometers from the camp by the Hitler Youth and shot by an SS man; the horrifying view of the block courtyard after the execution of 68 prisoners as punishment for the escape of others; a mass grave near the camp; Allied forces approaching the camp to liberate it and more. 

The author, Hans Maršálek (1914–2011), was a resistance fighter, political prisoner, meticulous biographer of the horror, and shaper of Mauthausen’s historical memory for generations. Born to a Czech–Austrian family, he was raised with values of democratic socialism and resistance to fascism. 

After the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938), he joined the underground socialist resistance movement. In 1941, he was arrested and deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp as a "dangerous political prisoner." During his imprisonment, he took part in the camp’s internal resistance organization. Toward the end of the war, he even served as a liaison between different national prisoner groups. After Mauthausen’s liberation in May 1945, Maršálek dedicated his life to the thorough documentation of the camp and the crimes committed there. While serving in an official position at the Austrian Ministry of the Interior, he gathered testimonies, documents, and original photographs from Mauthausen, and became the chief curator of the Mauthausen Memorial Museum. His testimony is considered a historical cornerstone, widely used by commissions of inquiry, historians, courts of law, and educational materials.

Extremely rare. Only one copy listed in the WorldCat global library catalog, held in a library in London.

102 [2] pages. Hardcover with original dust jacket, complete.