Mission at Nuremberg (22 page)

Mauthausen's gas chamber could kill up to 80 people at once. In the last three years of the camp's existence, the SS used Zyklon B to gas 3,445 people there. Before each gassing, the SS checked prisoners' mouths and marked a cross on the chest or back of those who had gold teeth.

At the Nuremberg trials, as a part of his defense that he'd never seen the gas chamber at Mauthausen, Kaltenbrunner said he'd only visited the camp's quarry. The quarries were a source of great economic interest to Germany—they were useful because the SS sold the granite unearthed by the camp prisoners to other departments of the Reich for use in Hitler's great building projects. Yet, as the witness testimony in Kaltenbrunner's case showed, they were also an effective murder weapon.

The quarry was first leased, and then owned, by the SS company German Earth and Stone Works. When Albert Speer was the Reich's armaments minister, he gave the Earth and Stone Works an interest-free loan of several million reichsmarks and signed a ten-year contract with the SS company to supply the granite for his great visions of Nazi buildings and monuments. One pit in particular, known as the Wiener Graben quarry, sat several hundred yards west of the main camp. This quarry was one of four between the thirty-seven-acre Mauthausen camp and the Gusen subcamp nearby, and it was one of the most evocative symbols of Mauthausen's cruelty.

The prisoners who worked in the quarry woke up at 5:30
A.M.
and drank a cup of coffee before marching down the quarry's stone steps into the pit. Lunch was one cup of cabbage or turnip soup. Dinner was a sixth of a loaf of bread and a half-ounce of margarine or sausage. The SS considered any prisoner weighing ninety-five pounds well nourished, though some workers weighed as little as sixty pounds. Every prisoner worked eleven-hour days, six days a week. Those who were too exhausted to work were shot, beaten to death in the quarry, or drowned in the pools of rainwater that collected on the quarry floor. Hundreds more simply froze to death in the pit during winter.

The 186 steps to the quarry floor were badly cut into the clay, and they were also slippery. Each was eight to twelve inches tall and held in place by logs. When prisoners reached the bottom of the quarry, they strapped massive granite slabs on their backs. The prisoners were often hobbled from the sharp rocks caught inside their wooden sandals, yet the guards beat them with rifle butts as they brought the boulders up this “Stairway of Death.” When a man reached the top, a guard may have directed him to throw the slab from the top of the sheared quarry wall—twelve stories high—back down to the bottom of the pit, then demand he run down and bring the same boulder back up the steps. The quarry guards regularly shot or beat the quarry workers to death if the prisoners' pace on the Stairway of Death wasn't fast enough.

Throwing prisoners twelve stories to their deaths below was also a cheap, effective murder method for the SS guards. As a witness in the case against Kaltenbrunner, the former SS guard Alois Höllriegel described a scene at the top of the quarry cliff. “I saw from my watchtower that these two SS men were beating the prisoners, and I realized immediately that they intended to force them to throw themselves over the precipice or else to push them over,” Höllriegel said. “I noticed how one of the prisoners was kicked while lying on the ground, and the gestures showed that he was supposed to throw himself down the precipice. This the prisoner promptly did—under the pressure of the blows—presumably in despair.”

An American prosecutor asked Höllriegel if the SS had a name for the prisoners they threw into the quarry. “Yes,” Höllriegel said. “In Mauthausen Camp they were called parachutists.”

This was only one horrific way to kill at Mauthausen. Many prisoners, for instance, were “bathed” to death by guards who hosed them down with cold water outside in freezing temperatures. Others were murdered with axes. Aribert Heim, Mauthausen's own version of Josef Mengele and known to inmates as Dr. Death, experimented on prisoners, frequently injecting benzine or phenol directly into the hearts of those too weak to work. In 1941, camp officials sent an eighteen-year-old Jewish prisoner—a former soccer player and swimmer—to Heim with a foot inflammation. Instead of treating the foot, Heim “anesthetized him, cut him open, castrated him, took apart one kidney and removed the second,” according to a Mauthausen prisoner who witnessed the murder. Then Heim removed the victim's head and boiled the flesh off it so he could keep it on display. Heim “needed the head because of its perfect teeth,” the prisoner said.

Commanders set up special areas around the camp for hangings and shootings. Hundreds of prisoners died of electrocution on the barbed-wire fence surrounding the camp. Guards drove gas vans, equipped to kill anyone in the back carriage, from Mauthausen to Gusen and back. From the summer of 1941 to the end of 1944, Ziereis sent hundreds of prisoners to Hartheim, a Nazi “euthanasia institute” near Linz.

In 1944, groups of 10,000 Hungarian Jews arrived and were mostly worked and starved to death. The SS killed 7,076 that year at the camp. At its height, in March 1945, the Mauthausen system included 84,472 prisoners, and by the time U.S. troops liberated the camp in May, 15,630 more had died. Over the seven years of the Mauthausen camp's existence, the SS brought more than 200,000 people there to use as slave labor and then to kill. Mauthausen became a death center for the entire Austrian concentration camp system.

 

IN THE SUMMER OF
1943, Father Sixtus O'Connor reported to Camp Barkeley, Texas, and was assigned to the Eleventh Armored Division's Combat Command “B,” a brigade-sized unit of three thousand to five thousand troops. Combat Command “B” was led by Colonel Wesley Yale, who had previously set up a disciplinary training troop at Fort Bliss, Texas, for garrison soldiers whose crimes didn't rise to the level of dishonorable discharge.

A year earlier the army had created the Eleventh—known as the Thunderbolt—in response to the British defeat of German field marshal Erwin Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, which was a crucial victory for the Allies in North Africa. The U.S. Army wanted more than the ten tank divisions it had, so the Thunderbolt was formed in Louisiana in August 1942.

In November 1943, the Eleventh moved to Camp Ibis in California, part of the army's Desert Training Center in the Mojave along the Nevada and Arizona borders.

The division's insignia was composed of three torques—yellow for cavalry, blue for infantry, and red for artillery. In the middle, a cannon symbolizing firepower was set atop a tank track symbolizing mobility and armor protection. A red bolt of lightning flashed across both symbols, indicating the division's capability for shock action.

The Eleventh's first commanders were told to have new recruits combat-ready by April 1943. The short time frame meant that the training at Camp Polk, Louisiana, was intense. Amid the dust and dirt of western Louisiana, the men spent long hours on huge howitzers and half-track-mounted medium weapons, becoming specialists in mortars, machine guns, rifles, pistols, and artillery pieces.

O'Connor joined the unit in July 1943, and most of his responsibilities involved celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, visiting hospitals, giving “sex morality” lectures and marriage instruction, sitting in on conferences with company and battalion commanders, and presiding at weddings, baptisms, and funerals. At Camp Ibis, he took part in his unit's desert maneuvers, and in January 1944 O'Connor was promoted to captain.

On September 27, 1944, just as the war began turning for the Allies in Europe, the division's ten thousand enlisted men and six hundred officers left Staten Island on the HMS
Samaria
and the USS
Hermitage,
landing in England on October 12.

The Normandy invasion had taken place several months earlier, and Germany was reeling. In early December, after six weeks of training, the Eleventh was ordered to the European continent to relieve the Ninety-Fourth Infantry Division at Chateau Briand.

But just as the unit hit France, its orders changed. German divisions were attacking along a fifty-mile front in Belgium's Ardennes Forest. The Ardennes offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge for the shape it made in Allied battle lines, was Hitler's final effort at keeping Germany from being overrun. On December 19, the Eleventh began sprinting from Normandy to the Ardennes, which was six hundred miles away. The division was assigned to General George Patton's Third Army. Tanks, half-tracks, armored cars, jeeps, and trucks raced through bitter cold, rain, and snow toward battle. One soldier described it as “a wild ride in a complete blackout.”

On Christmas Eve, German planes strafed the division. “Christmas morning was the first time I went to church with a forty-five . . . hanging by my side,” one soldier wrote home. As the division positioned itself at the center of the bulge to await the German attack, its orders changed again. The Germans were menacing the only supply route to the 101st Airborne Division, which was fighting in Bastogne, Belgium, and the Eleventh was ordered to clear the road.

During the battle, O'Connor's unit, Combat Command “B,” captured the small Belgian town of Mande St. Etienne and held on, despite a fierce counterattack. In freezing temperatures that claimed many toes, and with very little sleep, the Eleventh pushed two German divisions back six miles, liberated a dozen towns, and cleared the Bastogne supply line. After five days of fighting, the division accomplished its objective, having suffered 661 casualties.

Because of O'Connor's fluency in German, he was asked to be an interpreter between U.S. commanding officers and Germans the Eleventh captured during the battle. Many of the German POWs were afraid of reprisals for a slaughter of more than eighty unarmed American GIs in Malmedy, Belgium, by a German unit on December 16, just after the Battle of the Bulge began. O'Connor calmed the German soldiers down, telling them that American troops would never murder unarmed prisoners.

O'Connor's experience at Mande St. Etienne was his first on the front lines, but it was not his last. Thousands of other chaplains saw battle during the war as well. The U.S. Army spelled out for its chaplains their role in battle, stating that

 

when the ground forces go into action, their chaplain should be with them. This may mean he will move from one platoon to another or will minister to the wounded in exposed positions but never that he will place himself in unnecessary danger. . . . His skills may save the lives of wounded men. . . . He will do his utmost to comfort the suffering and give the consolations of religion to the dying.

As the Thunderbolt moved east, it encountered frequent artillery and sniper fire from increasingly desperate German forces. Bodies and wrecked equipment littered the snowy landscape. Between battles, the men of the Eleventh slept in foxholes the retreating German army had left behind, drinking melted snow filtered through handkerchiefs. An outbreak of dysentery exacerbated the constant threat of frostbite.

On February 6, 1945, the Eleventh reached the Siegfried Line—a four-hundred-mile-long, three-mile-deep system of bunkers, command posts, tunnels, troop shelters, and tank traps that defended German's western border—and attacked for twelve days.

Once past the massive wall, the Thunderbolt continued deeper into Germany. When the division finally crossed the Rhine on March 28 at Oppenheim, flares, tracers, and 90 mm bursts lit up the night to repel the Luftwaffe war planes attacking from above.

Throughout the rest of March and April, the division moved through small towns toward Bavaria, where Nazi holdouts resisted Allied capture and where snipers took potshots at the Americans rolling through.

During the months of fighting, O'Connor's monthly chaplain reports are perfunctory. His January report notes only that “the troops I serve were in actual combat two of the four Sundays this month.” In February, he wrote forty-six letters of condolence, a task he continued for the next three months. He celebrated Mass at least once every day for as many soldiers as could make it. And thousands did between December and April.

O'Connor had seen months of combat and had done his best to comfort those needing God. In the middle of battle, O'Connor listened to more than four thousand confessions. He also earned a Bronze Star in the process. His citation read:

 

Between 30 December 1944 and 1 May 1945, Chaplain O'Connor was often in front line positions ministering to the wounded and dying and furnishing spiritual guidance to many men suffering from mental disturbances incidental to combat. In this capacity, Chaplain O'Connor has been frequently subject to heavy enemy artillery, mortar and small arms fire, especially in the area of [redacted]. By his complete devotion to duty and utter disregard of personal safety, Chaplain O'Connor has contributed to the saving of many lives and the immediate rehabilitation of many men who otherwise would have been victims of battle fatigue . . .

As the division moved south, it liberated thousands of Allied prisoners from POW camps. At Bensberg, Combat Command “B” came across its first concentration camp, with thousands of Russian and Polish slave laborers. Then, near the Regen River, the division noticed emaciated bodies on the sides of the road. As the Americans marched closer to the river, they met sixteen thousand inmates from Buchenwald who had just overrun what was left of their SS guards. In the coming days, they would see even more. When the SS were fleeing the Flossenburg concentration camp, they'd brought the prisoners with them, shooting those along the way who couldn't keep up. The SS had done the same at Stamsried and Posing, releasing prisoners who spent their newfound freedom desperately wandering the countryside scavenging for food. “For over four months we had witnessed death daily, but these people were the walking dead,” wrote one officer of the Eleventh. “They were starved, barely clothed and dazed.”