LAMPE: I was arrested on 8 November 1941. After two years and a half of
internment in France, I was deported on 22 March 1944 to Mauthausen in
Austria. The journey lasted three days and three nights under
particularly vile conditions—104 deportees in a cattle truck without
air. I do not believe that it is necessary to give all the details of
this journey, but one can well imagine the state in which we arrived at
Mauthausen on the morning of the 25th of March 1944, in weather 12
degrees below zero. I mention, however, that from the French border we
traveled in the trucks, naked.
When we arrived at Mauthausen, the SS officer who received this convoy
of about 1,200 Frenchmen informed us in the following words, which I
shall quote from memory almost word for word:
“Germany needs your arms. You are, therefore, going to work; but
I want to tell you that you will never see your families again.
When one enters this camp, one leaves it by the chimney of the
crematorium.”
I remained about three weeks in quarantine in an isolated block, and I
was then detailed to work with a squad in a stone quarry. The quarry at
Mauthausen was in a hollow about 800 metres from the camp proper. There
were 186 steps down to it. It was particularly painful torture, because
the steps were so rough-hewn that to climb them even without a load was
extremely tiring.
One day, 15 April 1944, I was detailed to a team of 12 men—all of them
French—under the orders of a German “Kapo,” a common criminal, and of
an SS man.
We started work at seven o’clock in the morning. By eight o’clock, one
hour later, two of my comrades had already been murdered. They were an
elderly man, M. Gregoire from Lyons, and a quite young man, Lefevre from
Tours. They were murdered because they had not understood the order,
given in German, detailing them for a task. We were very frequently
beaten because of our inability to understand the German language.
On the evening of that first day, 15 April 1944, we were told to carry
the two corpses to the top, and the one that I, with three of my
comrades, carried was that of old Gregoire, a very heavy man; we had to
go up 186 steps with a corpse and we all received blows before we
reached the top.
Life in Mauthausen—and I shall declare before this Tribunal only what I
myself saw and experienced—was a long cycle of torture and of
suffering. However, I would like to recall a few scenes which were
particularly horrible and have remained more firmly fixed in my memory.
During September, I think it was on the 6th of September 1944, there
came to Mauthausen a small convoy of 47 British, American, and Dutch
officers. They were airmen who had come down by parachute. They had been
arrested after having tried to make their way back to their own lines.
Because of this they were condemned to death by a German tribunal. They
had been in prison about a year and a half and were brought to
Mauthausen for execution.
On their arrival they were transferred to the bunker, the camp prison.
They were made to undress and had only their pants and a shirt. They
were barefooted. The following morning they were at the roll call at
seven o’clock. The work gangs went to their tasks. The 47 officers were
assembled in front of the office and were told by the commanding officer
of the camp that they were all under sentence of death.
I must mention that one of the American officers asked the commander
that he should be allowed to meet his death as a soldier. In reply, he
was bashed with a whip. The 47 were led barefoot to the quarry.
For all the prisoners at Mauthausen the murder of these men has remained
in their minds like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. This is how it was
done: At the bottom of the steps they loaded stone on the backs of these
poor men and they had to carry them to the top. The first journey was
made with stones weighing 25 to 30 kilos and was accompanied by blows.
Then they were made to run down. For the second journey the stones were
still heavier; and whenever the poor wretches sank under their burden,
they were kicked and hit with a bludgeon, even stones were hurled at
them.
This went on for several days. In the evening when I returned from the
gang with which I was then working, the road which led to the camp was a
bath of blood. I almost stepped on the lower jaw of a man. Twenty-one
bodies were strewn along the road. Twenty-one had died on the first day.
The twenty-six others died the following morning. I have tried to make
my account of this horrible episode as short as possible. We were not
able, at least when we were in camp, to find out the names of these
officers; but I think that by now their names must have been
established.
In September 1944 Himmler visited us. Nothing was changed in the camp
routine. The work gangs went to their tasks as usual, and I had—we
had—the unhappy opportunity of seeing Himmler close. If I mention
Himmler’s visit to the camp—after all it was not a great event—it is
because that day they presented to Himmler the execution of fifty Soviet
officers.
I must tell you that I was then working in a Messerschmidt gang, and
that day I was on night shift. The block where I was billeted was just
opposite the crematorium; and in the execution room, we saw—I
saw—these Soviet officers lined up in rows of five in front of my
block. They were called one by one. The way to the execution room was
relatively short. It was reached by a stairway. The execution room was
under the crematorium.
The execution, which Himmler himself witnessed—at least the beginning
of it, because it lasted throughout the afternoon—was another
particularly horrible spectacle. I repeat, the Soviet Army officers were
called one by one, and there was a sort of human chain between the group
which was awaiting its turn and that which was in the stairway listening
to the shots which killed their predecessors. They were all killed by a
shot in the neck.