In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen (review)

Volume 10, No.1 Fall1991 149 The book, then, has a lasting value for those who would understand the Germans and their actions in the Third Reich. Though the immediacy of the Historikerstreit has been thrust aside by the events of 1989/90, the long-term questions analyzed in this volume will be vital to the new Germany as it defines itself and its role in the history of the modern world. Gordon R. Mork Department of History Purdue University In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen, by Gordon 1. Horwitz. New York: Free Press, 1990. 236 pp. $22.95. Many Austrians deny that they knew anything about the systematic brutalizatiqn and mass murder of inmates in Nazi concentration camps during World War Two. As Gordon J. Horwitz's significant book convincingly demonstrates, this claim is patently false when it is made by people who lived in the immediate vicinity of a camp like Mauthausen. Despite the intimidating demarcation of the various carrip facilities by armed guards or electrified barbed-wire fences, the inhuman maltreatment and killing of prisoners interned in these compounds intersected with the lives of the local residents in a variety ofways that usually implicated them in support capacities or exacted their passive acquiescence in the atrocities being perpetrated in their midst. Horwitz initially chronicles the development of the different camps and institutions which comprised the Mauthausen complex. In 1938 the 55 chose the quarry at Mauthausen as the site of the area's first camp because a source of granite was needed for the new buildings Hitler planned to erect in his hometown of Linz. A branch camp was erected at Gusen in 1940. By the next year, Heydrich classified Mauthausen as a camp for meting out the harshest treatment to the worst categories of offenders. The cruelty of the 5S taskmasters and the arduous and dangerous quarry work assigned to the inmates assured that only a minority of the latter survived. Some of the weaker and sicker inmates were selected at various times for gassing in the euthanasia program that had been established at Castle Hartheim. Other prisoners were forced to dig and then toil in the underground tunnels at Redl-Zipf where V-2 rocket engines were tested in 1943 and 1944. The subterranean armaments factories near the monastery at Melk were constructed by and for the waves of inmates inundating Mauthausen in the spring of 1944. At both Redl-Zipf and Melk, the work and the working conditions often killed the slave laborers. 150 SHOFAR The book's final chapters focus on three occasions in 1945 when the camps' horrors overtly confronted the local populace. In February, 495 Russian prisoners of war overpowered the Nazi guards in two watch towers and escaped into the countryside. The SS conducted a bloody public manhunt which littered the landscape with corpses. At the end of March and during April, the SS attempted to prevent the stronger captives in the Mauthausen camps from falling into enemy hands by marching them throughout the region . These strenuous marches and the frequent beatings and shootings of the prisoners enduring them scattered more bodies all over the area. When the American troops liberated Mauthausen shortly thereafter, they opened the camps for the native population to see for itself the shocking evidence of what had transpired there. Although Horwitz includes several pictures of townspeople burying the cadavers of inmates or viewing the U.S. Army's photographic exhibition of the crimes committed in the camps, he surprisingly fails to describe their reactions to these experiences aside from mentioning the seemingly atypical impressions of a local priest who entered the main camp to comfort its wretched remnant of survivors. All told approximately 119,000 people perished in the Mauthausen complex. One-third were Jews. Horwitz clearly documents that SS officials administering the camps relied on local complicity to fulfill their mission. The natives of Mauthausen quickly discovered that the construction and operation of camps in the area generated business and employment opportunities. This not only entailed procuring contracts for the mundane services and supplies needed to keep any penal facility running, but also for more incriminating tasks like burning...