24th_infantry
Rookie
My friend served in the 26th Division (Yankee Division) in WWII. He liberated Gusen which was a subcamp of Mauthausen in Austria and photographed the camp. He later helped print a booklet for the Austrians and Germans in 1945 called KZ. Bildbericht aus fünf Konzentrationslagern (Photo Report of Five Concentration Camps).
His photographs from the camp depict the bodies of prisoners and some of the SS men which his unit killed. When they entered the camp the stench was horrible and they never once fired a shot at the SS, instead they beat them to death with their rifle butts. In a couple photos you'll see the SS men in uniform with their skulls busted open. Some of the SS were used to dig graves for all the bodies. When the Allies began to close in on the camps the SS began having mass executions of the prisoners. They loaded up wagons with bodies and transported them into train cars to move the corpses to another location, their goal was to avoid being caught with the hundreds of bodies. After the camp liberation, my friend and his unit located one of the trains carrying Concentration Camp corpses.
I have a lot more photos from Mauthausen itself which I will post later, including the SS digging graves for the Jewish corpses, the ovens with skeletal remains, and train cars filled with bodies.
His photographs from the camp depict the bodies of prisoners and some of the SS men which his unit killed. When they entered the camp the stench was horrible and they never once fired a shot at the SS, instead they beat them to death with their rifle butts. In a couple photos you'll see the SS men in uniform with their skulls busted open. Some of the SS were used to dig graves for all the bodies. When the Allies began to close in on the camps the SS began having mass executions of the prisoners. They loaded up wagons with bodies and transported them into train cars to move the corpses to another location, their goal was to avoid being caught with the hundreds of bodies. After the camp liberation, my friend and his unit located one of the trains carrying Concentration Camp corpses.
I have a lot more photos from Mauthausen itself which I will post later, including the SS digging graves for the Jewish corpses, the ovens with skeletal remains, and train cars filled with bodies.