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Mauthausen. A concentration camp located in Austria. Prisioners of war, Jews, political prisioners were detained here. And died here.
The camp remains and we had the opportunity to walk around it. The gas chamber is immediately identifiable. The dissection table still remains. The crematoriums-individual sized but would still be used to cremate 10 people at a time- are there. These, along with the rest of the camp, are preserved to remind the world of the atrocities committed during the Nazi regieme.
Mauthausen is situated next to a quarry where the ablebodied (and I use that term loosely as all of the prisioners were emaciated and beaten) were used as hard labour. Prisioners were thrown off the top to see how far they would 'fly'. Other prisioners would be loaded up with stones and made to walk up 200+ steep stairs. The exhausted ones would fall and take out the prisioners behind him. It would create a domino effect and the end result was an avalanche of bodies and rocks. The acts committed here are despicable, horrifying.....real.
The Americans liberated the camp. The footage from this time as well as the photos that exist are simply ghastly to see. People with both feet in the grave and holding onto life with the tip of their pinky finger, emaciated, hollow eyed and downtrodded.
These photographs exist along side those that remain from the SS, the inspection by Himmler of the camp and the 'daily' life of the soldiers. The constrast is disturbing. The healthy youth of the Nazi regieme alongside the starved prisioners. Images of prisioners who threw themselves onto the electrified wires to escape life. Images of the contorted bodies which were removed from the gas chambers.
Let the world never forget the cruelty of mankind at the hands of their own. Let the world never let this happen again. Never may be a long time, but in this case it is required.
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