Will 40,000 'missing' Nazi victims and Hitler's secret nuclear bomb factory finally be uncovered?
A WW2 concentration camp’s 70yr mystery unfolds as experts claim thousands were killed in tunnels for knowing too much about Hitler's atomic weapons programme
The Austrian slaughterhouse of Mauthausen-Gusen was among the last Nazi concentration camps to be liberated. So when allied troops arrived in May 1945 they were at least prepared for the skeletal figures and the deathly stench.
But this time there was something that just didn’t add up. SS documents showed 90,000 prisoners were registered as living in the camps just days previously – but only 40,000 souls were actually there.
A few thousand had been marched two hours to the River Danube and shot. Around 10,000 Jews had been evacuated. But that still left thousands missing.
For 70 years the mystery has remained. But now a terrible explanation may be about to emerge from the bowels of the earth below the sleepy town of St Georgen an der Gusen.
Experts think that below the chocolate-box perfection of its traditional houses are tunnels where the bodies of those missing victims will be found.
What’s more, they believe they were massacred to protect another sinister secret – that the Nazis had been developing atomic weapons in clandestine underground laboratories.
“There could be as many as 40,000 people down there, killed in what might be described as a giant gas chamber.
“We could be about to uncover a vast mass grave,” says Andreas Sulzer, the Austrian documentary-maker who is leading the project.
It is known that a 75-acre network of tunnels was dug by concentration camp inmates to house Nazi munitions and fighter-jet factories. Up to 320,000 are said to have died in brutal working conditions.
But Sulzer is convinced that there is an undiscovered 12-mile section which could have been used for atomic bomb research.
His team of historians and scientists have been digging in the area for more than three years and in December a concealed entrance was found.
For now, the dig has been temporarily suspended while a new permit is sought.
“Until we get down there we won’t know anything for sure but I believe we could find thousands of bodies, and evidence that nuclear weapons were being worked on.
"I think the Nazis were getting close – and they were planning to attack London and New York first,” says Sulzer.
“What we do know is that there are almost no witnesses. The reason may be because those witnesses are still there.”
Although Nazi nuclear research began before the outbreak of war in 1939, many historians believe Hitler was nowhere near his goal of creating a atom bomb like the ones America would later drop on Japan to end the war in the Pacific in 1946.
Sulzer’s team says there is evidence that a team of nuclear scientists was working at Gusen under the leadership of SS General Hans Kammler, the man in charge of Nazi missile programmes, including the V-2 rocket.
“The SS leadership aspired to create a combination of missiles and weapons of mass destruction,” says historian Rainer Karlsch. “They wanted to equip the A4 missile, or more advanced rockets, with poison gas, radioactive material or nuclear warheads.”
The team was first alerted to the possible secret tunnels by the diaries of a German physicist Viktor Schauberger.
“He was involved, under strict secrecy, in research projects for the SS in St Georgen,” says Sulzer. “In his letters he talks about splitting the atom. He speaks of atom-smashing.”
Aerial and forensic teams have found evidence of underground structures in the area under investigation.
“You could see ventilation shafts on the hill close by, unnatural structures in the hills. Based on that we started our digging,” explains Sulzer.
When the secret entrance was found, it was evident that the Nazis had gone to extreme lengths to seal it shut with large granite plates when they abandoned the site in 1945.
An SS helmet was found during the digging too. One SS officer interrogated by the Americans spoke of a chemical workshop operating at a deep level.
And the Nazis had moved atomic research experts to Gusen from other concentration camps, including Auschwitz.
“They selected chemists, radio technicians, physicists and skilled labourers,” says Sulzer.
“We have interviewed Auschwitz survivors who came to Gusen and they told us on the train they talked to other inmates and realised they were highly skilled experts.
“Prison inmate cards and ‘death books’ show us that Gusen had a high proportion of chemists, electro-technicians, physicists, metal workers.
"There was an unbelievable death rate for the metal workers – they were surviving a maximum of four weeks.”
Sulzer believes the likely cause was exposure to chemicals being extracted in the tunnels.
Research also shows increased levels of radiation around the site.
“There are very clear signs that there is probably something strange going on down there,” says Sulzer.
Fears that the digging will uncover a mass grave comes from documents and interviews including evidence from Gusen’s SS commander Franz Ziereis. who was shot trying to escape then interrogated on his death bed.
“He revealed he had an order to kill inmates, specifically the people who worked in this complex and had knowledge of the secret project.
"He was told to bring them to the tunnels and blow them up with a chemical substance,” says Sulzer. “But he claimed that he did not execute the order.”
The mismatched figures suggest differently – 90,000 inmates registered, only 40,000 alive when the camp was liberated.
Even allowing for known shootings and the daily toll of the gas chambers, Martha Gammer, who leads a Gusen commemoration group, believes there could be 25,000 bodies lying where they fell underground.
“I think they may have been killed because they knew too much. And how else can you kill thousands in just a few days? They had just four or five days to kill them before the SS fled,” she says.
An Austrian report from the 1960s also seems to show that explosions had taken place in the tunnel complex.
Why they did not go on to explore further Sulzer does not know – but the job of technicians at the time was simply to evaluate the area for possible use as a nuclear waste plant.
“Perhaps they knew it was already contaminated land,” he suggests.
More chilling details of how the mass killings might have been happened have emerged from interviews with camp survivors.
Sulzer says: “I spoke to one Polish survivor last year and he said the commander started training a particular section of inmates to run to the tunnels in fake aerial raid practices.
“They practised this four or five times, but the prisoners in sections that produced the planes and the rockets did not do this. Just the physicists, the chemists, the people working on the secret project.”
He says it’s possible that in the last such drill, tens of thousands ran to their deaths.
Until excavation work re-opens Sulzer and has team can only guess how close Hitler came to making atomic weapons and the fate of those forced to work on them.
But he is determined to discover the truth.
“We owe it to the victims,” he says.
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