One afternoon last spring a man lay dying. But this was no ordinary man. He was a Nazi. But this was no ordinary Nazi. He was the commander of a concentration camp. But this was no ordinary concentration camp. It was Mauthausen, one of the worst, and the man was Franz Ziereis.

Quite probably you do not remember his name, but almost certainly you have heard a little about him. He was the father of the eleven-year-old boy who used to sit on the front porch of the administration building in the camp and shoot helpless prisoners with his rifle—for sport, for the fun of it, just as other little boys shoot rabbits.

Now the son was locked up in the local jail, and the father lay dying on a United States Army cot. He had been shot through his back and left arm the day before by an American patrol that had been sent to scour the surrounding Austrian countryside for him. They had found him hiding in a mountain cottage, and when he tried to escape, they had wounded him fatally. Later he had been brought down the mountain to an Army hospital set up in the shadow of the concentration camp he had run.

Ziereis was a killer among men, and I should like to tell you something about the final hours of the killer because, as I have said, he was a most extraordinary man. Two Dutchmen, themselves ex-inmates of Mauthausen, and now serving as translators, took down in haphazard English everything he said.

“I am no studied head,” he kept repeating, “but a simple soldier who got this post owing to my own will, energy, and hard work.” He liked, you see, to think of himself as a man who had a job and who had performed it to the best of his ability. Some men ran slaughter-houses in which cattle were killed; Franz Ziereis had run a concentration camp in which there had been slaughter of another kind. The official figures in the files of SHAEF said that 40,000 people had in fact been killed in Ziereis’ slaughter-house in the first four months of 1945 alone.

He said that sometimes, of course, his chosen field of work had got on his nerves, for besides being a killer, he also considered himself a human being. And physically, and for fleeting moments emotionally, he was. It is this distortion—that a man could be a human being and also run a slaughter-house for other human beings—that makes Ziereis such an illuminating symbol of the times through which we have just passed. Quite calmly he confessed how SS General Pohl had once sent him 6,000 women and children who had been without food for ten days. “They had been on railways in open cattle-carriages, without blankets, in an icy cold,” said the killer. “According to an order received from Berlin, I had to send the children immediately on transport to Belsen Camp”—and then he added, with a sigh, “I suppose they all died a dreadful death.”

The killer not only thought of himself as a substantial citizen performing a substantial job, he also regarded himself as a good family man. Each evening, after the day’s shootings and gassings and beatings had been done, he left his office in the camp and drove to his home, where he lived quietly with his wife, whom he adored, and Fritz, their eleven-year-old son.

“Myself,” said Ziereis, “was against killing in mass and robbing.” He had been shocked, he said, when during a visit to Buchenwald he had seen “taken away from prisoners all their money, gold, and jewels. Everybody in that camp got at once a big car. Obersturmfuehrer Hackmann drove out in a Mercedes, with stolen diamonds on the fingers, and his subordinate, Untersturmfuehrer Meyer, imitated like a monkey all these manners. The chief of the arrest-cells drove out drunk with a naked woman in a car to Erfurt, where he spent in bars 5,000 marks a night.”

The killer was against all this. He himself lived modestly and kept his savings, totaling 19,000 marks ($1900 at current rates), in two local banks. In the evenings, he did not drive to the big cities or consort with naked women, but ate his soup and schnitzel quietly at home with his family.

There they sat. Frau Ziereis, home from the day’s shopping in the town of Mauthausen, unless she happened to have shopped further afield in Vienna or Linz. The killer, home from his job. And Fritz, home from the porch of the administration building, having brought with him the rifle, which he kept in his bedroom at night. That the child’s rifle may have accounted for several lives that day did not disturb his parents’ peace of mind. Like any well-brought-up youngster, he had first to ask his father’s permission before he was allowed to shoot.

Now that he was dying, Ziereis asked to see his son. Fritz was brought to the hospital from the nearby jail. He was a dour-looking but well-fed kid, dressed in breeches and a colorful shirt, but the feature that most distinguished him was his posture, which was exceptionally erect.

In these final hours, Ziereis was trying very hard to salvage some claim to consideration as a human being; when his son entered, he looked at him and smiled. A film of sentiment flickered across his eyes, and in his face there was a hopeful and even an expectant look.

But the son marched into the room and up to the dying father’s bedside and stood there stiffly, almost at attention, and there was no expression on his face.

“I have been shot. I am dying,” said the father.

But the son just looked.

“When I die,” said the father, “I want you to take care of your mother. She is at the cottage Pirn. Obey her. Be always kind to her.”

But the son just looked.

Then quickly, without a word, a handshake, or a tear, he did a series of rapid military movements with his feet and marched out of his father’s room.

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One of the special characteristics of the camp that the killer had run was the rock quarry. The quarry had steps. It had, as a matter of fact, 86 steps. Up these steps prisoners had been forced to carry heavy rocks. If they stumbled or fell, they were shot. When Lieutenant Colonel Seibel of Philadelphia, the first American to reach the scene, examined the steps, he found them “encrusted with blood.”

Most of this blood was the blood of Catholics and Protestants. It is a peculiarity of recent times that one is able to say this, because in a sane world there would be no way to distinguish between the blood of Catholics and Protestants and the blood of anybody else. But, as I have said, Mauthausen was extraordinary, even among concentration camps. Its Jewish prisoners were not normally accorded the privilege of being shot to death on the steps. Instead, “they were brought to the top of the quarry and thrown over the edge. Those who survived were thrown over again until they died.” Sometimes in the evenings, after a good deal of beer had been passed, Ziereis and his friends would talk and even joke about this. They had a name for it. They called it “the parachute jump.”

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However, now as he lay wrapped in a United States Army blanket on a United States Army cot, the killer was no longer in a joking mood.

He felt like confessing his sins—as though an hour of feverish atonement could make up for twelve years of cold abandon. He told how he had beaten prisoners with a stick “for merely sadism,” and how General Pohl had chased “sick prisoners in the forests where they had to feed themselves by fruits and berries.” He explained how a Dr. Richter had “murdered several hundred prisoners by operating on them without any reason and cut away the brain, stomach, and liver.” Then he added, rather quaintly, “Or other interiors.”

One incident that had upset him occurred when “2500 prisoners came to Mauthausen and had to be sprayed with cold water in winter. I had to send these prisoners to Gusen Camp, a way of about three kilometres, and we had no clothes for them besides underwear. I asked for clothes for the prisoners, but I got the reply from Berlin to send them naked to Gusen if no clothes are available. I sent them along in underwear.” Such cases, Ziereis said, happened several times. Just thinking about them made him very mad at his superiors in Berlin and, closing his fists, he asked to be confronted with the Hitlers and the Himmlers. “I will throw them the whole truth into their faces!”

He spoke also of how a fellow member of his trade, another camp commander, had “locked forty women in an air-tight cell and let them die of suffocation.” This had taken place in a camp whose name the killer could not for the moment remember. It was possibly while trying to rouse his memory with regard to this incident that the killer remembered his own wife.

She had fled to the mountains with him, but she had not been at the hideout when the American patrol appeared. She did not know, therefore, either that her husband had been captured or that he was now nearly dead. To spare her further worry, the killer asked whether he might dictate a farewell letter to her. Permission was granted and this is what he wrote:

My dear wife:
I had been made out on 23rd May 1945 by the Americans while you have been out for shopping. I ask you, my dear, to come at once. You may be submitted to an interview and I ask you to say the full truth about the conduct of the heads in Berlin. Furthermore give these gentlemen knowledge of our decision to go both into death to enable our children a better life.

When arrested I lost my nerves. I laid my machine-gun by the tree instead of using it as I am known as a master in the rifle. The Americans had perfect conduct, but they prevented my flight by means of arms. I have been shot twice and I could not rise.

I have said everything I had known, as far as it is possible with the heavy wounds I got. I have some more details to relate, especially about the dirty conduct of those gentlemen in Berlin, including the Fuehrer. Please come and let it know the gentlemen here how they threatened us miserably. Tell the gentlemen about the swinish conduct of the SS General Pohl.

Your loving husband, Franz

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Toward sunset the killer passed away. His body was wrapped in a blanket and taken to the morgue.

At about eight o’clock that evening, however, a peculiar sight was to be seen at the main gate of the camp. Near the entrance—where the barbed wire encircles Mauthausen and not far from where young Fritz used to sit—a naked body hung from a pole. It was attached to the pole in such a way that the torso and legs dangled aimlessly over the wire.

The corpse was that of Ziereis. His former victims had stolen his body from the morgue and had strung him up in a final, fitting gesture. They had also obtained some paint. In red letters, on the back of the killer, they had painted: Heil Hitler. And on the cheeks of the killer’s behind they had painted two big swastikas for all the free world to see and never to forget.