ABSTRACT
Today, on the wall outside Mauthausen's main gate, is a memorial plaque to the US 11th Armored Division that reads: 'Their deeds will never be forgotten.' Unfortunately, the division's prestigious deeds, or at least its last, have not been accurately recorded. Year after year the 'Thunderbolt' veterans meet at their reunions, and the division continues to appoint its official historian, but none has gone to work in the US military archives in Maryland to ascertain, point by point, the exact sequence of events in this crowning moment of the division's long and spectacular drive from the Ardennes to the Danube. It will surely surprise the reader to learn that, 50 years after the liberation of Mauthausen, the veterans of 'Thunderbolt' were unable to agree even on the most elementary circumstances of the camp's liberation. We have seen that two of the division's patrols (one from the 41st Cavalry and one from the 55th Armored Infantry) which reached the camp and liberated it on 5 May had left the camp by the evening. In 1975, Colonel (retired) Richard R. Seibel, who as a lieutenant-colonel had served as executive officer of Combat Command B under Colonel Yale, submitted a deposition in which he claimed that he personally had arrived at the Haupdager on 5 May and liberated it before becoming its commandant. When in 1993 the present author sent him a translation of Hans Maršálek's 1974 account, Seibel responded in rage. Believing that Seibel's personal records could, as he said, support what he claimed, the present author published in 1995 what he thought was a corrected version 1 of the account he had published earlier in 1993. 2
