What American Soldiers Saw on the “Stairs of Death” at Mauthausen DD

But on that day, the rules changed. The prisoners were free. The SS guards tried to run, but they couldn’t run fast enough. The prisoners caught them. They dragged them to the top of the cliff, and they gave the Nazis a taste of their own medicine. This is the true story of Mousen. The story of the most brutal labor camp in history and the brutal revenge the survivors took on the men who tortured them.

 To understand the revenge, you have to understand the torture. Mountousen was built on top of a granite quarry. Hitler needed granite. He wanted to build massive monuments in Berlin. He needed stone for his Germania and he needed slaves to dig it. The SS commander of Mountousausen was France Zerice. He was a sadist.

 He told his guards, “There are no sick people here. There are only the living and the dead.” The prisoners were worked 12 hours a day in the freezing snow, in the blistering heat. They had to carry blocks of granite up the stairs. Not small rocks, massive blocks weighing up to 100 lb, 50 kg. Imagine a starving man.

 He weighs only 90 lb himself. He is barefoot. He is weak. And he has to carry a rock heavier than his own body up 186 slippery steps. Step, step, step. If he stumbled, he died. If he dropped the rock, he died. And if he stopped, the man behind him would fall, and it would create a domino effect.

 Bodies tumbling down the sharp stone steps. The SS guards stood on the stairs. They laughed. They kicked the prisoners. They hit them with clubs. They called it the death march. But the stairs weren’t the only horror. At the top of the quarry, there was a cliff, a sheer drop of 160 ft, 50 m into the jagged rocks below. The SS guards invented a game.

 They called it the parachute jump. They would take a prisoner who was exhausted or a prisoner who had looked at them the wrong way. They would drag him to the edge of the cliff. An SS guard would point a gun at him. Jump, the guard would say. Jump, parachuter. If the prisoner refused, the guard would push him.

 a scream fading away. Heavy thud. The prisoners at the bottom of the quarry would hear the scream. They would see the body hit the rocks and they would have to keep working. They had to load the body onto a cart along with the stone. Sometimes the guards would force one prisoner to push another prisoner off. If he refused, they would both be thrown over.

This happened every day for seven years. The wall of the parachutists was covered in blood. May 1945. The rumble of American tanks could be heard in the distance. Commandant Zyres was in a panic. He knew he was a war criminal. He ordered the destruction of evidence. He ordered the gas chambers to be dismantled.

 He ordered the death marches to move the prisoners away, but it was too late. The 11th armored division was moving fast. They were led by Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kiaak. He was leading a platoon of 23 men in M8 Greyhound armored cars. They were scouting ahead. They didn’t know the camp was there.

 But then they met a man on a bicycle. It was Louis Hefelager, a Swiss Red Cross delegate. He had risked his life to find the Americans. He waved down the American convoy. You must come. You must come now. The SS are going to blow up the prisoners in the tunnels. There are 40,000 men. Sergeant Kiac looked at his map. He was outnumbered.

 He was behind enemy lines, but he looked at his men. Let’s go. The American armored cars roared toward the camp. The SS guards and the towers saw the white stars on the vehicles. They knew the game was up. Some of them threw down their weapons and ran into the woods. Others tried to fight. The American 50 caliber machine guns tore apart the guard towers.

 The resistance crumbled in minutes. The Americans drove into the main square. The appel plots. Thousands of prisoners poured out of the barracks. They were skeletons and striped rags, but they were screaming with joy. They swarmed the American vehicles. They kissed the tanks. They kissed the muddy boots of the soldiers.

 They lifted the American soldiers onto their shoulders. But then the mood changed. The joy turned into rage. The prisoners realized something. The Americans were here. The SS were no longer in charge. The guards, who hadn’t escaped, were trapped. The American soldiers were busy securing the camp.

 They were trying to get food and water to the dying. They were overwhelmed by the number of bodies. While the Americans were distracted, the prisoners formed hunting parties. They grabbed shovels. They grabbed rocks. Some of them grabbed guns dropped by the fleeing Germans. They went hunting. They found SS guards hiding in the barracks. They found them hiding in the potato sellers.

 They found them trying to dress in prisoner uniforms to blend in. But the prisoners recognized them. That is the block leader. That is the one who pushed my brother. The mob descended on them. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t an arrest. It was a lynching. They beat the guards with their fists, with wooden clubs. They tore them apart.

 An American officer tried to stop them. Stop. We must take them prisoner. But a Russian prisoner looked at the American. He pointed to the chimney. They did not stop for us. We will not stop for them. The American officer stepped back. He realized he couldn’t stop it. And deep down he didn’t want to. The revenge at Mountousen was brutal.

 But was it justified? Most history books hide this part of the story. They call it liberation. We show you the reality. If you want the uncensored truth of history, hit that subscribe button. Join us on the front line. But the ultimate revenge happened at the quarry. A group of prisoners captured a group of SS guards.

 These were the guards who had manned the stairs of death. The prisoners dragged the guards to the edge of the quarry. They dragged them to the top of the 186 steps. The same steps where thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russians had died. The guards were terrified. They begged for mercy. Please, I was just following orders. The prisoners didn’t listen.

 They forced the guards to pick up the heavy granite blocks, the same stones they had forced the prisoners to carry. Carry it. They ordered, “Carry it up the stairs.” The guards struggled. They were healthy, unlike the prisoners, but they were shaking with fear. They carried the rocks, and when they faltered, the prisoners kicked them just as the guards had done.

 And then they reached the cliff, the parachutist’s wall. The prisoners lined up the SS men. They looked at the drop, 160 ft. They looked at the rocks below and they pushed the sound of screaming falling away. A heavy thud. One by one, the parachutists were sent over the edge. The SS guards fell onto the pile of bones of their own victims.

 It was the grimst irony of the war. The murderers died in the exact same way they had tilled. The American soldiers watched from a distance. They saw the bodies falling. They didn’t shoot the prisoners. They didn’t arrest them. They turned their backs. They decided that this was not a crime. It was karma. And what about the leader Fron Zerice? The man who ran the murder house? He had run away.

 He was hiding in a hunting cabin in the mountains. He thought he was safe, but the Americans hunted him down. On May 23rd, 1945, American soldiers found his cabin. Zerice tried to run. He sprinted toward the woods. He thought he could escape justice, but an American soldier raised his rifle. Bow, bow, bow. Zerice was hit in the stomach.

 They didn’t kill him instantly. They brought him back to the camp. They laid him on a bed in the camp hospital, but they didn’t treat him as a patient. They treated him as an exhibit. The former prisoners came to see him. They stood around his bed. They stared at the man who had been their god. Now he was just a dying man in a dirty uniform.

 They interrogated him for hours. He confessed to everything. He admitted to gassing 65,000 people. He admitted to making lampshades out of human skin just like Ilce And then he died. His body was not buried with honors. The prisoners took his body. They carved a swastika into his chest and they hung him on the camp fence like a scarecrow.

 For days, every survivor walked past the body of the commandant. They spat on him. It was the final act of the Mountousen tragedy. The town of Mountousausen was just down the road. The civilians there claimed they knew nothing. We saw nothing. We heard nothing. But the Americans knew they were lying. The prisoners worked on the roads. They walked through the town.

 The smoke covered the houses. So the American commander ordered the civilians to come to the camp. Just like Patton did at Ordruff and Bukinwald, the citizens of Mountousausen were forced to bury the bodies, they were forced to clean the excrement from the barracks. They were forced to look at the staires of death.

 They dug mass graves with their own hands, men and women. Some vomited, some cried, but the American soldiers stood over them with rifles. Dig, they said, dig for the people you ignored. The liberation of Mount Housen was not a happy ending. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated rage. The survivors were too broken to celebrate. The soldiers were too horrified to smile.

 But the revenge at the stairs of death remains a unique moment in history. Usually the victors put the losers on trial. They have judges, lawyers, jails. But at Mountousausen, the victims delivered the verdict. They used the very instrument of their torture, the cliff, to execute their tormentors. Was it legal? No. Was it moral? Maybe not.

 But was it understandable? Yes. When you look into the abyss for long enough, eventually you push the monster in. The prisoners threw the guards off the cliff, the Americans let it happen. Do you think the soldiers were right to look the other way, or should they have stopped the revenge? Let me know in the comments below.

 And if you want to see the story of the ghost army that saved D-Day, click the video on the screen. Thanks for watching.

 

May 5th, 1945. Upper Austria. The US 11th Armored Division was moving through the beautiful Danube Valley. The war was practically over. But as the American tanks crested a hill near the town of Montousen, they saw something that looked like a medieval castle. High stone walls, guard towers. It looked like a fortress built by a giant.

 But as they got closer, they smelled it. The smell of rotting flesh, the smell of burning bodies. They crashed through the gates. What they found inside was worse than Dowau. Worse than Buenwald. Because Mothausen wasn’t just a prison. It was a grade three camp. The Nazis called it Morhousen, murder house.

 It was the place where incouraable enemies of the Reich were sent to be worked to death. The American soldiers looked over the edge of the camp wall and they saw the nightmare, a massive granite quarry deep in the earth and leading up from the pit were the stairs, the stairs of death. 186 steep uneven stone steps and at the bottom piles of broken bodies.

 But on that day, the rules changed. The prisoners were free. The SS guards tried to run, but they couldn’t run fast enough. The prisoners caught them. They dragged them to the top of the cliff, and they gave the Nazis a taste of their own medicine. This is the true story of Mousen. The story of the most brutal labor camp in history and the brutal revenge the survivors took on the men who tortured them.

 To understand the revenge, you have to understand the torture. Mountousen was built on top of a granite quarry. Hitler needed granite. He wanted to build massive monuments in Berlin. He needed stone for his Germania and he needed slaves to dig it. The SS commander of Mountousausen was France Zerice. He was a sadist.

 He told his guards, “There are no sick people here. There are only the living and the dead.” The prisoners were worked 12 hours a day in the freezing snow, in the blistering heat. They had to carry blocks of granite up the stairs. Not small rocks, massive blocks weighing up to 100 lb, 50 kg. Imagine a starving man.

 He weighs only 90 lb himself. He is barefoot. He is weak. And he has to carry a rock heavier than his own body up 186 slippery steps. Step, step, step. If he stumbled, he died. If he dropped the rock, he died. And if he stopped, the man behind him would fall, and it would create a domino effect.

 Bodies tumbling down the sharp stone steps. The SS guards stood on the stairs. They laughed. They kicked the prisoners. They hit them with clubs. They called it the death march. But the stairs weren’t the only horror. At the top of the quarry, there was a cliff, a sheer drop of 160 ft, 50 m into the jagged rocks below. The SS guards invented a game.

 They called it the parachute jump. They would take a prisoner who was exhausted or a prisoner who had looked at them the wrong way. They would drag him to the edge of the cliff. An SS guard would point a gun at him. Jump, the guard would say. Jump, parachuter. If the prisoner refused, the guard would push him.

 a scream fading away. Heavy thud. The prisoners at the bottom of the quarry would hear the scream. They would see the body hit the rocks and they would have to keep working. They had to load the body onto a cart along with the stone. Sometimes the guards would force one prisoner to push another prisoner off. If he refused, they would both be thrown over.

This happened every day for seven years. The wall of the parachutists was covered in blood. May 1945. The rumble of American tanks could be heard in the distance. Commandant Zyres was in a panic. He knew he was a war criminal. He ordered the destruction of evidence. He ordered the gas chambers to be dismantled.

 He ordered the death marches to move the prisoners away, but it was too late. The 11th armored division was moving fast. They were led by Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kiaak. He was leading a platoon of 23 men in M8 Greyhound armored cars. They were scouting ahead. They didn’t know the camp was there.

 But then they met a man on a bicycle. It was Louis Hefelager, a Swiss Red Cross delegate. He had risked his life to find the Americans. He waved down the American convoy. You must come. You must come now. The SS are going to blow up the prisoners in the tunnels. There are 40,000 men. Sergeant Kiac looked at his map. He was outnumbered.

 He was behind enemy lines, but he looked at his men. Let’s go. The American armored cars roared toward the camp. The SS guards and the towers saw the white stars on the vehicles. They knew the game was up. Some of them threw down their weapons and ran into the woods. Others tried to fight. The American 50 caliber machine guns tore apart the guard towers.

 The resistance crumbled in minutes. The Americans drove into the main square. The appel plots. Thousands of prisoners poured out of the barracks. They were skeletons and striped rags, but they were screaming with joy. They swarmed the American vehicles. They kissed the tanks. They kissed the muddy boots of the soldiers.

 They lifted the American soldiers onto their shoulders. But then the mood changed. The joy turned into rage. The prisoners realized something. The Americans were here. The SS were no longer in charge. The guards, who hadn’t escaped, were trapped. The American soldiers were busy securing the camp.

 They were trying to get food and water to the dying. They were overwhelmed by the number of bodies. While the Americans were distracted, the prisoners formed hunting parties. They grabbed shovels. They grabbed rocks. Some of them grabbed guns dropped by the fleeing Germans. They went hunting. They found SS guards hiding in the barracks. They found them hiding in the potato sellers.

 They found them trying to dress in prisoner uniforms to blend in. But the prisoners recognized them. That is the block leader. That is the one who pushed my brother. The mob descended on them. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t an arrest. It was a lynching. They beat the guards with their fists, with wooden clubs. They tore them apart.

 An American officer tried to stop them. Stop. We must take them prisoner. But a Russian prisoner looked at the American. He pointed to the chimney. They did not stop for us. We will not stop for them. The American officer stepped back. He realized he couldn’t stop it. And deep down he didn’t want to. The revenge at Mountousen was brutal.

 But was it justified? Most history books hide this part of the story. They call it liberation. We show you the reality. If you want the uncensored truth of history, hit that subscribe button. Join us on the front line. But the ultimate revenge happened at the quarry. A group of prisoners captured a group of SS guards.

 These were the guards who had manned the stairs of death. The prisoners dragged the guards to the edge of the quarry. They dragged them to the top of the 186 steps. The same steps where thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russians had died. The guards were terrified. They begged for mercy. Please, I was just following orders. The prisoners didn’t listen.

 They forced the guards to pick up the heavy granite blocks, the same stones they had forced the prisoners to carry. Carry it. They ordered, “Carry it up the stairs.” The guards struggled. They were healthy, unlike the prisoners, but they were shaking with fear. They carried the rocks, and when they faltered, the prisoners kicked them just as the guards had done.

 And then they reached the cliff, the parachutist’s wall. The prisoners lined up the SS men. They looked at the drop, 160 ft. They looked at the rocks below and they pushed the sound of screaming falling away. A heavy thud. One by one, the parachutists were sent over the edge. The SS guards fell onto the pile of bones of their own victims.

 It was the grimst irony of the war. The murderers died in the exact same way they had tilled. The American soldiers watched from a distance. They saw the bodies falling. They didn’t shoot the prisoners. They didn’t arrest them. They turned their backs. They decided that this was not a crime. It was karma. And what about the leader Fron Zerice? The man who ran the murder house? He had run away.

 He was hiding in a hunting cabin in the mountains. He thought he was safe, but the Americans hunted him down. On May 23rd, 1945, American soldiers found his cabin. Zerice tried to run. He sprinted toward the woods. He thought he could escape justice, but an American soldier raised his rifle. Bow, bow, bow. Zerice was hit in the stomach.

 They didn’t kill him instantly. They brought him back to the camp. They laid him on a bed in the camp hospital, but they didn’t treat him as a patient. They treated him as an exhibit. The former prisoners came to see him. They stood around his bed. They stared at the man who had been their god. Now he was just a dying man in a dirty uniform.

 They interrogated him for hours. He confessed to everything. He admitted to gassing 65,000 people. He admitted to making lampshades out of human skin just like Ilce And then he died. His body was not buried with honors. The prisoners took his body. They carved a swastika into his chest and they hung him on the camp fence like a scarecrow.

 For days, every survivor walked past the body of the commandant. They spat on him. It was the final act of the Mountousen tragedy. The town of Mountousausen was just down the road. The civilians there claimed they knew nothing. We saw nothing. We heard nothing. But the Americans knew they were lying. The prisoners worked on the roads. They walked through the town.

 The smoke covered the houses. So the American commander ordered the civilians to come to the camp. Just like Patton did at Ordruff and Bukinwald, the citizens of Mountousausen were forced to bury the bodies, they were forced to clean the excrement from the barracks. They were forced to look at the staires of death.

 They dug mass graves with their own hands, men and women. Some vomited, some cried, but the American soldiers stood over them with rifles. Dig, they said, dig for the people you ignored. The liberation of Mount Housen was not a happy ending. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated rage. The survivors were too broken to celebrate. The soldiers were too horrified to smile.

 But the revenge at the stairs of death remains a unique moment in history. Usually the victors put the losers on trial. They have judges, lawyers, jails. But at Mountousausen, the victims delivered the verdict. They used the very instrument of their torture, the cliff, to execute their tormentors. Was it legal? No. Was it moral? Maybe not.

 But was it understandable? Yes. When you look into the abyss for long enough, eventually you push the monster in. The prisoners threw the guards off the cliff, the Americans let it happen. Do you think the soldiers were right to look the other way, or should they have stopped the revenge? Let me know in the comments below.

 And if you want to see the story of the ghost army that saved D-Day, click the video on the screen. Thanks for watching.

 

May 5th, 1945. Upper Austria. The US 11th Armored Division was moving through the beautiful Danube Valley. The war was practically over. But as the American tanks crested a hill near the town of Montousen, they saw something that looked like a medieval castle. High stone walls, guard towers. It looked like a fortress built by a giant.

 But as they got closer, they smelled it. The smell of rotting flesh, the smell of burning bodies. They crashed through the gates. What they found inside was worse than Dowau. Worse than Buenwald. Because Mothausen wasn’t just a prison. It was a grade three camp. The Nazis called it Morhousen, murder house.

 It was the place where incouraable enemies of the Reich were sent to be worked to death. The American soldiers looked over the edge of the camp wall and they saw the nightmare, a massive granite quarry deep in the earth and leading up from the pit were the stairs, the stairs of death. 186 steep uneven stone steps and at the bottom piles of broken bodies.

 But on that day, the rules changed. The prisoners were free. The SS guards tried to run, but they couldn’t run fast enough. The prisoners caught them. They dragged them to the top of the cliff, and they gave the Nazis a taste of their own medicine. This is the true story of Mousen. The story of the most brutal labor camp in history and the brutal revenge the survivors took on the men who tortured them.

 To understand the revenge, you have to understand the torture. Mountousen was built on top of a granite quarry. Hitler needed granite. He wanted to build massive monuments in Berlin. He needed stone for his Germania and he needed slaves to dig it. The SS commander of Mountousausen was France Zerice. He was a sadist.

 He told his guards, “There are no sick people here. There are only the living and the dead.” The prisoners were worked 12 hours a day in the freezing snow, in the blistering heat. They had to carry blocks of granite up the stairs. Not small rocks, massive blocks weighing up to 100 lb, 50 kg. Imagine a starving man.

 He weighs only 90 lb himself. He is barefoot. He is weak. And he has to carry a rock heavier than his own body up 186 slippery steps. Step, step, step. If he stumbled, he died. If he dropped the rock, he died. And if he stopped, the man behind him would fall, and it would create a domino effect.

 Bodies tumbling down the sharp stone steps. The SS guards stood on the stairs. They laughed. They kicked the prisoners. They hit them with clubs. They called it the death march. But the stairs weren’t the only horror. At the top of the quarry, there was a cliff, a sheer drop of 160 ft, 50 m into the jagged rocks below. The SS guards invented a game.

 They called it the parachute jump. They would take a prisoner who was exhausted or a prisoner who had looked at them the wrong way. They would drag him to the edge of the cliff. An SS guard would point a gun at him. Jump, the guard would say. Jump, parachuter. If the prisoner refused, the guard would push him.

 a scream fading away. Heavy thud. The prisoners at the bottom of the quarry would hear the scream. They would see the body hit the rocks and they would have to keep working. They had to load the body onto a cart along with the stone. Sometimes the guards would force one prisoner to push another prisoner off. If he refused, they would both be thrown over.

This happened every day for seven years. The wall of the parachutists was covered in blood. May 1945. The rumble of American tanks could be heard in the distance. Commandant Zyres was in a panic. He knew he was a war criminal. He ordered the destruction of evidence. He ordered the gas chambers to be dismantled.

 He ordered the death marches to move the prisoners away, but it was too late. The 11th armored division was moving fast. They were led by Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kiaak. He was leading a platoon of 23 men in M8 Greyhound armored cars. They were scouting ahead. They didn’t know the camp was there.

 But then they met a man on a bicycle. It was Louis Hefelager, a Swiss Red Cross delegate. He had risked his life to find the Americans. He waved down the American convoy. You must come. You must come now. The SS are going to blow up the prisoners in the tunnels. There are 40,000 men. Sergeant Kiac looked at his map. He was outnumbered.

 He was behind enemy lines, but he looked at his men. Let’s go. The American armored cars roared toward the camp. The SS guards and the towers saw the white stars on the vehicles. They knew the game was up. Some of them threw down their weapons and ran into the woods. Others tried to fight. The American 50 caliber machine guns tore apart the guard towers.

 The resistance crumbled in minutes. The Americans drove into the main square. The appel plots. Thousands of prisoners poured out of the barracks. They were skeletons and striped rags, but they were screaming with joy. They swarmed the American vehicles. They kissed the tanks. They kissed the muddy boots of the soldiers.

 They lifted the American soldiers onto their shoulders. But then the mood changed. The joy turned into rage. The prisoners realized something. The Americans were here. The SS were no longer in charge. The guards, who hadn’t escaped, were trapped. The American soldiers were busy securing the camp.

 They were trying to get food and water to the dying. They were overwhelmed by the number of bodies. While the Americans were distracted, the prisoners formed hunting parties. They grabbed shovels. They grabbed rocks. Some of them grabbed guns dropped by the fleeing Germans. They went hunting. They found SS guards hiding in the barracks. They found them hiding in the potato sellers.

 They found them trying to dress in prisoner uniforms to blend in. But the prisoners recognized them. That is the block leader. That is the one who pushed my brother. The mob descended on them. It wasn’t a trial. It wasn’t an arrest. It was a lynching. They beat the guards with their fists, with wooden clubs. They tore them apart.

 An American officer tried to stop them. Stop. We must take them prisoner. But a Russian prisoner looked at the American. He pointed to the chimney. They did not stop for us. We will not stop for them. The American officer stepped back. He realized he couldn’t stop it. And deep down he didn’t want to. The revenge at Mountousen was brutal.

 But was it justified? Most history books hide this part of the story. They call it liberation. We show you the reality. If you want the uncensored truth of history, hit that subscribe button. Join us on the front line. But the ultimate revenge happened at the quarry. A group of prisoners captured a group of SS guards.

 These were the guards who had manned the stairs of death. The prisoners dragged the guards to the edge of the quarry. They dragged them to the top of the 186 steps. The same steps where thousands of Jews, Poles, and Russians had died. The guards were terrified. They begged for mercy. Please, I was just following orders. The prisoners didn’t listen.

 They forced the guards to pick up the heavy granite blocks, the same stones they had forced the prisoners to carry. Carry it. They ordered, “Carry it up the stairs.” The guards struggled. They were healthy, unlike the prisoners, but they were shaking with fear. They carried the rocks, and when they faltered, the prisoners kicked them just as the guards had done.

 And then they reached the cliff, the parachutist’s wall. The prisoners lined up the SS men. They looked at the drop, 160 ft. They looked at the rocks below and they pushed the sound of screaming falling away. A heavy thud. One by one, the parachutists were sent over the edge. The SS guards fell onto the pile of bones of their own victims.

 It was the grimst irony of the war. The murderers died in the exact same way they had tilled. The American soldiers watched from a distance. They saw the bodies falling. They didn’t shoot the prisoners. They didn’t arrest them. They turned their backs. They decided that this was not a crime. It was karma. And what about the leader Fron Zerice? The man who ran the murder house? He had run away.

 He was hiding in a hunting cabin in the mountains. He thought he was safe, but the Americans hunted him down. On May 23rd, 1945, American soldiers found his cabin. Zerice tried to run. He sprinted toward the woods. He thought he could escape justice, but an American soldier raised his rifle. Bow, bow, bow. Zerice was hit in the stomach.

 They didn’t kill him instantly. They brought him back to the camp. They laid him on a bed in the camp hospital, but they didn’t treat him as a patient. They treated him as an exhibit. The former prisoners came to see him. They stood around his bed. They stared at the man who had been their god. Now he was just a dying man in a dirty uniform.

 They interrogated him for hours. He confessed to everything. He admitted to gassing 65,000 people. He admitted to making lampshades out of human skin just like Ilce And then he died. His body was not buried with honors. The prisoners took his body. They carved a swastika into his chest and they hung him on the camp fence like a scarecrow.

 For days, every survivor walked past the body of the commandant. They spat on him. It was the final act of the Mountousen tragedy. The town of Mountousausen was just down the road. The civilians there claimed they knew nothing. We saw nothing. We heard nothing. But the Americans knew they were lying. The prisoners worked on the roads. They walked through the town.

 The smoke covered the houses. So the American commander ordered the civilians to come to the camp. Just like Patton did at Ordruff and Bukinwald, the citizens of Mountousausen were forced to bury the bodies, they were forced to clean the excrement from the barracks. They were forced to look at the staires of death.

 They dug mass graves with their own hands, men and women. Some vomited, some cried, but the American soldiers stood over them with rifles. Dig, they said, dig for the people you ignored. The liberation of Mount Housen was not a happy ending. It was a moment of pure, unadulterated rage. The survivors were too broken to celebrate. The soldiers were too horrified to smile.

 But the revenge at the stairs of death remains a unique moment in history. Usually the victors put the losers on trial. They have judges, lawyers, jails. But at Mountousausen, the victims delivered the verdict. They used the very instrument of their torture, the cliff, to execute their tormentors. Was it legal? No. Was it moral? Maybe not.

 But was it understandable? Yes. When you look into the abyss for long enough, eventually you push the monster in. The prisoners threw the guards off the cliff, the Americans let it happen. Do you think the soldiers were right to look the other way, or should they have stopped the revenge? Let me know in the comments below.

 And if you want to see the story of the ghost army that saved D-Day, click the video on the screen. Thanks for watching.