Mauthausen: 9 photographs that reflect horror
The Mauthausen Nazi concentration camp was released by the US military on May 5, 1945. More than 71,000 people who died about 35,800 were admitted. Among them, thousands of Republicans who were sent by Franco after the war.
Seventy years after the release of the Nazi field of Mauthausen, in Austria, this series of photographs are shuddering. They were stolen from SS by Francisco Boix with the help of other Spanish prisoners. The story of him has been recreated by the historian Benito Bermejo in the book the Horror Photographer.
Passionate about the photograph and socialist militant, first, and then communist, Boix (Barcelona, 1920-Paris, 1951) arrived in 1941 to Mauthausen, where the Spanish Republicans collective was the most numerous. Most of them (3,893) died in the neighboring field of Gushen and 431 gased at Hartheim Castle.
Boix was "a privileged" because in 1941 he entered to work in the photographic service that the Germans had in Mauthausen, who served to photograph life and death in the field. Some prisoner accounted for up to 35 ways to die there.
In 1943, after the German surrender in Stalingrad, the SS gave the order to destroy the photographic archives because they were "compromising", but, according to Boix in the judgments of Nuremberg and Dachau, they could save some twenty thousand photos of the sixty thousand They had been done.
These are some of them:
By Mauthausen, released by the US military on May 5, 1945, and for other fields of concentration dependent on him, as they like, some 200,000 prisoners from different nationalities passed, of which half died, including 4,761 of the 7,200 Republicans Spaniards who were confined there
The staircase of the quarry of Mauthausen, of 186 steps, where hundreds of prisoners were left their lives. According to Francisco Boix, the history of the field calculates a dead man by slab of rung. Working in the granite quarries of the Austrian concentration camp in Mauthausen meant almost certain death for prisoners. For that ladder they rose loaded with heavy granite blocks. Sometimes, when they reached up, the SS guardians pushed them and made them fall in chain
Hundreds of naked prisoners waiting for a general disinfection in the Nazi field of Mauthausen
Five emaciated prisoners of Mauthausen form abroad. They are the faithful reflection of the horror that was lived in any field
A group of Spanish prisoners drag a land wagon in the field of Mauthausen
A prisoner of Mauthausen died next to one of the Nazi field electrified wire
A group of prisoners knocks down the Nazi symbol installed at the entrance of the Mauthausen field, on the same day of liberation. The Spanish photographer Francisco Boix documented the first hours after the flight of the Nazis
Another time of the Nazi symbol demolition installed at the entrance of the Mauthausen field, on the same day of liberation
Photograph performed by Francisco Boix on the day of the liberation of Mauthausen, which shows hundreds of deaths in the Nazi field
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