The first Spanish contingents

We have seen that the first contingent of Spaniards entered Mauthausen on 6 August 1940. ¹ The train ride in summer was a terrible ordeal, and some Spaniards had died from suffocation and dehydration. Frederic Ricol, of Paris, testified in court that he had gone three days and three nights without food or water, ² and José Escobedo, an anarchist turned socialist from Teruel, who had been taken prisoner by the Germans at Dunkirk and sent first to Stalag I-B in East Prussia, attests that the 169 men in his convoy who arrived at Mauthausen on 9 August travelled for four days without, food or water. ³ Thirst drove some to the point of madness, whereupon others killed them. ⁴ Mariano Constante writes that his Compagnie de travailleurs numbered 350 when taken prisoner in June 1940, and that the Gestapo records show that only 300 of them reached Mauthausen. ⁵ Roger Heim writes that, of the 450 Frenchmen in his group, 130 were dead either on arrival or within a few days of arrival. ⁶