Lt. Jack Taylor, US Navy commando, after his liberation
Mauthausen was the last of the Nazi concentration camps to be liberated, just three days before World War II ended with the German surrender on May 8, 1945. The American liberators were greeted by Lt. Jack Taylor, a commando in the United States Navy, who had been captured after completing a sabotage mission behind enemy lines; he had been a prisoner at Mauthausen since April 1, 1945. He was brought to Mauthausen from a prison in Vienna when the city was evacuated because Russian troops were near.
The photograph above shows Lt. Taylor, taken shortly after his liberation from Mauthausen. He testified in court that he had weighed only 112 pounds when he was liberated. On his jacket, he was required to wear a red triangle, pointing downward, which meant that he was classified as a non-German political prisoner. Lt. Taylor was imprisoned at the main camp at Mauthausen, but this photo appears to have been taken at one of the sub-camps of Mauthausen, located near the mountains in Austria.
Only hours after the liberation of the Mauthausen camp, Lt. Col. George C. Stevens, the famed Hollywood director, arrived to shoot some footage of Lt. Taylor for his film entitled "Nazi Concentration Camps," which was shown at the Nuremberg IMT. Lt. Taylor was from Hollywood, California and he started off by saying that this was the first time he had ever been in a movie.
Prior to the proceedings at Dachau in the Mauthausen case, Lt. Jack Taylor gave the following testimony at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal:
"In October '44, I was the first Allied officer to drop onto Austria. I was captured December 1st, by the Gestapo, severely beaten, ah, even though I was in uniform, severely beaten, and, and, considered as a non-prisoner of war. I was taken to Vienna prison where I was held for four months. When the Russians neared Vienna, I was taken to this Mauthausen concentration lager [camp], an extermination camp, the worst in Germany, where we have been starving and, and beaten and killed, ah, fortunately, my turn hadn't come. Ah, two American officers at least have been executed here. Here is the insignia of one, a U.S. naval officer, and here is his dog tag. Here is the army officer, executed by gas in this lager [camp]. Ah...there were...
[Question: "How many ways did they execute them?"]
Five or six ways: by gas, by shooting, by beating, that is beating with clubs, ah, by exposure, that is standing out in the snow, naked, for 48 hours and having cold water put on them, thrown on them in the middle of winter, starvation, dogs, and pushing over a hundred-foot cliff."
After only 35 days in the notorious Mauthausen camp, Lt. Jack Taylor knew all about the crimes committed there: torture, hangings, shootings, beatings, and the gassing of prisoners twice a day, 120 at a time. Lt. Taylor was the first witness for the prosecution in the Mauthausen case before the American Military Tribunal at Dachau. By now, he was an experienced prosecution witness and he elaborated on his Nuremberg testimony. When asked by prosecutor Lt. Col. William Denson, on direct examination, how many different forms of killing that he had come in contact with in Mauthausen, Lt. Taylor testified as follows:
Gassing, hanging, shooting, beating. There was one particular group of Dutch Jews who were beaten until they jumped over the cliff into the stone quarry. Some that were not killed on the first fall were taken back up and thrown over to be sure. Then there was exposure. Any new transport coming in was forced to stand out in the open, regardless of the time of the year, practically naked. Other forms of killing included clubbing to death with axes or hammers and so forth, tearing to pieces by dogs specially trained for the purpose, injections into the heart and veins with magnesium chloride or benzine, whippings with a cow-tail to tear the flesh away, mashing in a concrete mixer, forcing them to drink a great quantity of water and jumping on the stomach while the prisoner was lying on his back, freezing half-naked in subzero temperatures, buried alive, red-hot poker down the throat. I remember a very prominent Czech general who was held down in the shower room and had a hose forced down his throat. He drowned that way.
Of course, Lt. Taylor had never seen anyone carried back up to the top of a cliff and thrown off a second time, nor had he ever seen anyone mashed in a concrete mixer, nor killed with a red-hot poker shoved down his throat. These were stories that he had heard from the other prisoners. This kind of hearsay testimony was common in all the Dachau proceedings. The purpose of reiterating these stories in sworn testimony on the witness stand was to get these atrocities entered into the record, so that these alleged crimes would go down in history for future generations to read as the gospel truth.
Lt. Taylor may have been confused about the nationality of the general since the Czechoslovakian Army did not fight when Germany invaded. There were similar stories about a Russian general, Lt. Gen. Dmitry Mikhailovich Karbyshev, who was either drowned in the shower or forced to stand outside in freezing weather while water was poured over him in February 1945. The prisoners had to take a shower and then stand naked outside while their clothes and barracks were disinfected in an effort to prevent typhus which is spread by body lice.
The photograph below shows the ledge where SS soldiers at Mauthausen allegedly forced Dutch Jews to leap into the quarry. The narrow ledge is in the center of the photo, a short distance from the top of the quarry.
The "parachute jump" where Dutch prisoners were forced to jump
Under cross examination, the defense attorney established that Lt. Taylor had only seen "maybe five or six" of the defendants while he was at Mauthausen, and that Lt. Taylor could not say for certain whether any of the accused had committed any of these alleged atrocities while he was at Mauthausen. That didn't matter since, under the common design charge, anyone who was present in the camp when any crime was committed was guilty of that crime. Hearsay evidence was allowed by the tribunal, so it didn't matter if Lt. Taylor had personally seen any of these alleged atrocities committed. It was enough that he had heard these stories from other inmates, who could not be cross-examined in court.
Lt. Taylor testified in the trial that he had been scheduled to die in the Mauthausen gas chamber on May 6, 1945, but he was miraculously saved when American troops arrived the day before his planned execution. Lt. Taylor was the only American ever to testify for the prosecution in the Dachau trials and his testimony was considered to be more credible than that of the other former prisoners who might have been seeking revenge, more than justice.
In his direct testimony, Lt. Taylor was asked by prosecutor Lt. Col. William Denson to describe the gas chamber. As quoted by Joshua M. Greene in "Justice at Dachau," Lt. Taylor testified as follows:
Yes, sir. It was rigged up like a shower room with shower nozzles in the ceiling. New prisoners thought they were going in to have their bath. They were stripped and put in this room naked. Then gas came out of the shower nozzles.
The photo below, taken in May 2003, shows one of the shower nozzles, and water pipes coming into the Mauthausen gas chamber. The gas chamber was cleverly disguised as a real shower room with real water pipes, real showerheads and real floor drains. However, Lt. Taylor was wrong about the gas coming through the shower heads. The gas was in the form of pellets, about the size of peas, which had to be heated before the poisonous gas fumes could be released.
Mauthausen gas chamber where gas came through the shower heads
According to the testimony of another Mauthausen prisoner, the poison gas flowed through a tube placed low on the wall of the shower room.
In his book entitled "The 186 Steps," Christian Bernadac quoted the testimony of Werner Reinsdorf, a prisoner who came to Mauthausen in 1941 and was assigned Prison Number 535 which had previously been assigned to another man who died. Reinsdorf "took part in the construction of the gas chamber," according to Bernadac.The following quote from Bernadac's book is the words of Werner Reinsdorf:
There was a tube that led into the gas chamber, eighty centimeters above the floor, with its opening turned toward the wall so as to escape notice. The gas flowed through this tube...I, myself, saw Jews being led to the gas chamber....
According to stories told by former inmates at Mauthausen, there was a small metal box, near the floor on the other side of one of the shower room walls. An open can of Zyklon-B gas pellets was put into this box, along with a hot brick which heated the pellets to the proper tempature so that prussic acid could be released. An enameled tube, through which the gas flowed, led from the box into the shower room. Unknown to Lt. Taylor, who expected to be gassed on May 6, 1945, Commandant Franz Ziereis had allegedly removed the box and the tube just before he escaped from the camp on the night of May 2, 1945. The tile in the shower room was replaced, and the wall, where the box had been located, was so skillfully repaired that no evidence of how the gas entered the room can be seen today.
The photograph below shows a glass case in the Museum at Mauthausen in which an open can of Zyklon-B pellets is displayed. The gas pellets are harmless until heated to a temperature of 78.3 degrees. The Museum displays are in the basement of the former hospital building where the gas chamber is located. Hopefully the temperature in the basement is always kept below the danger point. This type of poison gas was also used in all the concentration camps to disinfect the clothing by killing the body lice which spreads typhus.