ABSTRACT
Nothing was ultimately more precious to the Resistance than the decision of the SS to employ a Catalan from Tolosa, Antonio Garcia Alonso, to work in the Erkennungsdienst, or photographic laboratory. Garcia had arrived in France in the retreat from Catalonia in February 1939. He had been interned at Barcarès, enrolled in the 32nd Compagnie de travailleurs étrangers, and sent to the Maginot Line. There he had been captured in French uniform and sent, with 330 other Spaniards, to Stalag XVII-A, situated at Kaisersteinbruch, south-east of Vienna. They stayed there ten months, until one day the camp commandant announced that they could count themselves lucky: they were going to be liberated and sent to a rest camp. Some 300 of them were then embarked on a regular passenger train, second class, which carried them, on 7 April 1941, to Mauthausen station. The sudden shock of the reception at the station, and the brutal march to the fortress, were enough to tell them that they were no longer prisoners of war, and still less going to a rest camp.
