Ebensee - sub camp of Mauthausen

One of the survivors of Ebensee, according to Martin Gilbert's book about the Holocaust, was Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, a prisoner who worked as a medical doctor in the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. (The movie entitled "The Gray Zone" is based on his story.) Nyiszli was an eye-witness to the gassing of prisoners at Birkenau and the horrible medical experiments conducted on the prisoners by Dr. Josef Mengele. When Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945, Nyiszli was among the prisoners on the death march to central Germany. As the American Army approached, he was marched again to Mauthausen in Austria.

In his book "Holocaust," Martin Gilbert wrote the following quote from Dr. Nyiszli:

On May 5, a white flag flew from the Ebensee watch-tower. It was finished. They had laid down their arms. The sun was shining brightly when, at nine o'clock, an American light tank, with three soldiers on board, arrived and took possession of the camp. We were free.

According to Martin Gilbert, the author of a book entitled "Holocaust," Ebensee was an "end destination" for Jewish prisoners who were evacuated from camps farther east as the Soviet Army advanced toward Germany. In the last months of the war, the Ebensee camp was seriously over-crowded with these exhausted prisoners, many of whom had just arrived in the weeks prior to the liberation. Gilbert wrote the following regarding the evacuations and the death marches:

Jews who had already survived the 'selections' in Birkenau, and work as slave laborers in factories, had now to survive the death marches. Throughout February and March [1945] columns of men, and crowded cattle trucks, converged on the long-existing concentration camps, now given a new task. These camps had been transformed into holding camps for the remnant of a destroyed people, men and women whose labor was still of some last-minute utility for a dying Reich, or whose emaciated bodies were to be left to languish in agony in one final camp.

According to Gilbert's book, a train loaded with 2,059 Jews arrived at Ebensee on March 3, 1945. They had survived the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and had first been sent to the Gross Rosen concentration camp, then on to Ebensee. Forty-nine of the Jewish prisoners died on the train, and on their first day in the camp, 182 died during the disinfection procedure. New arrivals had to be disinfected to kill the body lice which spreads typhus. There was a typhus epidemic in Mauthausen and the sub-camps and, according to Martin Gilbert, 30,000 prisoners died in these camps in the last four months of the war.

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