Árpád Spitz 1919 - 1942

Born 27.10.1919 in Cărășeu
Died 28.7.1942 in Mauthausen

Biography

A photo shows two men who have been shot, their striped clothing identifying them as concentration camp prisoners. The two dead men are lying near to a barbed wire fence on a meadow. In the picture, the prisoner number of the man lying in the foreground can be read: 11552. A comparison with the register of ‘unnatural deaths’ in the camp shows that this was Jacques Günzig (born on 2 November 1904 in Loštice, Moravia), and that the other man who has been shot was probably Árpád Spitz (born on 27 October 1919 in Cărășeu, Romania). Both were registered in the Mauthausen concentration camp as Jews and were assigned to Block 13. According to records kept by the camp SS, Jacques Günzig and Árpád Spitz were shot on 28 July 1942 at 8.30am during an ‘escape attempt’. The photo was taken by someone on the staff of the so-called Identification Service.[1]

Identification services are police departments which collect people’s anthropometric data and take photographs of them front on and in profile. This data collection serves to identify individuals but also to categorise and typecast alleged or actual criminals.[2] The National Socialist concentration camps likewise had departments described as Identification Services. It was their task to create identification records about the deportees and take individual portrait photos on their arrival at the camp. Furthermore, the SS photographers working in the Identification Service produced official photos of the concentration camp, created photo documentations of work sites in the camp and of prisoners carrying out forced labour, depicted instances of ‘internal camp order’ such as roll calls, took typological photos of especially negatively stigmatised inmates, and created photo series recording visits by official delegations to the camp.[3] In addition, the Identification Service documented so-called ‘unnatural deaths’. This euphemism was used to describe the murder of prisoners by SS guards and alleged or actual suicides and accidents. Cases of inmates ‘shot while attempting to escape’ were also included in this category.[4] Most of these cases were in fact also murders committed by members of the SS, which the concentration camp’s bureaucracy would then legalise.

The Mauthausen survivor Gerhard Kanthack, who had to work as a prisoner in what was known as the Political Section of the camp, described in a report about his time in Mauthausen how ‘shootings on the run’ were processed: according to the written documentation produced by the camp administration, in each case the crime scene was examined, an autopsy was performed on the corpse, and the shooters were questioned. The reports on this were then sent to the SS and Police Court in Vienna. Sometimes these files contained photographs of the dead.[5] Numerous postwar testimonies given by survivors and former SS men verify that these alleged escape attempts were in fact murder. The photos of the crime scenes were intended to give the impression that the guards had acted in accordance with the camp regulations, which stated that escape attempts were to be prevented. The photos therefore falsified the actual circumstances of death. They deliberately failed to show how the prisoners died, instead fulfilling a specific purpose for the camp SS. The SS photographer Paul Ricken is also thought to have altered the position of the dead for this purpose.[6]

The photo of Jacques Günzig and Árpád Pitz is therefore a very problematic source. While it documents the deaths of the two deportees, the history of their murder cannot be read from it. The picture must not be interpreted as proof of an escape attempt, since the SS photographers working in the Identification Service deliberately covered up and legalised murders committed by the guards. Today, however, contrary to the intentions of the perpetrators, the photo does enable the identification of the two murdered men and therefore also research on the history of Jacques Grünzig and Árpád Spitz in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

Lukas Meissel

Verein GEDENKDIENST

 

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

 

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