Featured Declaration Document

@smshart I have only just found this document and in reading it found mention of of the "camp" at Mauthausen. I visited Mauthausen in 1962, 17-years after commander Franz Zieleis wrote his report.

In 2009 I got round to writing my feelings on visiting the concentration camp. I though it might be of interest to future readers of your submission:

Open gates

The gates were open. No guards to challenge us. No notice board to indicate the establishment we were entering. Grass was growing through the cracks in the concrete roadway. Silence. We were alone. Just me, and a companion.

I walked through an opening into a large, high building. If there were doors, I don’t remember seeing them. Everything was built of grey stone. Light streamed through the window openings; any glass was long gone. There were dissecting tables made of stone; grooves to allow the blood and gore to flow into the drain ways built into the floor. The metal doors to the furnaces were rusty, and creaked open to the pull. I remember thinking, how small the openings seemed.

In another place, a different setting, a peep into the ovens would have revealed our daily bread, and the warm sickly smell of yeast would have pervaded the air.

And that was it. I made no notes. Took no photographs. The silence gave it a reverential atmosphere. These are all that remain of my recollection of the visit I made in September 1962 to the Mauthausen or Guzen concentration camp; which one, I know not.

Grass and weeds, and the camp itself remained the only memorial to the 100,000, 200,000, 300,000 people who died in the two camps to assuage the intolerance, the inferiority, the hatred of a few obsessed people intent on exercising total power. A total power that we enabled and allowed them to take unto themselves by a failure and a fear to resist.

We hitched a lift to the City of Saltzburg. The driver, an Austrian, had one arm, and one leg missing. A living memorial to the folly of war. Looking back now, perhaps it also gave a little sign of progress. My companion was black. We would not have been offered a lift 20 years earlier.

Today there are memorials and museums at Mauthausen and Guzen. Tens of thousands of memorials, the words engraved in all languages, in all religions, celebrate the dead of wars through out history. There is no excuse for anybody to misunderstand the waste that is war. Yet as I write, wars are being fought in dozens of places around the world. Reinforcing and acknowledging that politicians, the military, and we, have learned nothing from the dead.

On several days each year, in cities, in towns, and in villages, we troop to these memorials and remember the dead from the glorious wars in every corner of the Earth — Afghanistan, South Africa, India, Mexico, Algeria, Russia, Turkey, Palestine, China, Libya, Mali — going back just days or to a century and more. Imperialist wars, colonial wars, civil wars, nuclear wars, guerrilla wars, urban wars, desert wars, asymmetric wars, and robotic wars. The terminology is elastic.

"When will we ever learn?”1 When will we ever learn to say ‘No to war’?
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“Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” words and music by Pete Seeger, 1961