The German occupation of France produced about six million displaced people, including Catalans, Basques and Andalusians, one and a half million of whom ended up in the concentration camps of the Third Reich, forcing themselves to work in the construction of French fortifications. . Spanish prisoners ceased to exist legally, not recognized as prisoners of war or refugees as Franco imposed administrative silence on them. Unjust wage labor.
Gutmaro Gómez Bravo and Diego Martínez López, authors of Slaves of the Third Reich. The Spaniards at Camp Mauthausen published by Cátedra worked with primary archival sources, particularly foreign sources such as the US Army archive, consular communications, and military documents, as well as correspondence and prisoner statements that were reproduced and provided data on them. Spanish presence in the Mauthausen camp and subcamps.
Professors Gómez Bravo and Martínez López estimate the number of Spaniards sent to concentration camps at 10,000, explain how Nazi regulations protected killings in the camps, detail the system of categorizing prisoners, describe the system of inmates self-management, measure kapos in Mauthausen (known as the Spanish camp ) and point out that five Spanish kapos in the Mauthausen, Gusen and Hartheim camps were convicted as war criminals in Nuremberg trials for being trusted employees of the Nazis (a case establishing case law in the US), they analyze Action14f13 for the extermination of the unproductive prison population, Hitler They point out that ‘is considering sending Gibraltar back to Spain in exchange for the cession of the Canary Islands, they talk about the first Spanish victim in Mauthausen (José Marfil Escalona from Malaga) and develop the concept of protective detention in which prisoners of war are sent to camps in December 1941 on the German land Concentration camps, with the cooperation of Vichy and Franco’s ignorance, a measure sponsored by Night and Fog. The authors note the progressive mortality rate of Mauthausen, which has been stigmatized as “people’s hell” as its survival rate was close to 70% in its first two years, and how barracks cleaning with Zyklon B gas was used to gas. prisoners.
An entire chapter is dedicated to Gusen’s subcamp of Mauthausen, a “more lethal if possible” version, and the SS in charge of running the camp has a good flaw in it. 70% of Spaniards who went to Mauthausen passed through this subcamp. Of the 2,906 deaths in Mauthausen in 1941, 1,612 died in Gusen “only in the late autumn months”. According to the authors, 4,405 Spaniards died in Mauthausen between 1940 and 1945, 106 of whom were from Alicante, not counting those who died during the excavation of the 50,000 m² underground galleries where the Nazis had acquired weapons construction projects since 1943.
Life in the countryside of Mauthausen attracts the attention of writers. Three prisoners slept in each 80 cm wide wooden bed (up to five in 1945), and “life in Mauthausen was carried on with constant tension at three speeds. On the one hand, prisoners exposed to an endless circle of violence and the agony of the moment; on the other, the guards tasked with keeping traces of death from tainting the world outside the circle of misfortune…; and finally, sadists who find their place in the torture and suffering of others». The most privileged prisoners (8%) were those engaged in internal duties in the camp, avoiding “tolerable work, a pitiful diet that made it impossible for them to sustain themselves, and total exposure to the elements”; Among them were the Catalan Antonio García, who was appointed to the photography service, and his assistant, Francesc Boix. The authors reveal their adventures to preserve photo negatives and Operation Bullet, which rescued British and American prisoners.
After the defeat in the battle of Moscow, the Nazis tried to incorporate their weapons production into the concentration camps, and the authors claim that 49 Spaniards (such as Juan Termes and Baldomero Chozas) set up the Steyr factory, one of many secondary sites. Work carried out by 40 Spaniards in Mauthausen and also in the Bretstein subcamp and 297 Spaniards in the Vöcklabruck-Wagrain subcamp. Presence of brothels in camps from 1942, clinical trials conducted on prisoners to prove the efficacy of the vaccine against tetanus, cholera and typhus, surgical experiments with prisoners (among them José Jornet Navarro from Alicante) as part of practical development “The insane racist agenda of Nazism”, Mauthausen prisoners the removal of a total of 25 kilograms of gold from his dentures, incidents of cannibalism, and the absence of Spaniards among the 780 prisoners first released by the International. The Red Cross are other issues documented by the authors.
North America’s liberation of the Mauthausen camp was the beginning of the end, and it would only come in 1951, when the refugee status of Spanish prisoners was recognized internationally in the face of Franco’s passivity, and the International Organization for Refugees rehomed some 400 Spaniards. , all over South America. In short, this is a condensed and interesting article, but sometimes the subtitle falls apart and betrays it, because its twists (e.g. the salvation of Buchenwald) cause it to lose the necessary Spanish reference that brings it closer to the reader.