A photograph of appallingly thin and exhausted prisoners sitting on a wooden bench in the courtyard of Ebensee death camp [apparently 1945. or possibly taken by the Germans during the war itself].
Ebensee was a Nazi concentration camp for forced labor, which from an administrative point of view is considered one of the sub-camps of the Mauthausen concentration camp. The camp was established by the SS in November 1943 near the town of Ebensee in Upper Austria, at the foot of the Alps. Most of the forced laborers there, about 20,000 prisoners, were enslaved there to death. When it was established, about a third of the prisoners in the camp were Jews. The camp had 25 residential barracks, each of which housed 750 prisoners. In addition, the camp had administrative buildings and a crematorium. In addition to the overcrowding that was already in the camp, the number of prisoners was higher than the capacity, and some of the prisoners had to stay under the open sky in the freezing cold of the Alps without protection. Even in the winter months, no effort was made to protect the prisoners from the cold of the Austrian winter at the foot of the Alps, and the death rate increased constantly. The prisoners wore prisoner's tunics made of thin fabric and wore wooden slippers, or walked barefoot after the slippers came apart, despite the cold. In the last weeks of the war the death rate rose to 350 dead per day. The crematorium was unable to keep up with the cremation, and naked bodies were piled up outside the hut, blocking the crematorium itself. To reduce the load, a trench was dug outside the camp, and the prisoners were required to throw the bodies into it, burn them and cover them with lime. Allied forces arrived at the camp on May 6, 1945. Some of the prisoners died in the following weeks due to malnutrition and disease.
16x12 cm. Paper pasting on the back of the photograph. Good condition.
