The Nazi Concentration Camp Mauthausen, Austria
Mauthausen's Role Before and During the Second World War
Oct 26, 2009
The Mauthausen camp was located in northern Austria not far from Linz. The site was selected by the SS because there were stone quarries in the surrounding area.
Mauthausen Camp before the Second World War
Like most other camps built by the Nazis before the war the inmates at Mauthausen were mainly political prisoners, criminals, anti-socials, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Jews of Austrian nationality. At this time the camp population was very low. The camp was mainly constructed by prisoners from the Dachau Concentration Camp. The inmates at Mauthausen were forced to work in the nearby granite quarries.
Mauthausen during the Second World War
By the end of 1939 the population at Mauthausen had tripled and increased rapidly throughout the war. Prisoners from all territories occupied by the Wehrmacht were incarcerated in the camp during the war, this included thousands of Spanish refugees who had fled to France after the Spanish Civil War, and they were turned over to the SS by the Vichy France leaders. As the war progressed the sub-camp complex at Mauthausen grew extensively, the camps held thousands of Soviet POWs, and a higher number of Soviet civilians, there was also Polish, Czech, French, Italian and Yugoslav prisoners held during the war.
Mauthausen was the first of the camps to have a brothel for SS guards and well-behaved prisoners; women were forced to work in the brothel, most of who were transferred from Ravensbruck camp for this purpose. Until around 1944 the Jewish population at Mauthausen was very low, in the last year of the war thousands of Jewish prisoners were transferred from Auschwitz and other camps in the east to Mauthausen.
Conditions in the Camp
Although Mauthausen was initially built as a Concentration Camp – for forced labour – after a few years it had its own gas chamber. It also had a mobile gas van, prisoners were told they were being transferred elsewhere, once in the back of the van a pipe was attached to the exhaust and fed into the back compartment. Mauthausen was amongst the most notorious of all camps for the medical experiments which took place there. One of the worst that happened was the doctor would remove an important organ, such as the liver or kidneys, while the prisoner was still alive and observe how long they could survive. Apart from being gassed in the chamber, thousands of prisoners were shot, hanged, worked to death or succumbed to disease and starvation.
Liberation of Mauthausen in 1945
In the last weeks of the Second World War, thousands of prisoners arrived at Mauthausen from camps that the Allies were approaching such as Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen. At this time the gas chamber was used to its full capacity, the overcrowded conditions caused a huge rise in the number of prisoners dying from disease outbreaks and malnutrition. In early May 1945 the SS effectively abandoned the camp for it to be liberated by US forces just a couple of days later. Estimates put the number of prisoners who died at Mauthausen to be almost 100,000; these figures can never be confirmed particularly regarding prisoners who died there in the last chaotic days of the war.
Sources:
Haunschmied, R. et al. St.Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen: Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered. Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2008.
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