During World War II, the SS inside concentration camps devised various methods to deceive inmates and prisoners into walking willingly to their deaths. At camps such as Auschwitz, victims were unloaded from trains and subjected to a selection process. Those deemed physically unfit for the hard labor required in the camp were driven brutally toward the gas chambers.
Inside many camps, further trickery and cunning were used to send people to their deaths. At Buchenwald, there was a neck-shooting facility where prisoners believed they were undergoing a medical examination. When they turned their heads away, a slot opened behind a fake height-measuring device and a pistol held by an SS executioner emerged. In this way, thousands of people, especially Soviet prisoners of war at Buchenwald, suffered their horrific executions.
But a very similar death room existed inside the Mauthausen concentration camp. This shows the extent to which the SS went to carry out the executions of certain prisoners. Specifically, what happened inside the execution room with the fake camera?
The Mauthausen concentration camp was not located in Germany, but in Austria. It was situated near a number of quarries, and prisoners were expected to perform hard physical labor that ultimately exhausted them. Extermination through labor was the policy. Over the seven years Mauthausen was open, 190,000 prisoners passed through its barbed wire, and more than 90,000 of them were killed.
Inside the camp, prisoners were regularly forced to climb 186 stone steps, known as the Stairs of Death, several times a day, while being made to carry extremely heavy stone blocks. This was torture and it was extremely dangerous. Death lurked around every corner at the hands of SS guards who practiced their murderous whims against any prisoner at any moment.
There were many execution methods used inside Mauthausen, from guards throwing inmates from a high rock cliff to gallows where many people could be executed at once. But inside a secret basement hidden in the crematorium, the place where the bodies of dead prisoners were burned, there was an execution room designed for mass slaughter.
Neck shooting was an execution method used widely by the Nazis, in which the executioner simply placed his pistol against the back of the victim's neck and fired. But inside the camps, the SS relied on deception to kill prisoners in this way. As mentioned, there were fake medical facilities and even sham hospitals created to trick prisoners into believing they would receive some kind of care or medical treatment, but all they received was a bullet to the neck.
Inside Mauthausen, SS personnel were more creative in hiding their true intentions. Inside the secret crematorium basement, there was a facility designed to look like a photography studio. It was made to appear as though the prisoners were about to have their pictures taken.
SS staff arranged the prisoners in a line near the entrance. The prisoners waited patiently to have their photos taken. There was even a camera placed near the corner of the room, covered with a dark cloth to make it look like real equipment.
One by one, prisoners were led down the stairs into the room. Then the door was closed behind them. The prisoners stood in front of the camera as if waiting for the flash. At that point, the executioner shot them in the neck. Death was often instantaneous.
Afterward, members of the Sonderkommando, the cleanup teams, waited in the adjacent mortuary. They were tasked with quickly removing the body, then wiping away the blood and traces of the execution before bringing in the next prisoner. Many were killed in this way.
Inside this room, too, there was a folding table with a movable floor, used for hangings and other executions. It was in the crematorium basement, a facility and room designed specifically for killing.
The next shooting room inside Mauthausen operated in the same way as other camps. Prisoners were deceived into walking toward their deaths, believing they would receive some kind of treatment or care. In the case of the facility at Mauthausen, they truly believed they were going to have photographs taken for camp records. Instead, an armed executioner with his pistol ended the lives of many prisoners.