Gusen Concentration Camp - Crimes in Mauthausen's Shadow # 2024

Although the Gusen concentration camp was one of 40 subcamps of the Mauthausen concentration camp, with its Gusen I and II camps and the significantly smaller Gusen III, it was in no way inferior to the main camp in terms of the crimes committed there. More than half of the approximately 70,000 prisoners died.

While the main camp at Mauthausen was preserved as a memorial site after 1945, Gusen was demolished except for a few buildings, and the land was parceled out and sold for construction. The new ORF III documentary tells the story of Gusen and the crimes committed there. It focuses on the location, which is in the immediate vicinity of a quarry where inmates had to extract building materials for Nazi construction projects under inhumane conditions.

With the outbreak of war, the arms industry also began to play an increasingly important role, with the SS lending out concentration camp inmates as forced laborers in exchange for good money. The exhibition shows that although working for Steyr or Messerschmitt increased the chances of survival in the camp for some skilled workers, the pressure to destroy the concentration camp remained enormous for some groups of prisoners, such as Russian prisoners of war or Jews. In Gusen, this was also due to the construction of the underground tunnel complex “Bergkristall,” to which the arms industry was relocated when the Allied bombing began. Thousands of concentration camp inmates who did not have the necessary skills to be employed by the German arms industry lost their lives during the construction of these facilities.

The question of how perpetrators were dealt with after 1945 is also explored. Although arrests were made and some of the most brutal henchmen of the Nazi regime were executed, many SS men enjoyed their twilight years as respected citizens in freedom. One example is Karl Chmielewski, the first camp commander of Gusen, who was also known as the “Devil of Gusen.” Archive footage features survivors and the son of the former camp commander of Gusen, Walter Chmielewski, who paint an authentic picture of life in and around the Gusen camp.

The result is an in-depth and multi-layered documentary about a long-forgotten place and the crimes committed there.