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world with Dachau and Buchenwald for the title of worst example of its kind. It was certainly the most
hideous thing that many members of XII Corps had ever seen. "Here were 16,000 political prisoners,
representing every country in Europe, all reduced to living skeletons and ridden with disease," the I & E
pamphlet history of the 11th Armored Division reports. "The bodies of more than 500 were stacked in
an area between two barracks. The few long term prisoners still alive said that at least 45,000 bodies had
been burned in the huge crematorium in four years. Other thousands were killed in the gas chambers,
injected with poison, or beaten to death."
Details of such camps have since received so much public notice in connection with post-war
trials of guards and superintendents of these hell-holes, that this volume need not repeat the stories of the
torture chambers, killing pens, the walking dead, the emaciated bodies stacked like cordwood. Suffice it
that a visit to Mauthausen was an unforgettable experience, – unfortunately. As one XII Corps
Headquarters officer wrote home: "It is really the smell that makes a visit to a Death Camp stark reality.
The smell and the stink of the dead and the dying. The smell and stink of the starving. Yes, it is the
smell, the stink, the odor of a Death Camp that makes it burn in the nostrils and memory. I will always
smell Mauthausen, just as I can still smell the bodies we found from the Flossenburg death march. …"
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