The Liberation of Mauthausen

The famous trilingual banner atop one of the entrances to the camp is an iconic symbol of the collapse of Nazi terror, and its Spanish message is profoundly significant: Spanish antifascists salute the liberating forces”. Once the initial euphoria had passed, however, there was a long road ahead to escape from the curse fortress. Those who succeeded took with them many lifelong physical and psychological consequences.

But on that morning of 6 May 1945 it was not possible to understand the scale of the crimes that had been committed in the KL. The wounds were still bleeding, and those who were now in charge had barely glanced into the abyss. The difficult task of saving as many prisoners as possible was beginning.

Most of the survivors who were not from one of the western powers had to confront the traumatic new process posed by personal loss and the impossibility of returning to what they considered home. The magnitude of the numbers leaves no doubt about this: at the end of the war there some twenty million people in Europe who were outside their country of origin.

In the case of the Spaniards, the work of the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was especially important. Created by the United Nations on 20 April 1946, it saw the voluntary relocation of the people in its care as one of its functions. The creation of this new organization brought a complete change in the definition of “displaced person” and “refugee”, acquiring a radically different meaning as it provided material, sanitary, and legal assistance to the people affected, although this did not begin immediately. The Spaniards who survived Mauthausen remained in a legal and support limbo for more than two years after the liberation.

In Spain, things were very different. The survival of the dictatorship until 1975 made it impossible to openly recognize of the deportation of Spaniards to the Nazi camps. Only in the 1990s would there be some movement in the legal recognition of the exile. At the moment, the Spanish state and the Spanish people are in the midst of a process of reclaiming and recognizing the victims of Francoism as well s of the deportation.

GGB