Austrian researchers are appealing to the public for any information they may have on a Cape Town man who was killed at the Nazi-run Mauthausen concentration camp in 1944.
The man, René Lescoute, was a theology student in France when he was killed. No other information about him is known.
This emerged from a new study conducted by Barbara Fuchslehner and Karin Röhrling, with University of Vienna Professor Walter Sauer, and journalist and sociologist Simon Inou supervising.
The study is the most comprehensive to date conducted on inmates of African origin in the Mauthausen concentration camp, which has been largely excluded from scientific research of Austria’s past.
The Mauthausen concentration camp was established in 1938, and during the next seven years, hundreds of thousands of people were systematically humiliated, tortured andmurdered – among them African women and men.
The national breakdown of the 157 documented inmates is Algeria (104), Tunisia (19), Benin Republic (1), Congo DRC (1), Egypt (4), Guadaloupe (3), La Réunion (2), Madagascar (2), Mali (1), Martinique (2), Morocco (17), and South Africa (1).
Sauer said reasons for the imprisonment were essentially political, and as far as the historical documents reveal, the affected persons were held at Mauthausen as “protective” or “preventative” custody prisoners - and not due to race-related ideological grounds.
Slightly more than half of the documented inmates were alive when the camp was liberated.
“It is a difficult subject to research because the sources are limited. A lot of the documentation was destroyed in 1945, and so what is left are fragments.
“Also, what is surprising is that you have one South African. This is because he was studying in France,” Sauer said.
“We don't know whether he was black, white; the only thing is that in the camp they said he was from the Cape of Good Hope,” he said.
The aim of the study was to have these victims acknowledged in Austria, and in Africa, Sauer said.
“These people have largely been ignored by academic research and hardly known to the public.
"This is actually true for other concentration camps because it was not only in Mauthausen that you had these prisoners of African descent, but in most of the others in Germany as well,”
Anyone with information on Lescoute can contact Sauer at: [email protected]