Austrian camp’s liberation recalled

MAUTHAUSEN, Austria – Former U.S. soldier Harry C. Saunders says he’ll never forget the searing images that burned into his memory more than half a century ago.

“The people were just living skeletons,” said Saunders, who returned to Mauthausen on Sunday to meet former inmates, their relatives, officials and others gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation.

Organizers said more than 21,000 people – many wearing blue-and-white striped kerchiefs symbolizing the uniforms worn by camp inmates – attended the two-day memorial event ending Sunday to mark an end to Nazi terror at Mauthausen and its 49 subsidiary camps.

Many survivors have grim stories to tell of the fortress-like camp and its subsidiaries that claimed more than half of the 200,000 people they held during World War II.

Described Sunday as a “piece of hell on earth” by Austrian Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, Mauthausen was the last big Nazi death camp still operating when the U.S. Third Army’s 11th Armored Division arrived on May 5, 1945.

Even though its Nazi guards had fled, locals were manning the guard towers when Saunders, then a young Army sergeant, drove his armored car through its heavy gates.

U.S. soldiers weren’t briefed on concentration camps, he says, and nothing prepared him for what he saw.

“We went through the gas chamber, the crematorium, and the realization slowly grew on us that this was more than just a fortification of some kind,” he said.

The commemoration was seen as a reflection that Austria has acknowledged its role in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities after decades of denial fed by arguments that it was the first victim of Hitler, who annexed the nation in 1938.