Outstanding Personalities

We dedicate these pages to a few people closely linked to KZ Gusen I, II & III.

While nearly all of them have become associated with Camp Mauthausen camp in the first decades after the war, most actually suffered in KZ Gusen and therefore typify the tens of thousands of nearly forgotten victims of that most horrible Gusen part of the former complex.

  • Marcel Callo, the beatified young French Youth Activist, died in close relation to the KZ Gusen II (Bergkristall) underground installations. Pope John-Paul beatified him in October 1987.
  • Stefan Filipkiewicz, the Polish painter and saviour of Polish refugees and Jews in Hungary who was executed with his compatriots like Henryk Slawik, Andrzej Pysz, Edmund Fietz, and Kazimierz Gurgulin KZ Gusen I in 1944.
  • Dr. Johann (Papa) Gruber, the “Saint of Gusen” , helped many inmates survive and organized an illegal school for children in KZ Gusen I. KZ Gusen survivors officially requested his beatification at the Vatican in 1988.
  • Father Jacques (Lucien Bunel), a French monk, died after many months in KZ Gusen I where he was sent for hiding several Jewish boys in a French monastery. Film director Louis Malle (a former student of Father Jacques) dedicated the movie “Au revoir les enfants” (Good-bye Children) to him, and USHMM dedicated an exhibition to him in 1997).
  • Albert J. Kosiek and Louis Haefliger risked their lives and careers to liberate the 40,000 inmates of the Mauthausen-Gusen I, II & III complex in May 1945. The Republic of Austria twice nominated Haefliger for the Nobel Peace-Price.

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