Nazi officials planned to move the Auschwitz gas chambers to a concentration camp in Austria as the Germans retreated westward from the Soviet army near the end of World War II, a magazine reported Sunday. While at the end of 1944, SS leader Heinrich Himmler gave orders to destroy the gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz to erase evidence of the atrocities, new research shows that officials sent at least some of the equipment to the Mauthausen camp for reuse, according to a report in the German news magazine "Der Spiegel".
Two Austrian historians came to that conclusion after sifting correspondence and hearing accounts by survivors of both camps. They also discovered a letter dated 10 February 1945 sent from J.A. Topf & Sons, an Erfurt-based company that made many of the incinerators for Nazi camps, to Mauthausen camp officials. In it, there is talk about sharply expanding the Austrian camp's gas chamber on the assumption that "all the parts from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp will be used again." Though accounts by camp survivors have indicated that some equipment from Auschwitz arrived, the war's turn against Germany prevented the Nazis from building the large-scale gas chambers they apparently envisioned for Mauthausen.
