<h6><strong>Eduardo González</strong></h6> <h4><strong>On May 5, 1945, exactly 80 years ago, US forces entered Mauthausen, where they were greeted with Spanish Republican flags and a large banner at the gate reading: “The Spanish anti-fascists salute the liberating forces.”</strong></h4> The Mauthausen camp had been built near an abandoned quarry along the Danube River in northern Austria. It is estimated that nearly 200,000 prisoners passed through the concentration camp and its “subcamps” (such as Gusen, a Kommando or auxiliary camp located in Upper Austria intended for the extermination of the weakest prisoners) between 1938 and 1945, and nearly 120,000 people were murdered, a third of them belonging to the Jewish community. According to official figures, Mauthausen once held more than 7,500 Spaniards, of whom at least 4,500 died, the vast majority (almost 4,000) in Gusen. The first batch of 500 Spaniards arrived in wagons on August 6, 1940. They had been surprised by the arrival of German troops while struggling to survive in Republican refugee camps, where they either assisted French troops directly with weapons or worked on the construction of military defenses within the so-called Foreign Workers Companies of the French army. Immediately after the capture of the Spaniards, in Angoulême and elsewhere in France, the German Embassy in Madrid contacted the Spanish government twice to urge it to take charge of these thousands of "Spanish Red Fighters" (Rotspanienkämpfer), but Francisco Franco's dictatorship, through its Foreign Minister, Ramón Serrano Suñer, simply responded that it did not recognize any Spaniards beyond its borders and that, as "stateless persons," Germany was free to do with them as it pleased, despite the fact that, as the documentation demonstrates, the Spanish government was fully aware of what was happening in the concentration camps. In this context, and due to the neglect of the Spanish authorities, between 10,000 and 12,000 Spaniards of all walks of life (women, men, children, the elderly) suddenly went from political refugees to prisoners of the Gestapo, which marked them with the inverted blue triangle of stateless persons and an S for Spanier in the center. According to historian Benito Bermejo, on September 25, 1940, Adolf Hitler ordered the shipment of "the combatants of Red Spain" to "a concentration camp." Following Hitler's order (which left Berlin the day after a meeting between the Führer and Serrano Suñer in the German capital), around 7,300 Spaniards arrived at Mauthausen-Gusen, among whom the Angoulême group, made up of about 400 men, stood out. On August 26, 1940, the first Spaniard died, and was immediately honored by his compatriots with a minute of silence. It is estimated that most of the Spanish deaths occurred between 1941 and 1942. <h5><strong>The concentration camp</strong></h5> Mauthausen was located next to a granite quarry where prisoners worked until they were exhausted (survivors remembered for many years the "stairway of death," the 186 steps up which the granite blocks had to be carried). Furthermore, in 1941, Mauthausen was classified as the only Category III concentration camp, reserved for prisoners "guilty of truly grave charges, incorrigible, asocial, and convicted of criminal charges." As a consequence of this political function of the camp, prisoners at Mauthausen/Gusen suffered the harshest conditions of detention and some of the highest mortality rates of all the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Although most prisoners died by shooting and hanging, as well as from hunger, disease, and mistreatment, the Mauthausen gas chamber had the capacity to kill 120 people at a time and was frequently used whenever prisoner transports arrived, as a kind of "show" to impress the high-ranking Nazi dignitaries who visited the camp. After 1945, Mauthausen remained under American administration and was subsequently used as a barracks by the Soviet Army. In June 1947, Moscow handed the former concentration camp over to the Austrian government for the construction of a memorial, which was inaugurated two years later as the Mauthausen Public Memorial. In subsequent years, numerous countries and victims' groups added their own memorials, until a cemetery was established within the camp in the early 1960s for the concentration camp victims held in the "American cemeteries" at Mauthausen and Gusen and in the SS mass graves. In 1970, the first permanent exhibition on Mauthausen was held in the infirmary building, and the Visitor Center was built in 2003. <h5><strong>Amical statement</strong></h5> In 2019, the Spanish government established the celebration of the Day of Tribute to the Deported Spaniards and Those Who Died at Mauthausen every May 5th. For this reason, and on the occasion of this anniversary, the Association of Friends of Mauthausen and Other Camps and of All Victims of Nazism in Spain has issued a statement demanding "that democratic governments implement active policies to solve people's real problems, dismantle the banal discourse of the extreme right, and implement genuine policies of democratic memory to inform citizens about the struggles of those who came before us to achieve the rights we enjoy today." These objectives, continues the association (which brings together former Republican deportees from Nazi concentration camps, as well as the families and friends of both survivors and deportees murdered in the camps), are especially necessary "when we see how war affects millions of people in places like Ukraine, Palestine, and Yemen, disregarding human rights and violating international law for political, territorial, or strategic interests."
