St. Georgen Gusen Mauthausen: Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered (review)

On August 17, 1943, an Allied air raid seriously damaged the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg, Bavaria. Its management reacted at once with the deployment of the manufacturing of airplane parts to the quarries of Flossenbürg and Gusen in upper Austria, which were run by the SS firm Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke (DESt) and used concentration camp prisoners as a workforce. Production at Gusen began in the autumn of 1943. At the end of February 1944, after the devastating Allied air attack on the German aviation industry (“Big Week”), Göring and Speer decided to go immediately underground with fighter plane production. Dr.-Ing. Hans Kammler, head of the SS construction department, was appointed CEO of the underground deployment projects. 10,000 prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp complex were assigned to this task in the Gusen area.

A second camp, Gusen II, was established, and in spring 1944, two excavation projects started: Kellerbau under the supervision of DESt, and the five times bigger Bergkristall project under the supervision of Kammler. In December 1944, a third, smaller camp, Gusen III, was established north of St. Georgen. At the end of 1944, Mauthausen main camp and the three Gusen camps held about 34,300 prisoners, two thirds of them in Gusen I and II. Living and working conditions for the prisoners were appalling. Work had to be done with no consideration for human losses. The already high death rates rocketed when, toward the end of the war, the prisoners’ food rations were continuously cut.

In the Bergkristall tunnel system, beginning in December 1944, fuselages of the Me 262 jet fighter were assembled. In the spring of 1945, St. Georgen-Gusen had become one of the major places of fighter plane manufacturing in the steadily shrinking Third Reich. The underground factory apparently was never detected by Allied aerial reconnaissance. Production did not end before May 3, 1945, when the first American troops entered the Gusen camps. The underground facilities, though already prepared for demolition, fell into the hands of the Americans undamaged. As in Thuringia and Saxony, the other centers of German high-tech weapons industry and development, the Americans took away everything that might have been of interest for their own country before leaving the St. Georgen-Gusen region to the Soviets, as agreed to at Yalta in February 1945.

The authors’ aims are twofold: on the one hand, they want to demonstrate that, in mainstream historiography, the Gusen camps are understudied: they stand in the shadow of Mauthausen, about which a rich literature does exist and to which the Gusen camps, according to the authors, were only attached in 1944, having had before their own prisoner numbering. On the other hand, they want to attract the reader’s attention to the production of fuselages of the world’s first operative jet fighter plane, the Me 262, in the tunnels around St. Georgen-Gusen. The bibliography and the list of archives consulted and interviews conducted with survivors and witnesses is impressive, and the illustrations are informative, especially those from the Museum of Catalonian History at Barcelona, Spain—regretfully without giving details about the photographer, date, and occasion on which these pictures were taken. Equally informative is their account of the chaotic conditions that prevailed in the camps and in military operations in the beginning of May 1945, when the Gusen camps were liberated.

The book, based on a local study by R. Haunschmied published in 1989, however, suffers from flaws frequently occurring in studies written by local historians. It hardly fulfills the pompous announcement made in the blurb, to “supplement the history of World War II and the SS’s strategic involvement in German war production.” It lacks an embedding in the general history of the Messerschmitt works (at that time, a totally state-controlled enterprise...