ABSTRACT
In the midst of so much suffering, few acts of barbarism stood out. If they did, it was because the SS were changing the rules. We have seen that Mauthausen contained many thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, whose inclusion the SS would justify in terms of race. A group of these arrived from the Nebenlager at Melk on 21 September 1944, already famished to the bone. Before they were all hanged, on the night of 25-6 September, they were immortalized in an SS photograph that survived and has been widely published. The photo shows a group of SO, standing at attention naked in freezing cold. Developing and printing the film in die usual way, Antonio García was startled to see that in this crowd of nameless faces, of men going to their death with no one anywhere to record it, was a man he instandy recognized: his compatriot, Lorenzo Rodrigo Barroso, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War and his comrade both in his CTE unit in France and in his POW camp in Kaisersteinbruch. He had been transferred from the Haupdager to Melk, and had simply found himself in a group marked for death and stripped even of their Drilliche and their triangles of identification. 1
