ABSTRACT
From February 1945 the Wehrmacht was in rout, and this offered quite new perspectives, but it was also clear that the period before liberation was going to be the most dangerous of all. Three plans were worked out, to meet the three most likely situations: an attempt by the SS to poison the entire prisoner population by mixing some toxic product in the soup; an Allied parachute drop in the vicinity of the camp; and a mass evacuation of the prisoners by forced march. In the first eventuality, it was decided that a careful watch would be sufficient, and for the second, final plans were laid for an assault on the armoury. Block 2, close to the main gate, became the command post. It was the third eventuality that was considered the most likely. The prisoners knew, from the accounts of survivors now reaching Mauthausen, that in an evacuation from one camp to another, four out of every five prisoners died or were murdered on the road. In a convoy of 12 000 men dispatched to Buchenwald at the beginning of April 1945, uncounted thousands were shot on the road by Hider jugend and even by women, with 74 of them murdered on the last stretch, the few miles from Weimar up the hill. 1 The international committee concluded that Mauthausen's population would be driven either into the Austrian mountain redoubts or to Gusen, where all would be exterminated by gas in the underground tunnels of St Georgen. Its conclusion was perceptive. We now know that on 4 April 1945, Himmler instructed the commandants of KL-Flossenburg and KL-Dachau to evacuate their prisoners immediately, without allowing a single prisoner to fall into enemy hands alive. 2 On his death-bed, Ziereis disclosed that he had received an order from Pohl in February to the effect that if the war were lost, every last prisoner was to be killed; Ziereis added that the Reichsfuhrer subsequently ordered him to convey all his prisoners into the Kellerbau and Bergkristall tunnels in Gusen and to blow them up with dynamite. 3
