Hans Spatzenegger was born on the 1st of March 1900 in Laufen then part of the German Empire. Immediately after Hitler came to power in January 1933, Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”. Unlike prisons with which they are often inaccurately compared today, concentration camps were independent of any judicial review.
The first such camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than 2 months after Hitler became the chancellor and Spatzenegger joined its staff shortly afterwards becoming one of its guards.
As the war progressed, 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.
Living and working conditions in Mauthausen, as in Gusen, led to the death by murder, mistreatment, starvation, exposure, and disease of more than half of the prisoners.
At Mauthausen, Spatzenegger became a director of the camps’ quarries.
The work in the quarries – often in unbearable heat or in temperatures as low as −30 °C– led to exceptionally high mortality rates.
The rock quarry in Mauthausen was at the base of the so called "Stairs of Death". Prisoners were forced to carry roughly-hewn blocks of stone – often weighing as much as 50 kilograms or 110 pounds up the 186 stairs, one prisoner behind the other. As a result, many exhausted prisoners collapsed in front of the others in the line, and then fell on top of the other prisoners, creating a domino effect; the first prisoner falling onto the next, and so on, all the way down the stairs. In the quarry, prisoners were forced to carry the boulders from morning until night, while being whipped by the Nazi guards.
Spatzenegger was among the most cruel and feared personnel stationed at the camp. If he thought that the prisoners were not working hard enough, he often staged "show beatings" which he performed with a stick.
Such brutality was not accidental. Former prisoner Edward Mosberg said: "If you stopped for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed you off the cliff to your death." The SS guards would often force prisoners – exhausted from hours of hard labour without sufficient food and water – to race up the stairs carrying blocks of stone. Those who survived the ordeal would often be placed in a line-up at the edge of a cliff known as "The Parachutists Wall". At gun-point each prisoner would have the option of being shot or pushing the prisoner in front of him off the cliff.
Another Spatzenegger’s specialty was throwing the prisoners on the 380-volt electric barbed wire fence, or forcing them outside the boundaries of the camp and then shooting them on the pretense that they were attempting to escape.
Others were literally torn to pieces by his dog.
On the 6th and 7th of September 1944, Spatzenegger took part in the murder of 40 Dutch and 7 British Special Operations Executive – SOE - agents.
The objective of SOE was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe against the Axis powers, especially against Nazi Germany.
The 47 agents were brought into Mauthausen and after being killed, their bodies were cremated. With risk for their own lives, Mauthausen prisoners, after seeing what those agents had to endure before being murdered by the SS, then secretly buried the container with the ashes.
Among Mauthausen inmates were also prisoners of war. During the night of the 2nd of February 1945 approximately 500 inmates, almost all of them Soviet officers, attempted to escape from the Mühlviertel subcamp of Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp...
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