The Sun
WALKING beside his dad, 11-year-old Walter Chmielewski watched as an emaciated man on death’s door was dragged towards a crematorium.
It was a harrowing sight, but one which was commonplace for Walter, who grew up in a Nazi concentration camp in Austria, of which his father Karl Chmielewski – a German SS officer dubbed the “Devil of Gusen” – was commander.
More than 35,000 prisoners, most of which were Polish, Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens and Italians, were slaughtered at Gusen – a subcamp of Mauthausen – during the Holocaust.
Prisoners were subjected to starvation, heavy labour and mass executions and had a life expectancy of just six months.
Chmielewski, who ran the camp between 1940 and 1942, was renowned for his ruthless, extreme brutality and was said to whip prisoners with a riding crop, scald them with buckets of boiling water and make wallets out of their skin.
But Walter saw the inmates as his friends – as did his mum, who infuriated her husband by feeding them the same food as the rest of the family when they came to work at the house.
Walter, now 92, never accepted his father’s Nazi beliefs, despite his insistence that the prisoners were “criminals, traitors, Jews, parasites” who want to “destroy Germany and don’t deserve anything else”.
As a child he was often taken into the camp to see a doctor or to have his hair cut, always tended to by inmates.
He told The Sun: “I saw some terrible things as a child… half-naked prisoners standing on the roll-call square at the camp, in the freezing cold.
“I remember one experience, when I wanted to see the production plants, so my father took me there, and on the way there stood a prisoner and he was throwing up.
“He was obviously, visibly, not in a good condition. My father then shouted at the guard who was accompanying us, ‘See to it that he returns to his place of work immediately!’
“Then the guard hit him in the back with the butt of his rifle and yelled, ‘You lazy one, get back to your place of work!’ But then the prisoner collapsed and fell unconscious.
“The SS guard called two Kapos (prisoners in charge for favourable treatment) and he was then dragged away by his hands in the direction of the crematorium.
“I don’t know if he was actually then taken to the crematorium itself. And I don’t know if he died there. It was 100 metres away. But he was certainly dragged in that direction.”
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