Execution of August Eigruber - Bestial Nazi Gauleiter of Austria, Hitler's Friend & War Criminal.
August Eigruber was a personal friend and confidante of Hitler and was one of the few who was even allowed to address him by his first name. On the 10th of April 1938, one month before Eigruber became Gauleiter, he had been elected as a member of the Reichstag - parliament of Nazi Germany, representing Austria.
In his position as a Gauleiter, August Eigruber helped to establish Mauthausen concentration camp which was located in his Reichsgau Upper Danube.
Eigruber was not in day-to-day contact with the camp, but he was the Nazi provincial leader under whose jurisdiction Mauthausen fell. He was involved not only in the building of the camp but also sending prisoners there and he was frequently there to witness executions in which he also participated.
The camp became operational from the 8th of August 1938, several months after the German annexation of Austria, when the SS transferred the first prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp. During this phase, the prisoners, all of them German and Austrian men, had to build their own camp and work in the quarry.
In December 1939 the SS ordered the construction of a second concentration camp - Gusen - just a few kilometres from Mauthausen. The Gusen camp went into operation in May 1940. Living and working conditions in Mauthausen, as in Gusen, were harsh, which led to the death by murder, mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
After the outbreak of war, people from across Europe were deported to Mauthausen, which gradually developed into a system of several interconnected camps. In order to accommodate the prisoners where they worked, the SS established several subcamps.
Commandants of these camps reported directly to German Nazi commandant Franz Ziereis. Newly-arrived prisoners were transferred to these camps from the main camp. During this phase, Mauthausen and Gusen were the concentration camps with the harshest imprisonment conditions and the highest mortality. Those who were ill or deemed ‘useless’ by the SS lived in constant fear for their lives. In 1941 the SS started to construct a gas chamber and other installations at Mauthausen for the systematic murder of large groups of people.
Other than four Yugoslav women whom the SS brought to Mauthausen with 46 men to be shot in April 1942, the first female prisoners in Mauthausen were two dozen women from Ravensbrück, whom the SS transferred to provide sex for favored male prisoners. The women arrived in June 1942 and lived in the first brothel established in the Nazi concentration camp system.
During the second half of the war the prisoners, who by the end of September 1944 included 459 women, were increasingly used as forced labourers in the arms industry.
Since the prisoners were now needed for their labour, living conditions improved for a short time. By the end of 1944, some 6,000 prisoners worked in 18 factory halls in Gusen producing rifles, machine pistols and aircraft motors. The stress on armaments production brought some benefits to the prisoners in 1943 and 1944. The SS authorities increased rations, allowed packages with food and medicine to come in from the outside, and issued special vouchers for especially productive workers.
However, the camp guards brutally mistreated the prisoners during the whole time of Mauthausen existence. After the war, Franz Ziereis, the camp commandant, confessed how the inmates had been killed by gassing, hard labor, or through benzine injections or how at an outside temperature of minus 12 degrees they made the prisoners bath in water and then stand in the open stark naked until they died. Some inmates had to haul stones until they collapsed, then they were shot, and their record was annotated "Trying to escape". Others were driven into a barbed-wire fence or were literally torn to pieces by the dog named "Lord".
In 1944, with the danger from Allied bombing increasing, the Gusen camp authorities deployed thousands of prisoners to build the underground tunnels which housed the armaments production sites....
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