Murder of Slovakian resistance fighters

Another incident, only indirectly connected to the Melk concentration camp, took place on 19 February 1945. Not far from the town of Melk, on Federal Highway 1 between Loosdorf and Melk, a military convoy was strafed by low-flying US aircraft. The military trucks of the Waffen-SS were transporting Slovakian resistance fighters from Bratislava to the Mauthausen concentration camp. The trucks were probably not recognisable to the Allied pilots as prisoner transports.

While the SS men in the convoy left their vehicles to take cover in roadside ditches, the prisoners had to stay in the trucks and had no escape from the gunfire. In 1968 a delegation from Slovakia erected a memorial to the Slovakian resistance fighters killed in Melk in 1945. Photo: ZHZ Melk, 2022.Several survivors of this attack later gave accounts of the incident, which diverged as to the number of people who died. The estimates ranged from 30 to 48 men. While the seriously wounded victims were simply abandoned, all other injured men were taken to the Melk subcamp and admitted to the prisoners’ infirmary, but not registered as camp prisoners. The majority of them were transported by train to Mauthausen the next day, but the most seriously wounded stayed behind. Over the following days, the SS orderly Gottlieb Muzikant kept them in a separate area of the infirmary, depriving them of food, before deliberately murdering them.