FLOSSENBURG ABREIT MACHT FREI – Flossenbürg Work Liberates. Testimony of a former Flossenbürg camp prisoner MAZALEYRAT MAURICE – Paris, 1968 – First edition. Copy dedicated by author.
A harrowing testimony about the horrific abuse he and his friends suffered in Flossenbürg camp. Maurice arrived at the camp in 1944, immediately upon arrival he heard the phrase: “Here you enter through the gate and exit through the chimney”. He describes a row of boys from the “Hitler Youth” whose job was to throw stones at the arriving prisoners. He was put in Block 21 where four prisoners had to sleep in bunk beds 80 cm wide, with rats running around constantly. A prisoner who fell off the bed immediately got beaten.
Maurice witnessed several executions of his good friends. After the war he was asked by their families if he knew what happened to them. Maurice describes at length the harsh interrogations he underwent in the camp, because the Nazis were sure he was hiding information about resistance fighters who are free. He didn’t dare answer, but as a result of the interrogations his body was shattered, and several times he was on the verge of death. Among other things, he describes the structure of the crematoria, how they operated in the camp, and how the Nazis looted the corpses, taking bodies from the crematorium for “research” – a sight he saw with his own eyes several times. At some point the Nazis transferred him to Block 8, where he was employed maintaining vehicles in the camp. Once he arranged to escape by hiding in the trunk of a truck that entered the camp, but at the last moment he canceled his plan because he heard the sound of planes and thought they were Allied planes, and didn’t want to endanger himself when liberation was so near. In the early months of 1945, he and the other prisoners gathered strength knowing that Allied liberation of the camp was imminent. Maurice was taken along with 1,700 other Jews and prisoners from Flossenbürg to Dachau for extermination near the end of the war, when they were assembled in the central square, which he describes in detail. Many died on the way to Dachau. Maurice himself was on a truck driven by Wehrmacht soldiers who had to concentrate on a gunfight with the Allies. Upon reaching the village of Pösing in eastern Bavaria, he and his friends managed to escape under cover of the fighting and hide in a nearby barn, where they found weapons and defended themselves from the Nazis who still pursued them, and that’s how his life was saved. After some time, American forces picked them up in ambulances and brought them to final liberation.
The author dedicates the book to all his friends who saved him from “Nazi slaughter” and lists their names, in particular “Bodo of Hanover who saved me from the SS massacre”, as well as “Gruber and Muhlbacher (two Austrian prisoners who were with him in the interrogation cell in the camp, and were executed a few days later) my cellmates executed in Graz”.
Flossenbürg camp was built by the Nazis in 1938 in Bavaria, near the border with the Sudetenland. In total, at least 30,000 were murdered there. Although the camp was expanded again and again, the number of prisoners was always far higher than its capacity. Prisoners in the camp were employed in arms production, in factories such as “Universal”, and also in the construction of Messerschmitt fighter planes. Living conditions in the camp were unbearable. The backbreaking labor in the quarries and inadequate care the prisoners received, as well as the cruelty of the camp guards, cost many prisoners their lives. On April 8, 1945, the SS in the camp began destroying evidence of what had happened there (Operation 1005). On April 20, 1945, the camp was evacuated for good. Its commander Max Koegel ordered a death march towards Dachau concentration camp. After World War II ended, around 5,000 corpses were found along the death march routes. Around 1,600 prisoners who were unfit for the march remained in the camp. The U.S. Army’s 90th Infantry Division arrived at the camp on April 23 and occupied it without resistance. Many of the prisoners who were there died in the following weeks due to their poor health.
95 [1] p. 21 cm. Very good condition.
