ABSTRACT
No name entered oblivion after 1945 faster than did Mauthausen. Four Allied Powers carved up Austria, but none wrote or spoke of it. Pierre Daix, who as a Frenchman had been evacuated from Mauthausen by the CICR in April 1945, and who became principal private secretary to the Minister Charles Tillon in the same year, had his own surprise when he called at the Ministère des Anciens Combattants on 2 May 1945. An official who held a list of the SS concentration camps had no listing for Mauthausen. 2 Later, when an official of the Criminal Division of the US Department of Justice, Alice B. Kennington, wrote to the Austrian Government for a piece of information, she received a letter back saying that Mauthausen was not in Austria. 3 Some French survivors produced their instant memoirs, of widely varying worth, but there was no account by a Spanish survivor before 1969. Many of the survivors were unable even to spell Mauthausen, 'Mathausen' being the usual preference, even in print. If ever a place deserved a total study it was this village on the Danube, but political events surfaced to make it impossible. The camp fell just within the Soviet Zone of Austria. In the Cold War that followed, as Simon Wiesenthal has said, the only winners were the Nazis. Then, with the end of the Cold War, interest in fascism, and especially Nazi Germany, revived. The Federal Republic of Germany continued to win high praise for its openness, its candour, and its readiness to provide compensation for most of the victims, 4 but its generosity towards the veterans of Nazi military forces, coupled with its refusal to pay pensions to the thousands of elderly Holocaust survivors in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, drew a protest from the US Senate. In a full-page advertisement in the International Herald Tribune of 16-17 August 1997, 82 Senators denounced the payment by the German Government of supplemental pensions to such veterans and their dependents who were living all around the world, including over 3000 in the United States. German law, they added, even extends these benefits to Nazi war criminals living in Germany.
