The SS approved the application for the allocation of a prisoner work-detail that Arado had submitted within the context of the Jaegerstab's (Fighter Staff's) measures.
When the first transport arrived on August 31, 1944, the barracks were not yet complete and the prisoners had to be lodged in the empty halls of a former porcelain factory.
According to concurring reports from many of the prisoners, they were personally selected at Auschwitz by Josef Mengele for deportation to Freiberg.
When the female prisoners were transferred to the still unfinished barracks in December 1944, they faced considerably worse living conditions.
With bare feet and inadequate clothing, they were forced daily to walk half an hour in deep snow to the factory.
The cold and wet concrete barracks, the brutality of the SS female guards, the physically draining work, and malnourishment soon claimed the lives of a number of prisoners.
Priska Loewenbein (Lomova), a Slovak prisoner, gave birth to her daughter Hana on April 12, 1945, two days before Freiberg was evacuated.
Of the approximately one thousand women who began in Freiberg, about one hundred twenty five were definitely accounted for as having survived to leave Mauthausen alive and their subsequent whereabouts known.
Possibly double that number actually survived, but starvation, disease and cold conditions claimed the majority.
The American soldiers (most from Patton's 3rd Army, mainly of the 11th Armored Division (Thunderbolts)) who liberated Mauthausen on May 5, 1945, were unprepared for what they found, but they quickly moved to help the sick and wounded.
Female SS guards, some of whom were recruited from the Freiberg area and some of whom came with the prisoners from Auschwitz, supervised the women.
The first transport arrived on August 31, 1944, with 249 primarily Polish Jewish women and girls from Auschwitz—whom the Flossenbürg commandant assigned prisoner numbers 53,423 through 53,671.
The second transport arrived on September 22, 1944, with 251 women from Auschwitz, also primarily Polish Jews, who were assigned prisoner numbers 53,672 through 53,922.
This transport included 183 Czechs, 158 Slovaks, 90 Germans, 25 stateless persons, 23 Dutch, 14 Hungarians, 6 Poles, 1 Serbian, and 1 American.
Hana L., a Czech prisoner, reported: They always assembled in groups of five, followed by the high SS marching by in their perfect uniforms.
As we were both dressed in a good coat and an anorak, he signaled my cousin Vera and me to the right and my mother to the left, which meant to the gas.
Several women reported on the employment, such as Katarina L, a Slovakian prisoner: "We worked in two shifts, 12 hours each, as heavy laborers building airplane wings.
Hana St., another Czech prisoner, recounted a similar exchange: This conversation appears strange, almost like a joke, but I find it very instructive as it is probably something like a reflection of the foggy thinking, brought about by the Nazi propaganda haze, of so many 'little people' in Germany at that time.
…This dialogue with Foreman Rausch took place in the first days: with hand motions and no words he sent me to get some tool, but I didn't bring the right one.
And when I asked him -- I was so impudent -- if he knew what concentration camps are, he answered me[,] 'Yes, that's where various elements are trained to work.'
I told him that we all had studied and worked normally and that among us were a number of highly educated women, JDs, PhDs, holders of master's degrees (Magister), doctors, professors, teachers, etc.
; that I myself, at that time 23 years old, [had] completed my diploma at a classical high school in 1939 and later worked as a qualified infant nurse and child care professional.
But the testimony Herta B., a German Jew, provided during her witness examination differed greatly: "Zimmerman was the foreman in an airplane factory at Freiberg.