JACOB JR, MY JEWISH WORLD. KONZENTRATIONSLAGER EBENSEE/AUSTRIA

- March 16, 2016

Wednesday, Adar II 6, 5776. March 16, 2016.

Shalom! World.

The Konzentrationslager Ebensee was a sub-camp of KZ Mauthausen, and is considered to be one of the most diabolic concentration camps ever built.

The construction of the sub-camp began in late 1943 and the first 1.000 prisioners arrived on 18 November 1943 from the main camp of Mauthausen and other Mauthausen sub-camps. The main purpose of Ebensee was to provide slave labour for the construction of the enormous underground tunnels in which armament works were to be housed.

After rising at 4:30 A.M. the prisoners dug away at the tunnels until 6 P.M. After some months work was done in shifts 24 hours a day. There was nearly no accomodation to protect the first batch of prisoners from the cold Austrian winter. Thus the death toll increased astronomically. Bodies were piled in heaps and every 3-4 days they were taken to Mauthausen crematorium to be burned. Ebensee did not yet have its own crematorium. The dead were also piled inside the few huts that existed. The smell of the dead, combined with sickness, phlegmon, urine and faeces, was unbearable. The prisioners wore wooden clogs. When the clogs fell apart the prisioners had to go barefoot. Due to this total illtratment combined with food allocations consisting of, in the morning: half a liter of ersatz coffe, at noon three-quarters of a liter of hot water containing potato peelings, in the evening 150 grams of bread, the deth toll continued to rise. Soon lice infested the camp.

The camp was surrounded by a barbed wire fence, small towers with machine guns and shacks for the SS.

The Mauthausen commendant Franz Ziereis sent his most caapable and vicious man to head the camp, Georg Bachmayer. After establishing his rule, he once again returned to Mauthausen and left the camp under the command of an Obersturmfûhrer who proved to be totally deranged. The combination of these two became a reign of terror.

One of the their favourite methods of torture was to tie a prisioner's arms behind him, with the hands side by side and thumb to thumb and then suspend him from a tree about eighteen inches off the ground. Bachmayer would then let his favourit dog, an Alsation called "Lord", loose. The prisioner would be left in this unspeakable torture to die a slow and agonizing death.

When the war was coming to an end, the mass evacuation from other camps put tremendous pressure on the Mauthausen complex which was the last remaining camp in the area of Nazi power. The 25 Ebensee barracks were designed to hold 100 prisoners each. At the most they held 750 each. To this number one has to add the prisoners being kept in the tunnel systems and outside under the open sky. The crematorium was of course unable to keep pace with the deaths. Naked bodies lay stacked up outside the blocks and the crematorium itself. At the closing weeks of the war, the death rate exceeded 350 a day.

To reduce congestion, a ditch was dug outside the camp and the bodies were flung into the quicklime. On one day in April 1945, a record number of eighty bodies were removed from block 23 alone. Amongst the pile, feet were seen to be twitching. During this period, the inmate reached a new high of 18.000 prisoners.