In January 1944, during the World War II, he was arrested after a colleague informed on him, and was imprisoned in the concentration camp Gusen I of the Mauthausen-Gusen system, where he kept a diary and made a number of sketches portraying life and death in the camp.
This was underlined by their industrial park at St. Georgen and Gusen that made the SS a key supplier of aircraft fuselages (Me 109, Me 262), carbines and machine guns to companies like Messerschmitt and Steyr-Daimler-Puch.
During World War II it was the site of slave labour and the "Gusen III" sub-camp of the Mauthausen-Gusen system later on.
•
In this early period, these inmates drove by truck every day from Gusen via St. Georgen to Lunigtz.
Slaves from the camp (who had initially been worked to death in quarries) started to be used in a highly profitable system used by 45 engineering and war-effort companies, and amongst them Puch had an underground factory built at Gusen in 1943.
After 1939, and the demonstration or "proof of concept" that the firm could design an incinerator which would handle large numbers of corpses, Nazi officials further contracted Topf and Sons to provide similar incineration furnaces for the Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen, Gusen Concentration Camps, and larger industrial incinerators especcialy designed for Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp | Gusen | Gusen concentration camp | Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials | Former ''DEST'' headquarters in Sankt Georgen an der Gusen |
In 2005, Mikołaj Lizut wrote in the Gazeta Wyborcza that Jan Kobylański falsified documents of the Red Cross, that he was a prisoner at Auschwitz, Mauthausen, Gusen, Gross Rosen, and Dachau concentration camps.
When Cayrol wanted to die by refusing any further food, his life was saved by Dr. Johann Gruber, the "Saint of Gusen." Gruber gave Cayrol some "Gruber soup" in the washroom of barrack No. 20, and intervened for Cayrol to get him transferred to an easier job.
•
Cayrol thereafter worked at the final-inspection of Steyr-Daimler-Puch at KL Gusen I (the "Georgenmuehle" command), where he was able to write literature during breaks.
The routes to Schönhausen, Genthin and Güsen were built by the Kleinbahn-AG in Genthin.
Even as a youngster, before his education as a mechanical engineer, he researched the "lost" history of the St. Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen area with its four Nazi concentration camps and focused as a pioneer on the history of the KZ Gusen I & II & III Concentration Camps.
On May 5, 1945, Wilzig — whose forearm bears the number the Nazis tattooed on him, 104732, was rescued from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria, by the U.S. Army.
At locations like Mauthausen and Gusen at St. Georgen, Pohl managed successfully to make leading armament producers like Messerschmitt GmbH or Steyr-Daimler-Puch fully dependable on deliveries by companies of Amtsgruppe W. Additionally, the SS was producing under contract military clothing and equipment for the Wehrmacht.