ABSTRACT
The continuing use of the gas chamber, which could not be kept secret, added to the well-founded fears of the international committee. We have seen that Ziereis had received an order from Pohl, unquestionably endorsed by Himmler and Kaltenbrunner, to the effect that if the war were lost, not one prisoner was to survive. Ziereis, with responsibility for every camp in Austria, called a meeting in the Kommandantur of all his officers and informed them of the order from Berlin. The plan proposed was to assemble all the prisoners in die Appellplatz and, at a given moment, open fire with all the machine-guns in the watch-towers, at the same time firing anti-tank grenades into the Blocks to set them ablaze. The Resistance got to know about the plan, but it also discovered that the SS were divided on the question of implementing the order, with one side fearing for their future. In their hesitation, they were overtaken by events. The Wehrmacht was now in rout. Many of the German and Austrian Greens in Mauthausen, and even some Polish Greens, had by now been incorporated, willy-nilly, into SS units. The irony is striking: it was into the Waffen-SS units, traditionally all-volunteer, and not into the Wehrmacht, that these criminals were being conscripted. The reasoning behind it was that such elements would do more damage to German morale if enlisted in the Wehrmacht. Even women from the Mauthausen and Gusen brothels, 18 or 19 in number (hence, virtually all) were incorporated in March 1945 into a women's Waffen-SS unit. 1 For those prisoners who could still laugh, it caused great merriment to learn that the SS was now putting prostitutes into its uniform; it told them that Nazi Germany had reached the very end. Gusen's brothel was then used to imprison 45 Ukrainians, members of an SS unit who had been sent to Gusen as guards and had attempted a revolt. From Gusen they were sent to Mauthausen's prison, and to the tender care of Niedermayer. A surviving document signed by Niedermayer shows that they were gassed on 15 April. 2 Gusen's own gas chamber was achieving all it could. More than 600 prisoners in the hospital of Gusen I were gassed at this moment, while some 800 inmates in Gusen II were beaten to death and their bodies brought to Gusen I to be burnt in the crematorium.
