During the Second World War, the SS developed increasingly elaborate methods of deception inside the concentration camps to lead prisoners to their deaths without resistance. Arrivals at camps like Auschwitz were unloaded from trains and subjected to a selection process. Those deemed physically unfit for the brutal labor the camps demanded were driven savagely toward the gas chambers. Elsewhere, more cunning tricks were used.
At Buchenwald, there was a shooting facility where prisoners believed they were undergoing a medical examination. As they turned away, a trapdoor opened behind a fake measuring device and a pistol held by an SS executioner fired into the back of their necks. Thousands of people, particularly Soviet prisoners of war, were executed in this manner. A very similar death chamber existed inside the Mauthausen concentration camp, demonstrating the lengths to which the SS went to carry out executions of certain prisoners.
Mauthausen was not located in Germany but in Austria. It sat near a number of quarries, where prisoners were expected to perform physically exhausting labor that would eventually break them. Extermination through work was the established policy. Over the seven years the camp operated, 190,000 prisoners passed through its barbed wire, and more than 90,000 were killed.
Inside the camp, prisoners were regularly forced to climb 186 stone steps, known as the Death Stairs, several times a day while carrying extremely heavy stone blocks. It was torture, and it was highly dangerous. Death lurked at every corner at the hands of SS guards who exercised their deadly whims against any prisoner at any moment. There were many methods of execution used at Mauthausen, from guards throwing inmates off a rocky cliff to gallows where several people could be hanged at the same time.
But hidden in a secret basement of the crematorium, the place where the bodies of dead prisoners were burned, there was an execution room designed for mass killing. Shooting in the neck was an execution method widely used 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 this way. As mentioned, fake medical facilities and even sham hospitals were created to trick prisoners into believing they would receive some form of care or treatment.
All they received was a bullet in the neck. Inside Mauthausen, the SS were more inventive in hiding their true intentions. Within the secret cellar of the crematorium there was a facility designed to look like a photographic studio. It was made to appear as though the prisoners were about to have their pictures taken.
SS personnel arranged the prisoners in a queue 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, the prisoners were led down the stairs and into the room.
The door was then closed behind them. The prisoners stood in front of the camera as though waiting for the flash of the photograph. At that moment, the executioner shot them in the neck. Death was usually instantaneous.
Afterward, members of the Sonderkommando, the cleaning squads, waited in the adjacent mortuary. Their task was to remove the body quickly, then wipe away the blood and traces of the execution before the next prisoner was brought into the room. Many were killed in this manner. Also inside this room there was a folding table with a movable floor, used for hangings and other executions.
It was located in the basement of the crematorium, a facility and room designed specifically for killing. The next shooting room inside Mauthausen operated in the same way as those in other camps. Prisoners were deceived into walking toward their deaths, believing they would receive some form of treatment or care. In the case of the facility at Mauthausen, they genuinely believed they were going to have their photographs taken for camp records.
But instead, an executioner armed with his pistol ended the lives of many prisoners.