Hans Spatzenegger began his concentration camp career as an SS guard at Dachau before being transferred to Mauthausen in 1938. There, he became a supervisor in the notorious Wiener Graben quarry, where prisoners were subjected to exhausting forced labour and forced to carry heavy granite blocks up the infamous 186 “Stairs of Death.”

Spatzenegger became one of the most feared SS personnel at Mauthausen. Survivors later testified about his violent beatings and the killing of prisoners in the quarry. He also participated in the murder of British and Dutch SOE agents and later joined the manhunt following the mass escape of Soviet prisoners during the infamous “Mühlviertel Rabbit Hunt.”

As Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945, Spatzenegger fled and went into hiding. But his past eventually caught up with him. Arrested in 1946, he was brought before an American military tribunal at Dachau, where survivors described the atrocities they had witnessed at Mauthausen and Spatzenegger was finally forced to answer for his crimes.