Mauthausen

Mauthausen, one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps, located near the village of Mauthausen, on the Danube River, 12 miles (20 km) east of Linz, Austria. It was established in April 1938, shortly after Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. Starting as a satellite of Dachau, in Germany, it became an independent camp in the spring of 1939, operated by the SS (the Nazi paramilitary corps) and acquiring satellite camps of its own throughout Austria, all collectively called Mauthausen.

The camp provided slave labour to work previously abandoned stone quarries nearby. During its first year, the camp received prisoners transferred from Dachau—mainly convicted criminals, but also so-called “asocial elements,” including political prisoners, homosexuals, and others. The camp later became a detention centre for anti-Nazis from all over Europe, including 10,000 Spanish Republicans. In November 1941, Soviet prisoners of war began arriving. The first Jews arrived in May 1941, but Jews were a small minority of the camp prisoners until 1944, when Jews from Poland (especially from Plaszow) and Hungary greatly increased the camp population. Still later, Mauthausen absorbed survivors of the infamous death marches from evacuated extermination camps.

All categories of prisoners carried the official instructions Rückkehr unerwünscht (“return not desired”), and the inmates were thus starved, beaten, used for medical experiments, and subjected to the most grueling work, especially in the local quarries. The Nazis delivered unruly prisoners and captured escapees from other camps to Mauthausen for punishment by beating, hard labour, shooting, or gassing.

About 200,000 prisoners passed through Mauthausen. Some 120,000 of them died, mainly from starvation, disease, and the hardships of labour. About 38,000 of the dead were Jews. Mauthausen also had a gas chamber and gas vans, and from April 1944 to January 1945 the gas chambers at nearby Hartheim Castle were also used to kill prisoners too weak to work or too “undesirable” to be kept alive. The SS fled Mauthausen shortly before American troops entered the camp on May 5, 1945.