Picture this.

May 1945.

The war in Europe is over.

American soldiers are walking through a concentration camp in Austria trying to process what they are seeing.

Skeletal survivors, mass graves, gas chambers still smelling of death.

And then one of them looks toward the fence.

A naked man is hanging there.

Not a prisoner, not a victim.

The commonant, the man who ran this place for six brutal years, painted across his back in red.

Hile Hitler, swastikas smeared across his flesh.

His torso and legs dangle lifelessly over the same electrified barbed wire he once used to kill human beings.

His name was Fran Seir, and the people who put him there were the ones he tortured.

This is not a war movie.

This is documented history.

And there is a photograph.

Stay with me because before we get to how Zerice died, you need to understand what he built, what he ran, and what made his prisoners hate him with every ounce of strength they had left in their starved, either broken bodies.

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Now, let’s go back to where this all started.

It is the morning of March 12th, 1938.

German military columns roll across the Austrian border, and they are not met with gunfire.

Honor, they are met with flowers.

Thousands of Austrians line the streets cheering and waving as Adolf Hitler, who was himself born in Austria, returns as a conqueror.

But beneath the celebration, a terror is quietly detonating.

Jews, political dissident, and anyone who had ever spoken against the Nazi regime scramble for the borders before they are sealed shut.

Most do not make it in time.

What follows in Vienna is pram level violence.

When Austrian Nazis drag Jewish men and women into the streets, not at night, not in secret, but in broad daylight, and force them to scrub the cobblestones on their hands and knees while crowds laugh and take photographs.

They are beaten with belts, humiliated, stripped of every shred of dignity they have.

And this, all of this is just the appetizer.

5 months later on August 8th, 1938, the SS selects a site near the Austrian city of Lintz, a granite quarry surrounded by mountains.

When they transfer the first prisoners from Dao and hand them shovels and pickaxes, the prisoners are ordered to build their own cage stone by stone.

The Nazis nickname this place something that tells you everything you need to know, the Bone Grinder.

Its official name is Mount Housen.

Of the roughly 197,000 people who will pass through its gates between 1938 and 1945, at least 95,000 will never walk out.

More than 14,000 of them are Jewish.

The rest are Polish, Soviet, Spanish, Italian, Yugoslav.

People from nearly every country the Nazi war machine touched.

In 1939, a second camp opens just kilome away.

Gusen.

Together, these two sites form the deadliest concentration camp complex outside of the extermination camps in Poland.

The man placed in charge of all of it.

France Searise, a failed butcher’s apprentice from Munich who joined the SS in 1936 and discovered he had a talent for cruelty.

Here is the detail that will not leave you.

What? At the base of the granite quarry sits a staircase.

186 stone steps cut into the earth.

The SS forces prisoners already starving, already sick, many weighing as little as 40 kg or 88 lb, to lift granite blocks weighing up to 50 kg, about 110 lb, and carry them up those stairs.

Single file, one man directly behind the next.

When a man collapses, and they do constantly, he falls backward onto the prisoner behind him, who falls onto the next, who falls onto the next.

a chain reaction of broken human bodies tumbling down stone steps.

Those who survive the climb do not find rest at the top.

They find the parachutist’s wall, a cliff at the edge of the quarry, where guards force prisoners to stand in a line.

The offer is simple and obscene.

Be shot where you stand or push the man in front of you over the edge.

Many prisoners chose to jump themselves rather than push a fellow inmate.

The SS called these jumps parachute jumps.

They thought it was funny.

A survivor, Edward Mosberg, described it plainly.

If you stop for a moment, the SS either shot you or pushed you off the cliff to your death.

Now, let us talk specifically about the man running all of this.

France Sir was not a distant bureaucrat signing papers from a comfortable office.

He was hands-on.

He walked the camp.

He participated.

Survivor accounts confirm that he personally abused and murdered prisoners.

He took part in the selections for the gas chamber.

And there is one detail about Zer Ice that once you hear it, you will never forget.

He lived with his wife and children in a house inside the camp perimeter.

He raised his family surrounded by mass death.

And on multiple occasions, he allowed his 11-year-old son to stand on the veranda of their home and shoot prisoners with a rifle for sport as entertainment.

This was the domestic life of France.

while 95,000 people died within walking distance of his front door.

If the SS at Mount did not rely on one method, their cruelty was diverse, experimental, and relentless.

Some prisoners were thrown onto the 380 volt electrified perimeter fence.

Others were marched outside the camp boundary and shot.

Their murders logged simply as attempted escape.

Around 3,000 inmates were stripped naked, soaked with ice cold water, and left standing outside in Austrian winter temperatures of minus 10° C until they froze to death.

At Gusen 2, eight prisoners were drowned headirst in barrels of water, and a dog named Lord, kept by the SS, was used to literally tear prisoners apart.

Inside the medical block, things became unspeakable.

Dr. Edward Krebsbach killed prisoners by injecting phenol directly into their hearts.

Camp physician Herman Richter surgically removed organs, stomachs, livers, kidneys from conscious living prisoners to document how long the human body could survive the loss.

And then there is doctor known to history as Dr.

Death and the butcher of Mountousausen.

When an 18-year-old Jewish prisoner was brought to him with a simple foot infection, Heim put the young man under anesthesia, cut him open, removed one of his kidneys, castrated him, and then decapitated him.

He then boiled the severed head to remove the flesh, and kept the skull as a trophy on his desk.

He performed operations on prisoners without anesthesia, not because the drugs were unavailable, but because he wanted to.

Food at Mount Housen was not sustenance.

It was a weapon.

During the period of 1940 to 1942, the average prisoner weighed just 40 kg, 88 lb.

By 1945, daily rations had been cut to between 600 and 1,000 calories.

Less than a third of what a working adult requires to function.

Starvation became so catastrophic that some prisoners, particularly during the brutal winter months, allegedly resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Extremely ill prisoners were reportedly afraid to sleep, terrified that other desperate inmates might cut flesh from their still living bodies.

A black market of stolen meat was said to have emerged.

These are not rumors passed down through history.

These are documented accounts from survivors.

Not everything that happened inside Mount Housen was meant to survive, but it did because of one man.

Frances Boyce was a Spanish photographer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who had been imprisoned at Mount Housen after fleeing fascist Spain.

While working in the SS photography lab, Boy secretly smuggled out nearly 2,000 photographic negatives documenting life and death inside the camp, including images showing senior Nazi officials visiting the camp and the quarry.

These photographs were later presented as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.

Some of that real footage referenced in this video’s title exists because of Frances Boy’s courage, a prisoner who hid the truth inside the monster’s own dark room.

As Allied forces advanced across Europe in early 1945, the SS began evacuating prisoners from camps near the front lines, dumping tens of thousands of dying, disease-ridden men and women into an already overwhelmed Mount Housen.

Prisoners arrived from Achvitz, Eoxenhausen, and Gross Rosen on death marches through winter snow.

He crammed into cattle cars with no food or water for days.

In April 1945, SS ordered Capos beat several hundred prisoners to death at Gusen.

On April 20th, Hitler’s birthday, nearly 3,000 sick prisoners were selected from the infirmary and murdered.

On April 28th, just 7 days before liberation, Mount Housen’s gas chamber operated for the final time.

33 Austrian political prisoners were locked inside and gassed.

The killing continued until the Americans were almost at the gate.

N May 5th, 1945, US Army soldiers arrive at Gusen and Mountousen.

What they find defies description.

The surviving prisoners, men and women who have been starved, beaten, frozen, experimented on, and worked to the edge of death, are finally free, and they want justice.

Most SS guards had already fled, but those who remained did not survive.

Capos.

The prisoner supervisors who had carried out SS brutality in exchange for slightly better rations were hunted through the barracks.

One Russian prisoner lifted a wooden chair above his head and brought it down on a capo’s skull until the man stopped moving.

Another cappo was pushed head first into a fire barrel and held down until he drowned.

A Polish prisoner drove a knife through a capo’s chest with such force that the blade pinned the man to his bunk.

SS guards who were not killed were forced into the quarry to carry stones under the direction of the prisoners they had tortured for years in American soldiers watched as the former guards were made to perform the same degrading physical exercises they had inflicted on inmates for years now back to the man on the fence.

On May 3rd, 1945,
two days before the Americans arrived, Sir fled Mount Housen with his wife, three children, and whatever belongings he could carry.

He drove to his private hunting lodge near Spelern, deep in the mountains of Upper Austria.

He disguised himself entirely in civilian clothing and waited.

As he thought he had escaped.

On May 23rd, while his wife had briefly driven away, former Polish prisoners accompanying a US Army unit recognized him near the lodge.

Zerice ran.

American soldiers shot him once through the upper left arm and once in the back, the bullet passing through his lung and stomach and exiting the other side.

He was brought to the US military hospital set up in his former camp at Gusen.

For 6 hours lying in agony from his wounds, he confessed everything from the gassings, the freezing executions, the medical murders.

He confirmed his orders came directly from Himmler, Colton Bruner, and Mueller.

He also revealed that the camp’s food supply had been deliberately cut, that a Nazi gallowiter had ordered 50% of prisoner food rations to be redirected to the civilian Austrian population.

On May 24th, 1945, Fran Zerice died.

He was 39 years old.

Shortly after his death, Polish and Russian former prisoners removed his body from the morg and they stripped him naked, leaving only the military bandage on his left arm and hung him from a concrete fence post at Gusen, his legs straddling the very barbed wire he had used to execute human beings.

They painted Hy Hitler across his back.

They painted swastikas across his flesh.

His body remained there for several days in full view until the stench of decomposition became so unbearable that a US Army officer finally ordered it removed.

There are photographs of all of it.

House between 1938 and 1945, an estimated 197,000 human beings passed through the Mount Housen camp system.

At least 95,000 of them died through gas, starvation, freezing, execution, and experiments that no civilized mind can justify.

France oversaw every single one of those deaths from his comfortable home inside the fence, while his son practiced his aim from the front porch.

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