Mauthausen

On March 11, 1938, Austria was occupied by Germany and incorporated into the German empire. Shortly afterward, SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, SS general Oswald Pohl and chief of the concentration camps, Theodor Eicke visited an existing quarry just outside a small village called Mauthausen, about ten kilometres southeast of Linz. The quarry was called Wienergraben and was located next to the river Danube. The purpose of the visit was to find a suitable place to set up a concentration camp for Austrian citizens. The German occupation of Austria was not welcomed by everyone and these must be kept under surveillance or even put in concentration camps.

At the end of April 1938, SS founded the company Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke to extract granite from the quarry. The idea was that the labour needed would be taken from the concentration camp. In August 1938, about 3,000 prisoners were transferred from Dachau to Mauthausen to build the new camp. By the end of 1938, about 1,000 prisoners were imprisoned in the camp, mostly criminals and anti-socials. Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, the number of prisoners had increased to about 2600. The main purpose of the prisoners was to slave labor in the quarry next to the camp. The camp was also largely made up of stones from the quarry. The first commandant of the camp was SS-Hauptsturmführer, Albert Sauer, but he was replaced in February 1939 by SS-Sturmbannführer, Franz Ziereis, who remained in office until May 1945.

Mauthausen also consisted of some sixty satellite camps subordinated to Mauthausen’s organization. The most famous (and infamous) was Gusen about five kilometers west of Mauthausen. The satellite camps produced everything from war materials to building materials. The camp was placed in category 3, which meant that SS themselves considered it a camp with extreme harsh conditions. In Mauthausen there were also prison cells for prisoners who violated the camp rules. A crematorium and a smaller gas chamber was also built. There were also executions of prisoners. As in other camps, there was a lack of sanitary facilities, food shortage, lack of medicine, non-existent healthcare, overcrowding and the spread of diseases contributed to a high death rate among prisoners. Prisoners from all corners of Europe were sent to Mauthausen.

In 1942, the camp was given a gas wagon (truck with hermetically sealed cargo space) to murder prisoners. The truck went from Mauthausen and Gusen where the victims were cremated. Barely 3,000 prisoners deemed too ill to be used as slave labor were sent to nearby euthanasia centre Hartheim where they were murdered in its gas chamber. Mauthausen also conducted medical experiments on prisoners. SS doctor Aribert Heim is perhaps the most famous of them and in addition to experiments, he also murdered prisoners with lethal injections. He served only for about six weeks in the fall of 1941 before being transferred to Ebensee.

In 1944, the number of prisoners increased as a result of prisoners being sent to Mauthausen from evacuated camps closer to the front. One way to deal with the increased number of prisoners was to set up a tent camp just outside the camp. Here, mortality was extremely high because the availability of food and medicines was largely non-existent and extremely exposed to the weather. The camp was liberated by American troops on May 5, 1945. Of approximately 200,000 prisoners who ended up in Mauthausen between 1938 and 1945, about 100,000 died. Most often as a result of the slave labor they were forced to perform.