"It was just incomprehensible..."
US Colonel R. R. Seibel on the liberation of the Mauthausen concentration camp, interviewed in 1985.

"It was just incomprehensible. Sure, we had heard about concentration camps but we didn't know what they were. We had heard about gas chambers, but we didn't know whether that was propaganda or not. Until the day our troops arrived at Mauthausen. Then we saw the horrible, cold facts and the murderous way that human beings had been treated here. The way the bodies were stacked like logs - it was just unbelievable. We found about 700 corpses. We set up a cemetery on the athletic field and our division chaplain consecrated it. We buried all the dead and, later, 1,500 more who died while we were there. We were unable to save them, they were so starved and sick."

Quoted from: Österreich II. A Documentary Film Series by Hugo Portisch and Sepp Riff, Part 4. Austria, 1985.